The colour Emerald.

Luca was wearing an emerald green jumper and DJ’ing at the Académie Française afterparty for an exhibition that opened there. I was wearing an emerald green jumper and a tight striped Max Mara skirt I had bought in Paris, and what were white All-Star shoes, now stained with mushroom blotches from kicking melting mushrooms around the Calder Foundation grounds in France the previous week.

He said something about liking my outfit. He then played the song by Pulp, "Common People," about a girl the singer met going to St. Martin’s College—I realized it was for me.

I danced and I danced and I danced. I don’t really think I had a thing for Luca in that moment, but he made me dance. To me, colour was always very important—it said a lot about the people who chose a particular colour, telling me something about their energy. Most of all, of all colours in the world, I loved emerald green, and all its shades diffused in white.

I was sort of between worlds at this point, floating on a tiny piece of ice in the big wide ocean, with currents pulling in all directions. I had no idea where I lived, or where I would live, or how I would live.

I had my first taste of being an artist after graduating, with my solo exhibition at the AKA Gallery in Via del Pellegrino. I saw the incredible expanse of wealth and the jet set—the life connected to art crystallized in Paris, in and around the Nuit Blanches. I also saw the galleries that made money in Rome from the inside, eating with the gallerists and collectors from the day I arrived in Rome. There, a wave of people who loved Raffaella and worked with her engulfed me into a very intense and thick feeling of an art movement, quite unlike anything I had experienced in London.

The French Academy is set in the most beautiful palace, with the most beautiful wide stone staircase—right out of Fellini, or movies about the Roman Empire. It makes you want to just slide down its banisters. A garden surrounded it—lush, gorgeous Mediterranean parks, the kind we in London did not have at all—and barely framing the Academy art studios!

This was another level. The Italian art studios looked nothing like the East London studios of the British artist crowd in the rain—these fucking studios looked like they were set in heaven.

A cheesy, perfect, beautiful, pasta-marketing type of heaven. All that was missing were the fat little angels playing golden harps, flying around. God.

But there was Luca, and he was playing electronic music—to kill the cliché beauty, bring it down a notch, cool it up, disregard it, contrast. So I danced. I can’t remember whether I had a champagne flute in my hand or a plastic wine cup—to emphasize the cool, probably the latter.

I seem to remember the exhibition we came to see was by the boyfriend of Marina Abramović, and then, on the beautiful stone staircase, I first set eyes on a very beautiful man who looked so much like a real-life prince—which, many years later, I found out he was. In between, we became dear artist colleagues, competitors, and friends.

My flight out of Rome, for Paris Charles de Gaulle, was the next day. I was flying back to spend some more time with the Cuban sculptors and accompany them to the FIAC art fair, to see that for the first time.

I had connected with Marco while dancing to Buena Vista Social Club on the oak kitchen table of Bettie’s house a few weeks earlier, when they were in Rome for their exhibition at the 1/9 Gallery, curated by the same Raffaella, in whose gallery I had an exhibition. We were sort of compatriots by curator. And something in our correspondence, in my writing, made Marco invite me to the Nuit Blanches.

The lure of writing—so many times, my opening up, which happens when I am alone with the screen and write—ended up getting me into a romance far faster than would have happened in person, it seems. I like correspondence.

We danced far too long into the night. Raffaella left me to it. Barbara was to drive me home. But Barbara somehow, quite on purpose it seemed, drove me over to Luca's, who had a tiny plastic motorino to take me the rest of the journey.

He wanted to show me something, of course, before driving me to Bettie’s house. We jumped into a black wrought-iron lift—the film noir kind, the kind still in function only in Rome—and up to his tiny, modern apartment stuffed with art books.

He put an article he had written into my hands.

“Do you know about Nero magazine?” he asked.

He was the editor of Nero magazine. An art magazine. And there were three more editors—his friends. Luca looked at me with patience as I read this very important-to-him article—only I couldn’t really admit, at that point, at 6 a.m., floating in fatigue between night and dawn, that my Italian was not that brilliant and I couldn’t really understand it in its true splendor. But I did recognize that Raffaella had several Nero magazines in AKA Gallery.

I’m pretty sure a kiss must have happened. Maybe even a breakfast in a bar. For sure though, he drove me on his blue plastic motorino, with me holding onto his waist and my legs around the motorino as if it were a horse. He drove me to my side of town, through the growing Rome morning, speeding the way only Italians dare—between cars and lorries, diving in and out, in the most reckless way.

I just stared at the tall, lush plane trees that grow all the way down the River Tevere, the ones whose leaves I had jumped upon in a white magic exchange—each leaf for a day longer in Rome.

I was happy I was still, somehow, miraculously, there. And enjoyed this terrible fragility, riding the tiny mosquito bike between trucks and intense traffic noise, in a sort of daze, ignoring it all, and just trusting in this young, fragile but self-assured writer.