Viva Italia
So, we moved to Italy. That actually deserves exclamation marks. We moved to Italy!!! My 15-year-old self deliriously reaches for a high-five with her jaw agape. This is the (near) completion of a circle that I didn’t know I had begun to shape.
The first time the concept of Italy entered my mind, I was a young teenager scrolling through images on this newfangled device called a computer. Before we ever got a modem or knew where “online” was, my dad bought the Microsoft Encarta 95’ CD-ROM, a digital encyclopedia that I’d spend countless hours with, soaking up the facts and wonders of the world like a parched sponge. One evening, I came across an image of bright, turquoise waters surrounded by jagged cliffs and palm trees. Bleach-white houses were dotted in clusters behind impossibly curvy roads. But, what really stood out was that empty hammock in the foreground. After an imaginative, fairytale dream sequence, I became convinced it was just daring me to find it.
Nothing happened for 15 years and I sort of forgot about the dream. Or, I recognized that my finance habits weren’t conducive to floating off a bellini hangover on a hammock in Capri. But by age 30, I got my adult shit together, saved up some money, and went traveling through Europe.
My first trip to Italy, 2010
That first trip blew my mind. It birthed a decade of flights to Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia. It inspired investments in Italian language classes in the states and immersion courses in Italy. My infatuation made me a magnet for accents, which ultimately led to meeting my Milanese husband on an Irish beach. And today, I sit writing this on a white dondolo (sort of like a hammock) in my backyard surrounded by fruit-bearing trees and the mountains of Tuscany.
How did that 15-year-old girl get here?
Well, that’s one thing I owe to the pandemic. Almost immediately after we got married, Covid-19 hit the shores of Ireland. We were paying a lot o’ rent to live in the closed and quarantined city of Dublin, and one dreary year of that was enough. Getting my husband used to the idea of returning to his home country was a process, but he finally came around. We went from daydreaming to looking more seriously, then we really put the word out.
One day, the house we’d been looking for came to us via text message from an old friend of his who seemed to instinctively know exactly what we wanted. We called the moment we saw it and his parents drove 3 1/2 hours to see it that weekend. It was four very enthusiastic thumbs up. One month later, we’d shed our raincoats and wellies for tank tops and open-toed shoes. As I write this, we’ve been here for just under 5 months.
My new office.
So before I go forgetting what it was like to move here and stumble with language and meet new people, I want to share what it’s been like for me.
This blog is about living in Italy. It’s about the good, the bad, the frustrating, the funny, and the boring parts that make it just like anywhere else at the end of the day.
Except it’s not…really.
Italy is a cultural behemoth that beckons you with emphatic gestures to eat more carbs. It’s the spiritual echo of the collective nonna demanding you cover your belly at the slightest breeze. It’s the justification for eating gelato twice a week and dipping out for coffee three times a day without going broke.
These are my observations about living in a boot-shaped country where the only thing outnumbering the rules are the exceptions.
It’s a place where passion is palpable, whether you’re talking about varietals of wine, a pair of shoes, or cleaning products.
Italians bathe in a potent exuberance for life. And I’m here to get gloriously drunk on the bathwater.