I’ve discovered the secret to aging happily in a very unlikely place.

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If you, like me, are a perimenopausal woman who woke up one day in her late 40s to realize that she had gained 15 pounds seemingly overnight, that she had popped a belly pooch where a simple curve had been before, and that the dreaded 11s—those above-the-nose/next-to-eyebrow creases we all have—had gone from lightly etched lines to full crevasses, I believe I have found the key to happiness.

It’s not a GLP-1. I tried that two years ago. Yes, I lost the weight and then some. (By the way, as far as I could tell, no one noticed.) I also lost my ass, which had previously been, er, ample but became flat as a pancake (or, as my friend Anna Holmes noted in Slate, “a back with a crack”). Additionally, I ran up the charges on my Amex paying for it each month, shoving to the side my correct thoughts that this money would be better invested in my daughter’s 529. After eight months, I decided it wasn’t worth it physically, let alone financially. (And let me tell you from experience: If you do get on these drugs, you have to be on them … forever. The weight came back within months, and even though my butt has started to return, I’m pretty sure I altered my backside for good.)

The answer also isn’t plastic surgery or even a touch of Botox (which I do get occasionally, despite the fact that I always hate it for weeks until it wears off a bit. It’s hard to get a light touch, it seems). It’s something so much better. Something totally pleasurable. It’s not cheap but will reward in ways a trip to the med spa down the street never could.

Friends, it is a trip to Europe. Specifically, southern Italy.

I recently spent a few days in Sorrento, just south of Naples, with my family. The food was great. The town was adorable and stuffed with stores selling all manner of merch featuring lemons, which the area is known for. The beachside cliffs offer a clear view of massive Mount Vesuvius. But what will stay with me—even more than the perfect pasta with Gorgonzola and walnuts I had at a tiny restaurant down the street from my Airbnb—are the faces and bodies I saw at the Bagni Salvatore beach club.

Sorrento is on the Bay of Naples (which is essentially the Mediterranean Sea), and the coast underneath the dramatic cliff line is dotted with these clubs. Some have a bit of sandy beach, but they mainly feature long piers crowded with orderly deck chairs and umbrellas. Along the piers are ladders to ease you into the bath-temperature water for a swim. If you really want to be lazy, you can rent a floatie for the day.

From my vantage, floating at the tip of Bagni Salvatore in my big inflatable tire, I watched the mix of Italians and tourists who’d come out for a swim. There were men and women and girls and boys of all ages, and even a very fit Italian mom on a paddleboard whose young daughter practiced doing a headstand while they drifted along. But my eyes were drawn again and again to the older women, the ones I judged to be over 70, in their animal-print-yet-modest bikinis, with drooping and crepey skin, bobbing around and chatting with friends and family. They were unselfconscious, despite cellulite and extra kilos—unlike me, in my tummy-control one-piece.

Hillary Frey

It’s not that you don’t see some older bodies at, say, Rockaway Beach, where I spend at least a few days each summer. It’s that I struggle to see them, overwhelmed by the improbably sculpted, thin, and artificially modified middle-aged ones all around me. I’m conducting my own personal thinvestigations, as my colleague Paola de Varona calls them, on women near me, wondering what they’ve done to escape the “broadening of the beam,” to paraphrase something my mom used to say. It was easier, in Italy, to see the old people, because they were literally and figuratively taking up the space they deserve.

It wasn’t like that scene in Barbie when Margot Robbie’s character is awestruck by the older woman with the deeply lined face: “You’re so beautiful!” That wasn’t my thought. My thought was: You are all so at ease. These were regular, older women living in their regular bodies, having a great time. They weren’t tugging at their suits or running from the water to cover up with towels. Nor were they showing off bodies they’d somehow “tamed.” They weren’t “fighting aging.” Why is that seeming ease so hard for me, for so many of us, to find? On top of regular-looking old people, I also clocked a lack of BBLs (a regular sight here at home, from the Rockaways to Miami) and lip filler, save for some of the younger Spanish tourists. The young people were uniformly great-looking. The old people were uniformly old-looking. There were no time-traveled bodies, no evident efforts at erasure of the years and years they’ve spent on Earth. Only a bunch of people demonstrating what happens naturally to bodies over time, from the flawless beauty of childhood to the wrinkled wisdom of old age.

I am well aware you can also find normal aging in environments outside my urban Brooklyn bubble; I’ve been told Michigan is a good place to start, as well as New Hampshire. I’ve stayed in a little hamlet of houses in Denmark, on the Baltic Sea, where the pale, wrinkled old ladies (whom I also love and admire!) get up for a cold plunge. But there was something about the decadence of Sorrento—a town named for the Sirens of the Odyssey, with teal waters and mounds of gnocchi—twinned with the realness, the naturalness, the normalness of the senior population, that refreshed me more than any Baltic dip. Together, it was all beautiful, and made me feel beautiful and carefree too. It wasn’t just a holiday. It was a vacation from my preoccupation with getting older and feeling uncomfortable, living in a body I am still struggling to own. I’ll look for that in the U.S. But I know it’s there for me in beautiful Italy. And for you, too.