A Random Italian in Twillingate · Week 26
By Luca Bonafede · June 28, 2026 ·
A lot can happen in a week.
A few days earlier, I was working on the beautiful St. John’s harbour when a colleague mentioned that up in Twillingate, five hours north, there was a massive iceberg. A really beautiful one.
Then she showed me a photo.
I stopped. I looked at it. And I knew, with the kind of certainty that doesn’t ask permission: I need to see this.
It wasn’t my first iceberg. I had already seen one in St. John’s weeks earlier. But once you have seen one iceberg, you want to see a bigger one. Especially this one. It was truly unique: a double-tower iceberg.
I said, “I want to see it.”
They said I would need a car. I said, “Don’t worry about the car. I’ll find a car.”
Next thing I knew, the company had organized accommodation for me. The tours up there were running up to five a day, and the crew had been working every day for so long that they were tired. They needed people to work on the boat. So I rented a car, and I drove north. And who better than me to help them get some rest?
936 kilometers in total, and the whole way was a beautiful drive, even if I had to keep extreme attention, since the whole route is moose territory, with many deaths on the road every year. I arrived as the random Italian guy in a black BMW, driving around Twillingate. European much?
The first day was gloomy and very cold. I wore every layer I owned. Within 24 hours, I was down to a T-shirt. The weather turned, the sun came out, and everything changed.
If you have never seen an iceberg from the water with the sun shining on it, it is hard to comprehend how beautiful it is. I won’t try to describe it. I will only say that I got to see it from the deck, at work, five times a day.
The nights were with the locals. Everybody sings. Everybody plays guitar. People fish, people hunt, and they own every toy you can imagine for winter and for summer. There was a lot of fun and a fair amount of drinking. What impressed me most was how handy everyone is. They know how to do everything, and they do it well.
One night, I was sitting in a living room with a guy from Alberta, watching a man sing and play guitar at a professional level, surrounded by weapons, lobsters, and everything a Life on the edge of the Atlantic collects. The Albertan and I looked at each other and said, “Wow. We are definitely foreigners here.”
That is the best part of traveling: the moment you realize you are standing inside someone else’s ordinary, and you have been invited to stay a while. No itinerary leads you there. You find it by saying yes to the next road.
There is also a story about a drone I nearly lost. It is a long one, and it deserves its own post.
This week had no plan. I didn’t schedule an iceberg. I said one sentence out loud, but behind it was a very strong desire, and the week arranged itself around it. The iceberg had been drifting toward that bay long before I knew it existed. I didn’t go to meet it so much as fall into the same current. The best weeks seem to work that way: you stop pushing the river and start paying attention to where it is already going.
I chose “Ordinary” by Alex Warren (2025) as the soundtrack of this week because the vibes matched so well. Life in Twillingate may feel ordinary to the people who live there, but to me it was absolutely breathtaking. Perhaps that is the quiet lesson of the week: what is ordinary to one person is a miracle to another, and the difference is only a matter of where you are standing.
I am so grateful. For the iceberg, for the people, for the road, and for a week I could never have planned.
Thank you Iceberg Quest for trusting a random Italian guy who came all the way to Newfoundland with a dream.
Another week worth living.
A lot can happen in a week.
Thank you, and ciao for now.
Luca Bonafede
St.John's, Twillingate, NL, Canada 🇨🇦