One Day Trip to Orvieto, One Year Set in Motion
When Taste revealed a truth that carried me toward a life I finally recognized as mine
For the better part of this past year when The Untethered Traveler was nothing more than an amorphous idea, waiting in quiet confidence for me to finally connect it to my calling and purpose, the universe was busy paving my path forward with carefully curated collisions and curiosities. During this window of time, I felt like I was in a constant state of varied motion - shedding, stretching and cautiously creeping toward a truer version of myself. I sensed I was on the precipice of being reimagined. It was as if I had been refurbished, upgraded to the latest and greatest lightning-fast processor.
As the months came to stack on top of one another, I remember feeling all this glorious space inside of me, around me and between all the ‘things’ that had once cluttered my ability to see, think and feel clearly. The best and only way I can explain it, is I felt untethered.
All the while I was bumping into and navigating through magnificent inspiration and telegraphic resistance. And because I had the space to do so, I examined what fell out between these two extremes with clearer, calmer contemplation. It was the resistance I paid the most attention to having brushed it aside for far too many years. Through stillness and resolve, I began to rediscover who I was and who I wasn’t. My inner voice spoke in undistorted, fortifying truth. My appetite for learning and self-connection came roaring back.
As The Untethered Traveler came to life on the page and online, it rescued me from a path of complacency and comfort. As my beloved new brand took new shape, so, thankfully did I. It was exhilarating. I was a soul at peace and one on fire at the same time. I was determined not just to dream but to dare to act.
As this slow metamorphosis was taking place, strange as it may sound, I was inexplicably drawn to the concept of Inertia. I hadn’t thought about inertia since I turned in my high school physics exam back in May 1997. The most illustrative straightforward definition I could find online, states that inertia is the natural tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, unless acted upon by an outside force.
I have come to believe when we travel, inertia can be our worst enemy or best friend. It either plays a crippling role inhibiting journeys of self-discovery from ever taking off or a catalytic one unlocking the movement we crave to break free and let go. It wasn’t until I started framing this piece out that I recognized the role inertia has played in my own life.
November 21, 2025, marks one year since I was laid off from my “dream” job. This life event would go on to infiltrate and define - redefine really - every facet of my life over the next 365 days. Most obviously, the lay-off transformed the role travel plays in my life, the where I go and why. It shaped directly and indirectly the thesis of every Tessera blog I’ve ever published. And with uncanny impact, it inspired every book I’ve discovered and devoured this year. Behind this hard-working triumvirate of movement, reflection and insight, I have come to appreciate the months that passed for what they really are - a system reset, a mysteriously directed reboot coded in collision and curiosity.
The more I abandon the conventional path forward and trust instead my instinct and where the universe nudges me, the more effortless and purposeful each step forward feels, the more my why and its how flow as one. By opening up my heart to what is mine to hold and realizing I’m strong enough and deserving enough to actually hold it, I have been blessed by extraordinary coincidence and providence. What’s more, I have been handed all the evidence I need to believe I’m right where I should be.
I always planned on confronting and commemorating the anniversary of my layoff here. Not through the whiny, melancholy discourse of a marketer scorned but through the happier, brighter tastes and treasures of Orvieto, Italy, where I intentionally positioned myself days after the plug was pulled on my seemingly perfect, burgeoning career.
But as I’m learning in accepting my calling and post as writer, the stories we tell can often have a mind and spirit of their own. These journey-inside-the-journey detours never fail to surprise and delight me. When I let go and allow the words to carry me, I connect the dots between memories and places with a perspective that feels more channeled and gifted than uniquely my own.
When I look back, I recognize inertia did what I wasn’t able to do, let alone see at the time was necessary. Through a single act of intervention which ended up being the collision of all collisions, inertia freed me from the confines of what I’d accidentally locked myself into – the wrong life, the wrong purpose and the wrong version of myself.
Then late spring as generously as it dislodged me from what wasn’t meant to be, inertia boomeranged back around, to compel me to movement. I was suddenly and monumentally motivated to crawl, walk, run…fly with a sense of purpose I had never felt in my entire life. The Untethered Traveler has been my labor of love ever since.
But all of this is recounted in retrospect, not how I actually showed up in lovely, little Orvieto last Fall. Orvieto was a day trip in the middle of a 5-day adventure to Rome that I had dubbed my Italian Severance Project. I knew I was being laid off and my way of gaming the system was to wake up the next morning in Italy. I didn’t know it at the time, but my choice to travel through uncertainty and turmoil would consecrate movement as my vocation and lifeblood.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think about Orvieto is the Cacio de Pepe with Pear at Trattoria Vinosus. While that exquisite taste will always be entangled with who I was hovering over it, it is flavor not misfortune that irrefutably settles into focus. I can still taste it. The pear adds just the right amount of sweetness to the spicy cracked pepper and pecorino cheese. And as exceptional as the sauce is, it does not overshadow the freshness and al dente preparation of the spaghetti resting just below. It is balanced, complex and bold.
Everything I came to eat that afternoon was memorable and delicious, from the steak tartare that originally inspired my visit to the mango chocolate bomb that sent me away, full and happy. It was the perfect Saturday lunch in Italy. What started as a quiet meal with just me at a corner table in the window under the most beautiful Italian frescoes crescendoed cinematically to me surrounded by boisterous, joyful laughter and conversation springing forth from every table in the room. I felt insanely lucky just to be there and for the first time entertained the idea that maybe there could be a fateful reason why.
After lunch I walked around Orvieto’s Piazza Duomo. It was hard not to put life into perspective standing on the steps of its imposing centerpiece, the 14th-century Orvieto Cathedral. I let my intuition guide me from there down one picturesque cobblestone street after another, popping into artisan gift shops full of handmade leather, ceramic and gourmet goods. More than once, I thought – this is how I want to live. This is how I want to feel. How do I get back here…?
Not wanting to leave the peace and calm behind, I stopped at Bottega Vera for one more glass of wine. Surrounded by towering shelves stocked with bottles of Italian wine, I sipped on a Barbera from a shaky high-top table. I recalled then as I recall now how much joy I always seem to find from a little gourmet wine shop full of local sweet and savory goodies. One glass of wine turned into a second. I tried my best to slow time down sipping and nibbling off a charcuterie board teeming with meats, fresh baked bread and cheese.
The charcuterie board at Bottega Vera
The setting sun was my cue to finally surrender to the inevitable. The town seemed to glow from the inside out as I made my way down the winding hill to Orvieto’s tiny funicular station. I slipped into the crowded cable car just in time and we descended down the steep hill to meet the train back to Rome. Feet tired, stomach full and mind flooded with peace and possibility, I sank into my seat on the train feeling satiated and lucky that this, this very spot and moment in time is where life had always planned to bring me.
In less than 48 hours Travel, my life companion had transformed Orvieto. What was once a place of interest I casually tagged with a green flag in Google Maps became a destination I would inextricably identify as the catalyst behind my calling. As I sit back and think about it one year later, the one thing that I can’t deny is the extent, the power to which Taste moved me that afternoon. While I couldn’t have articulated where it would take me then or how it had affected me in that moment, I know without a shadow of a doubt it opened up a portal that I would come to travel through for the rest of my life.
And of even greater consequence still, it opened up the gateway to my calling and purpose. What started out as a journey to escape and forget, evolved through inertia’s engineering, into me taking my first steps toward movement with meaning. From a quaint hilltop village just outside of Rome, I discovered a most invaluable and precious tool, one that would come to serve me for the rest of my life - my compass, Taste.
Every week, I send one new Tessera Blog on taste, travel and the truths we collect along the way. If this piece resonated, I’d be honored if you’d share or subscribe.
