An American in Italy—How to Make Any Space Feel Like Home

Text and photography byJenny Walton

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Jenny Sais Quoi: Adventures in Vintage and Personal Style,the new book by tastemaker Jenny Walton, is exceptionally personal—part scrapbook, part diary, part sketchpad, and part photo-essay. Yet it’s also relatable: Readers will feel the distinct thrill, paging through Jenny’s illustrations and selfies and sketches and reading her personal essays, of recognizing themselves in her story. Below, Jenny shares images from places she’s called home in Italy, alongside an essay from the book entitled “Learning How to Love” about a universal experience: settling into a new home.

Dressing a home is like coming to know a new love. One cannot rush straight to embellishment; that would be far too abrupt an opening to so momentous and romantic an affair. Still, the thrill of an unfolding journey should never be suppressed. Bring in the lilies, even while the walls still wear their dust. A few glasses may be swiftly unwrapped, a mirror hastily hung. A folding table and chilled champagne secured in haste and uncorked in celebratory abandon. Bliss naturally rises in these first flickers, as soft and effervescent as bubbles in a crisp sparkling wine on a balmy summer’s twilight. These moments are meant to be savored, gulped down selfishly within the safe sanctuary once confined to our dreams. As the minutes melt into months, one should wake to morning light, still giddy and grinning in that hazy dawn of blossoming beginnings.

As dreams settle into days, the afternoon light will at times make its gradual sweep across the sun-warmed room, and the chipped terra-cotta tiles, which at first glance seemed charming, will begin to reveal their deepest cracks. These imperfections must be met not with a need to fix, but with a quiet reverence for all that has come before. Some we may try to repair, while others prove too deep to touch. We leave them as gentle reminders of everything that preceded us, honoring the resilience of the heart and hearth that found the courage to weather such seismic tremors. In these vulnerable moments of truth, a valiant effort at nonjudgment carries immeasurable weight. A new love is fragile: a careless comment can fracture intimacy as swiftly as an errant hammer swing against glass.

Natural beauty shines when polished, not chiseled. The quick, bright strokes of white paint across chestnut beams, the careless traces left by past inhabitants, must be stripped away so the wood can breathe once more. When love’s warmth becomes their gentle scaffold, the dismantling of a wall becomes a far safer affair. So we move slowly, with earned respect. As we trace the contours of their spirit within the space their walls and bodies enclose, our understanding of our new partners deepens with time. And as always happens, just as certainty settles, a new blossom unfurls. In the garden, birds build their nests in the oak tree, while a couple lies in the dappled light beneath, sharing truths too sacred to be spoken before. We learn to cherish the never-ending journey of discovering the many layered sides of the people and places we love.

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