It starts with a single cicada. Always one. Testing the microphone around midday, like the world’s tiniest, most persistent DJ, cueing the soundtrack of summer. And then, suddenly, the choir joins, and the Mediterranean hums to life, vibrating under the sun, asking you—politely, insistently—to slow down.

I have lived entire afternoons wrapped in that sound, on a balcony in Naxos, under a fig tree in Puglia, with salt on my skin and sticky peach juice on my fingers. If you have spent any real time under the Mediterranean sun, you know these sounds are not background noise. They are life itself.