Some years ago I was given a life-changing nugget of travel advice: if you visit the same café, bar, or restaurant, at the same time of day, for three days in a row, you are (more often than not) magically transmuted from tourist to temporary local.
And, amazingly, the trick works at every scale. In the aftermath of Covid, I took coffee and tramezzini every day for ten days at Bar Mio di Teso Mauro, just off Piazza San Marco in Venice. By day three they not only knew my order, they welcomed me by name.
So fixated is Instagram-obsessed travel with ticking off best-of listicles, we forget how easily domestic bonds can be forged by such an elementary act of loyalty.
