By Francesca Street, CNN –
Kacie Rose Burns walked into the Florence jazz bar, alone. “I’ll go for one song and suss it out,” she thought, trying to quieten her nerves.
Kacie slipped in at the back. The club was dark and busy, a few wall lights and neon signs illuminating people drinking, dancing and chatting. Before she could even take in the musicians on stage, Kacie’s eyes landed on a tall man sitting at the bar.
“I walked in and he was there,” Kacie tells CNN Travel today. “We clocked eyes.”
“Ciao,” said the stranger, smiling.
“Ciao,” Kacie said back, before adding apologetically: “That’s all the Italian I’ve got for you.”
It was October 2018. Kacie was a 24-year-old New Yorker on vacation in Florence. It was her first time in Italy and her first time traveling solo. It was an exciting – and terrifying – experience.
“I was a professional dancer in New York,” explains Kacie. “A very exhausting career – there’s a lot of toxicity, a lot of rejection, there’s a lot of politics that come into play – and I was feeling a little stuck, a little unhappy, a little – just stagnant, if you will.”
Kacie spent her days auditioning, traveling for gigs and moonlighting at a clothing store. She needed a break, and she’d long felt a “pull” to Italy and dreamed of an Italian vacation.
“I kept saying, ‘I’ll wait for somebody to go with, I’ll wait, I’ll wait. And then I was waiting for years. And so then one night – at two in the morning – I was like, ‘What am I waiting for? Life is too short.’ So I booked a solo trip to Italy.”
Kacie planned to spend the majority of her time in Rome and Venice and just a couple of days in Florence. But in the lead-up to the trip, she got chatting to a customer at the store she worked at. This woman had lived in Florence for five years and sung the Tuscan city’s praises, persuading Kacie to add an extra day to her Florence stint.
And that’s how Kacie and the Italian stranger happened to be in the jazz club on the same evening.
“I’m really glad that I listened to her,” says Kacie. “That’s the only reason why we met on the first night that I was in Florence, on that earlier day that I wasn’t originally supposed to be there.”
A Florence meeting
The man Kacie crossed paths with in the jazz bar was 26-year-old Dario Nencetti, a chef in a Florence hotel who usually worked nights. It just so happened that was the only evening he had off that week.
The jazz bar, called Jazz Club Firenze, was one of Dario’s favorite hangouts. He loved the music, the underground ambiance and the fact the bar encouraged punters to sign up for jam sessions.
“That place is, let’s say, unconventional for Florence,” Dario tells CNN Travel. “Usually in Florence, there’s like a table for two or three or four people. In the jazz club, there are big tables, so you can sit with strangers and stuff, which I love.”
When Dario realized Kacie didn’t know much Italian beyond “ciao,” they switched to English.
Dario told Kacie he’d lived in Scotland for a year, and they got talking about travel. Kacie mentioned she was on her first solo trip and Dario said he’d embarked on a similar adventure to Japan earlier that year.
“We bonded from the beginning,” says Dario. “It was really natural, really easy conversation.”
