In Switzerland, the late winter sun lingers above the frosted valleys, shedding a bright, forgiving light that seems to bleach away any shadow of malaise—a climate so different from the arid haze I left behind that I feel almost embarrassingly awake here. The air has a clinical sharpness, and every morning I walk to the Lyceum, my footsteps crunching on old snow, I feel both out of place and newly minted. I was expecting the famous neutrality of the Swiss, their polite reserve, but no one mentioned the intoxication of waking up to this kind of ineffable Alpine clarity, or the way it amplifies every color, every sound, every ambition.
The Lyceum is like a miniature League of Nations, if the League were staffed exclusively with the disaffected offspring of warlords, oil magnates, and hereditary sheiks—all corralled together and instructed to behave as though world history and geopolitics were just charming electives. In my first week, I met Mahmoud from Riyadh, who will one day inherit control of his country's sovereign wealth fund, and whose idea of casual conversation was to offer me a Cuban cigar and ask if I'd ever tried truffle-infused espresso. He introduced me to Ahmad, the Bruneian prince, who wore custom suits even to gym class and had a bodyguard discreetly stationed on the far side of the squash court. There was an unspoken contest among the students to see whose family crest or scandal carried the most global weight: children of the Aga Khan, dissolute scions of French banking dynasties, the only daughter of a Chinese industrialist who used her father's Gulfstream as her weekly shuttle to and from Beijing.
We were supposed to be learning finance, international law, languages—but what we really learned was how to act unbothered by the excess, to treat private jets and hastily-scheduled Monaco weekends as though they were items on a school supply list. The real curriculum was in the school's canteen, where alliances were made over hand-rolled sushi and caviar, and entire currencies' worth of bitcoin changed hands in poker games that stretched long into the night.
I didn't gamble, but I watched. It was in these hours that I found my true education: the way Ahmad never showed a flicker of fear even when tens of thousands of dollars were at stake, or how the princess from Abu Dhabi could smile and say nothing, rewarding you with a single word that cut deeper than a dissertation. I learned how to listen, how to read the undercurrents, how to calculate the true value of a rumor before it even made its way to the teachers. By the end of my first month, I could predict who would be homesick and crying in the garden at three a.m., who would end up expelled but protected by family name, who would befriend me only to ask for a favor on their graduation day.
The weather in this part of Switzerland is great, making it the perfect learning environment. My fellow classmates are like the prince of Brunei and MBS, the future crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
It's the weekend, a time of freedom and endless possibilities. I decided to embark on an adventure and spend the next two days in the enchanting city of Rome. The thought of exploring its ancient streets and rich history filled me with excitement. To ensure a smooth journey, I coordinated with my team to meticulously sort out all the logistics, from securing accommodations to planning our itinerary.
The first thing you learn in Rome is how to let the city seduce you. It starts at precisely the moment your shoes touch the ancient stones, the entire world resolving into a manic chiaroscuro of gold, carmine, and shadows so black they seem like open graves. I forced myself to walk everywhere, refusing the lazy comfort of taxis, determined to burn the geography of the city into my calves and mind. The Via Condotti, with its perfumed air and surgical array of fashion, gave way to the Campo de' Fiori, where old women hawk artichokes and political rumors in the same throaty dialect. Overhead, laundry lines fluttered like surrender flags. Below, espresso bars pulsed with the economy of secrets, every eye fixed on the door for a client, a creditor, or a ghost.
I could have wandered for days, but my itinerary was strictly prescribed by two masters: curiosity and ambition. At the Vatican, I watched tour guides compete in a dozen languages for the attention of bored billionaires and their retinues, the Sistine ceiling above us as irrelevant as the price of bread. In Trastevere, a student with revolutionary hair and a nose ring offered to sell me hash; she seemed genuinely disappointed when I declined. I accepted a glass of wine instead, and listened as she explained that any city with so many locked doors had to have more than one underworld.
By dusk, my phone buzzed with a single encrypted message: "Osteria alle Tre Stelle. Ask for Pietro. Dress light." The address was in Testaccio, another of those neighborhoods where the river bends and the streetlights are spaced just far enough apart that anonymity becomes a shared hallucination. I changed into a plain T-shirt and track pants, stashing my real clothes in a rented locker at the Termini station. At the osteria, Pietro appeared as a silhouette—a man built like a retired rugby player, with cauliflower ears and a nose that had lost its original shape to a lifetime of recalibration. He handed me a black gym bag, inside of which was a pair of five-ounce gloves, a roll of medical tape, and a towel folded with military precision.
"Don't eat too much," he said. "You'll want to keep your blood in your head."
I followed him into the catacombs beneath the restaurant, where the air was thick with mold, wet limestone, and clove cigarettes. The makeshift locker room was a damp corridor lit by a string of hazard-yellow bulbs. The fighters—a collection of local kids, a Ukrainian with a tattoo of the Archangel Michael, and one American Marine on a weeklong bender—wrapped their hands with the practiced indifference of men for whom pain was a currency. They eyed me with a mixture of curiosity and contempt, but nobody said a word. Every now and then an emissary from the upstairs world would float in, passing envelopes or cigars, and then disappear as quickly as they'd come.
The rules were simple: three rounds, two minutes each, no biting or eye gouges. The purse was four thousand Euro, cash, winner take all. The crowd was an even split between Camorra foot soldiers—young, overdressed, and nervy—and older men whose faces belonged on oil paintings, the kind of people who never touched money but always had it counted. The bell was literally a bicycle horn. My opponent, announced only as "Matteo di Ostia Antica," was exactly as mean as his name implied, with a buzz cut and a smile full of dental gold.
The fight went as these things always do: an ugly, frantic negotiation between bravado and self-preservation. I took the first round by keeping him at bay, jabbing and circling, but in the second he caught me with a left hook that made the world shrink to a pinhole. I spat blood, laughed, and called him a bastard in Spanish; the crowd loved it. By the third round, my hands were numb and my vision salted with stars, but the System kept feeding me stats and probabilities, turning every feint into a chess move. When the final horn sounded, both of us were still standing, but only one of us was smiling. The American Marine, who'd been appointed referee for the evening, raised my hand and grinned like a man who'd just seen a ghost.
Afterwards, as tradition apparently dictated, I joined the Camorra boys at their corner table. There were toasts, shouts of "bravo," and a round of grappa that burned like disinfectant. The boss—known only as Lo Zio—finally leaned over and, in unaccented English, said, "You fight like a man who prefers to win with his brain. Is that why you're really here?"
I wiped the blood from my lip and met his gaze. "Maybe I just like to see my enemies up close."
He smiled a slow, reptilian smile. "Rome will be good for you, Leonidas. But remember, in this city you can buy anything except a second reputation."
That night, walking back to my hotel through the neon and marble, it occurred to me that the real initiation wasn't in the ring but in the invitation that followed—an after-dinner meeting, somewhere in the hills outside the city, where the real business would be conducted and the alliances cemented.
I pick up my phone and dial my father's number, the familiar sound of the ringing filling the air as I await his answer. When he picks up, I inform him that I've successfully made the initial contact with the Camorra, my voice steady yet laced with a hint of anticipation. I assure him that I will keep him updated on how the meeting unfolds and outline what steps we need to take moving forward, the weight of our future decisions hanging in the balance.