When the self-employed public relations professional visited Milan six years later, she knew she wanted to move there. “I had this deep feeling that I was meant to live here,” she told CNN Travel. But her first attempt to move to Italy ended before it started.

Italy’s highest court has confirmed a slander conviction against U.S. defendant Amanda Knox for accusing an innocent man in her British flatmate’s 2007 murder, a sensational case that polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic.

From noon to nearly midnight, they hunched over more than a dozen machines in Concord, trying to score as many points as possible before missing a critical flipper hit or losing balls rolling into