Savona, Italy —

So here we are at 10:00 p.m., standing under the harsh lights of the port of Savona along with a few hundred other confused travelers.

No one really has a clue as to what is going on and it takes an hour before we realize that our ferry hasn’t even shown up yet. Everyone keeps inching up to the dock’s edge to see if there might be a boat in there somewhere and the Italian dockworkers keep yelling at us to move back so that the forklifts can buzz back and forth with ferry supplies. We are an ignorant and anxious bunch.

Then boom, the ferry rounds the bend, docks, disgorges a huge stream of vehicles and promptly takes us aboard. We are sandwiched in so tight that some of us must climb out the windows of our cars but in 20 minutes everyone is settled and disbursed throughout our floating hotel. All the old Corsica hounds head to the bar on the pool deck and order up rounds of Pietra, a slightly tangy beer flavored with chestnut flour. Donna and I head up to the uppermost deck, grab a couple of deck chairs and find a quiet corner from which to savor our departure.

It’s a lovely moment as the boat slowly pulls away from all the industrial bustle. Genoa glitters in the distance and the villages of the Ligurian coastline slowly form a wide string of multicolored lights. And then they recede and for an hour the horizon dims until there is nothing but the black water, thousands of stars and Corsica, hidden in the distance, pulling us towards it.