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(Editor’s Note: Dylan Friedman is the brother of blue chip Leena Friedman. He graduated from Marist College and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He has been traveling with his sister this spring in Italy during the clay court season.)

The red brick dust of the clay swirled around my sister's feet, a familiar sight on our Italian tennis tour. What was not familiar, what felt plucked from a Renaissance painting, was the figure slowly descending the sun-drenched hillside adjacent to the court: a shepherd, his almost biblical staff guiding a woolly river of sheep towards the low fence, their curious eyes an unexpected audience for a junior tennis match in the tiny town of Santa Croce. It was a scene that would have felt fantastical back home in the States, a living tableau from a different age.

Unaffiliated with the tournament's official proceedings, locals and passersby gathered in the tennis club, their presence a world away from the intense focus of the young athletes battling it out on the slow, unforgiving red clay. A cluster of older men, their faces etched with the wisdom of the Italian sun, sat on old plastic chairs, nursing glasses of ruby-red wine and exchanging boisterous commentary in rapid Italian.

Wisps of cigarette smoke curled lazily into the afternoon air, mingling with the earthy scent of the surrounding countryside, creating an atmosphere that felt both timeless and utterly removed, a palpable serenity that stood in stark opposition to the frequently taut and pressure-laden environments that habitually envelops the parents and coaches at junior tennis tournaments across the United States like a wet blanket.