Italian Girl

Apologies if there are duplicate posts. I'm not finding this board easy to naviage.

"I know a really nice lady called Magaret moved to Italy rather than France, after years of learning French too !" It’s only the second time in a year that I’ve looked in on this board so you can imagine my surprise when I read Russet House’s very kind comment above. Yes, we did eventually settle in Italy, we’re celebrating five years in il bel paese later this month. We had lived in France before (Paris for two years in the early ‘90s) and had always assumed we would retire there but after viewing maybe as many as 40+ properties in various departements (and making several offers) we woke up and realised we really wanted to live in Tuscany. So here we are in a valley so beautiful UNESCO has made it a World Heritage Site, yet we’re less than an hour to Florence in the car or 75 mins to Rome by train when we feel in need of bright lights (which we do, often, in the winter). And this is something I felt we would have trouble coping with in the deepest depths of rural France, those long wet winters with only a small provincial town to escape to. We see a lot of rain here from Nov to May, sometimes for days on end, and there’s snow too guaranteed. But our villages are thriving year-round communities that also see tourists (albeit in far smaller numbers) nine/ten months of the year, so there’s still a gentle buzz of activity even in Feb or November. Otherwise the problems for expats are precisely the same. You have to learn the language, ideally to a reasonably good standard for despite what you read about the region being overrun with Brits, there are nothing like the numbers you find in 24, 46 or 16 even where we have several British friends. And rarely do you find an English speaking Italian in a government office. In our village of 1500, we’re the only permanent resident Brits and I only know of two other couples owning seldom-visited holiday homes. Even in the heart of the Chianti, you’ll be lucky to hear English voices in mid-winter, and when you do they’re more likely to be Americans. The bureaucracy is a b!*&%y nightmare but the great thing about the Italians is their flexible approach to everything. When we were first here struggling to find our way around, we were constantly amazed at how helpful people were. And as our bank manager said to us on one occasion (after he had just undertaken the most extraordinary piece of creative accounting in our favour), “in Italy we have a solution for everything, except for death”. And it’s true, they do. If you think you have taxes in France, you should see them here. But I suspect the difference is that in France a larger percentage of people pay them! I once mentioned in passing to Italian friends that I’d just been to the post office to pay a particular tax, to which they all chorused “why?” The cost of living is going up daily though the quality of local produce is still incomparable to what you’d find for the same price in Britain, as is eating out. A decent bottle of Chianti Classico Riserva can be found for around Euros 5 direct from a small producer and flagons of very drinkable sangiovese are available from farmers for Euros 1.25/1.50 litre. (I’d be curious to know how that compares with France. And I must stress this stuff isn’t rough.) Also, how much is petrol in France? My husband is looking over my shoulder and urging me to ask this. After a shocking couple of months back in the winter when it shot up to Euros 1.70/litre, it’s now back around the E1.55 mark. I don’t want to talk about gas and electricity prices but needless to say we spend much of the winter wearing multiple pullovers around the house. As in France, I maintain it’s better to wait and move when you retire for there’s very little you can do to earn a living here, and you do need a fairly decent income to survive. The market for B&Bs or even villa lets is swamped and few owners this summer made much, if any money. Several familiar names are mentioned in this post but I didn’t see Coco’s. She was the first person that stood out on this board for me with her sometimes feisty comments. Does anyone know whether she’s still running her B&B in Normandy? Pucette, of course, what an interesting woman living all alone in the middle of nowhere (somewhere south of Brive?) spending her days fixing tractors and evenings reading French philosophy. I know she moved back to the UK maybe as long as five years ago. And I thought of Saligo Bay very recently after reading an article in an Italian magazine on Michel Houellebecq. I remember a thread where she, Pucette and I discussed his latest novel, which she wrote off as being “just about some nerdy bloke in computers”! It’s funny how the memory retains some things and forgets so much more. I’m so pleased I stumbled upon this thread and that this board is still so lively. There’s nothing like it on this scale for expats in Italy, which is a great shame.