What Water ?

It was thirty-four degrees in Turin. In May.

Not usual, they said. But I don’t know — I’ve only been here two years.

My daughter was stretched out on the sofa like a melting candle. She doesn’t like summer unless she is near water. Which is funny to people here, because she is supposed to be from the desert. Yes! For them, “Sotto Pavia, è tutto Africa“. Everything south of Pavia is Africa. One big, homogeneous bloc of sand and heat. I’ve stopped explaining 🙂 !

Five days of school holidays ahead of her, and she was staring at the ceiling.

Well… not exactly.

Kids don’t really stare at ceilings anymore. That’s gone. That quiet kind of boredom — the one that used to do something inside you — has disappeared. The ceiling used to give us time to create our own thoughts, our own stories, our own little world built out of nothing. Now there is always a screen. It is the new ceiling. One that talks back, endlessly, , and never leaves you alone with yourself.

I looked at her. Then at the tablet. Then at her again.

Honestly? I didn’t know what to think. I scroll too. More than I’d like to admit. When nothing more important comes along… there I am, scrolling.So I am not going to pretend I am better than anyone here. But I still wanted her to know that something exists outside of it. Something real, something close, something that no algorithm had packaged and served to her yet. Not because I have all the answers. Just because the world outside was still there. Quietly. Waiting.

My phone buzzed on the table.

A friend. Hey, I confim, the house on the Ligurian coast is free this week. you can go if you still want?

I had asked her about it days before.

I read the message. Put the phone down. Started thinking.

It was a good news. A generous offer — this is Italian generosity, something I still find surprising and beautiful after two years here. Two hours from Turin, a house by the water, a place I’d already visited once, nothing to organise. The kind of thing you say yes to without thinking… But I needed to think… And in the end, I didn’t say yes.

I’m not sure I can explain exactly why. I sat there for a moment — my daughter quietly absorbed in her screen, Turin pressing its strange unseasonable heat against the windows — and something in me just paused.

The sea. The Ligurian coast. All of Turin, already there.

We have the sea. We have always had the sea. My daughter and I are Moroccan — between the two of us we have an Atlantic Ocean and a Mediterranean, entire summers of saltwater, of falling asleep with sand still between our toes. The particular exhaustion of a body that has been in the sea all day — heavy, happy, smelling of salt and sun. Total happiness. The kind where you don’t need to document anything because your whole body already knows.

The sea is not a destination for us. The sea is our whole summer. Every summer. So much summer and sun that people here don’t believe we were ever lighter than we are now.

I found myself staring at a map. Piedmont. The Alps folding down into foothills. And there, scattered like dropped coins across the landscape — lakes. Small ones. Quiet ones. Names I didn’t recognise.

I had lived here two years and never once gone to look. If I’m honest — I had barely left my corner of Turin. I am someone who finds a place and stays there. Who goes back until she knows every crack in the pavement. Who doesn’t leave until she has used a place up completely. That corner of Turin — I will tell you about it one day. It deserves its own story.

But that afternoon I looked up from my corner. And I was surprised — genuinely surprised — by the number of lakes on that map. Places with freshwater, places where you could actually swim. Less than an hour from home.

In Marrakech, where my family is from, water is not something you take for granted. The river that runs through the city was dry long before I was born — when it fills, it’s a natural disaster. The old city survived for centuries on khettaras — tunnels hand-dug deep into the earth to pull water from the Atlas Mountains before the sun could claim it. Yes! water had to be underground just to survive. The hammam, the weekly ritual, was never luxury. It was ceremony. Something you gather. Something you share. Water is life. Not poetry. Engineering. Survival.

And here I was. Living at the foot of the Alps. Surrounded by glacial lakes full of cold freshwater — patient, still, completely free — waiting for ten thousand years.

Freshwater. Close enough to touch. Less than an hour from my door.

I typed back to my friend: Not this time. Thank you.

Then I turned to my daughter.

“Let’s discover the lakes nearby.”

She didn’t move. “Which lake?”

“One a day. We drift. We follow what we feel.”

A pause. She turned her head toward me slowly.

“But Mom, you don’t know anything about them. We might just waste our time. And I’m hot. I hate summer.”

“Probably. But either way — it’s going to be an adventure.”

She looked at me for one long moment. Then she got up, disappeared down the hallway, and came back thirty seconds later with her swimsuit already in her hand.

“I don’t trust you, Mom,” she said. “But I love adventure.”

While all of Turin was already on the autoroute to Liguria — bumper to bumper, same direction, same coastline, same postcard — we turned the other way.

My daughter had her swimsuit on her lap. She looked out the window with the expression of someone who has decided to believe in something without quite believing in it yet.

I had a lake pulled up on my phone. Lago Sirio. I don’t even remember why I chose it. Something I had found while looking at the map and doing some search on the internet. A name. A photo. A feeling.

That was enough.

We didn’t know what we were going to find. She didn’t fully trust me. I didn’t fully trust myself.

But the water was waiting.

We left the screens behind and got in the car.

We were moving.

And somewhere out there — cold freshwater that neither of us had ever touched had been waiting ten thousand years.

It could wait one more hour…

Next: Lago Sirio!