When I was a kid we went on a family vacation to Tuscany, Italy each year. We never stayed in fancy hotel or took a flight back then. We would drive the whole way down from Germany in our old VW station wagon and stayed at a rustic farm house a friend of my parents owned.

For my sister and me this holiday was always a big adventure. We would explore the surrounding countryside with hundreds of olive trees and mysterious hide out places or play with the neighbors kids, whose parents had a huge pheasant farm next door and whose language we didn’t even understand.

Staying in this old Tuscan villa where we could run around all day and just do whatever we loved to do meant total freedom for us back then. I remember feeling like I was an adventurer or a pirate, anything, but definitely not just a little kid from a small town in the south of Germany.