Sometimes even the best-laid plans go sideways – especially if those plans involve traveling to Italy during a heatwave in peak tourist season. As our writer Adrian Lee explains, being a self-described ‘travel optimizer’ means researching restaurants, pre-booking tours and having a plan for every train connection. And yet as Lee discovered, if man plans, Italy laughs. Trains were late; a boat tour was overtaken by two brassy older Italian women; signs pointed in unhelpful directions. In the end, Lee writes, a trip to Italy was a lesson in letting. Or, as the Italians would say, he learned to embrace the live-and-let-live attitude futtitinni.

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