I’ve lived in Italy now for nearly nine years.
Obviously I love it here. I have four children, all of them boys. You can imagine the faces of Italians when I tell them that; they don’t know whether to congratulate me (because having boys here is still generally viewed as hitting the jackpot) or to smile indulgently and comment to their friends that my Italian is so bad I even get my numbers wrong (after all, no one in their right mind has that many children).
We ended up in Italy because my husband loved it here. I had never even visited the country before our first house hunting trip. In honesty, the push away from the UK was greater than the pull of Italy. I was simply bored with my life in Blighty and happy to follow my husband to a new and romantic lifestyle. This ended up being a bit of a joke really, since we could only afford a tumble down farmhouse with a little roof and no inside bathroom. We were living the dream though… And, as with all dreams, it is now (fortunately) a distant and somewhat surreal memory. In fact I hardly recall at all the feelings of having to shower outside in November; or shivering next to windows that don’t quite fit in the frames, which rattled in January storms. There was even the 25 pots and pans that were needed all over the upstairs floors to catch the rain. Nope – I will not remember it: I refuse!
Back to living the dream… First and foremost I wanted to be organically self sufficient. My first year in the garden taught me that 1) everything grows like mad in Italy as long as you can keep up with the watering, 2) never plant more than 3 zucchinis unless you are happy eating them until you are so sick of them you never want to see another zucchini, 3) don’t try to grow seedlings if you’ve got free range chickens (unless your garden is behind a chicken proof fence).
Chickens have taught me a lot about me and my family. I thought they were a great idea: snake munching, egg producing, chicken dinners on legs. It turns out that my rough, tough, outdoorsy husband can’t abide the thought of killing the excess cockerels, much less eating them. Once I had mastered the art of dispatching them I had to cook them in a curry or he could taste that they are ours (free range chicken is really different to what you buy in the shops). So, we abandoned the self sufficiency thing and just went with growing vegetables. It seemed easier. Though, I still harbour deep desires to own a cow.
The next preoccupation was money – how the heck do you make it on a hill in Tuscany where your only source of income is olive oil (and you now realise that every man and his dog has an uliveto in Toscana and the price of olive oil is pants.)?
We hit upon the old idea of renting out our house during summer to holiday makers. My husband set about finishing the renovations off (something he would never have got around to doing if it had just been us living in the house – never marry a builder if you want your house fixing up!) and we took in our first guests. After a few weeks of this we started to call them pests. After a few months we were grateful that the mortgage was being paid but if anyone else came around at 10pm and asked for a loo roll we’d commit hari kari.
We soldiered on through three seasons, by which time we had enough of smiling and saying the same things over and over again. It was also rough on our kids, who had to be on constant good behaviour and not shout, scream, wander around naked or pee outside. It was hell for them obviously. My husband didn’t particularly like these restrictions to his civil liberties either. And so it came to pass that we closed our doors to our guests/pests and embarked on a brave new venture. The Tuscan Magazine (formerly Tuscan Living Magazine – but it turned out that we’d copied someone else’s name by mistake so we had to change it) contains every bit of information that we always wished for and couldn’t find when we first moved over here. Our aim is to make living in Tuscany fun, easier and realistic. Above all it’s entertaining and honest (because we all know that living here isn’t just about vineyards, olive groves and cypress trees, which is what most English language literature about Tuscany tries to convince us of). We are also committed to promoting Tuscany to the rest of the English speaking world. It’s a big project but we are working away like mad and the magazine is steadily growing (have a look – www.thetuscanmagazine.com ).
Running a business in Italy is tough. We are only just realising the depths of the (dare I say it?) incompetence. So here it is: fax currently the height of sophistication as far as technology is concerned. Accountants tend to sit around, shuffle paper and then inform you that you’ve missed some deadline and are about to be deported. Clients attempt pay in bottles of olive oil and (do we really look this daft?) cockerels! Business’ send in adverts without any contact details and when asked to provide them say ‘But everyone knows us – we don’t need to tell them’ (surely the point in advertising is to find new clients who previously did not know you existed?). I could go on… the rant is almost limitless. But, for all this, we love working in Italy because it really is laid back. Deadlines shuffle back and no-one bats an eye. Accounts get left unpaid for months – no worries. You take the whole of August off and that is just fine. The world of business here is so different from that we have come from that it takes time to adjust. But adjust you must, otherwise you’d have high blood pressure within a month and be packing up and leaving within a year.
Beyond work, we are lucky that our kids seem to have integrated brilliantly. I can but hope that my own cobbled together Italian will not embarrass them too much (they are forever begging me to stop trying to communicate with anyone Italian). At home we speak English and they go to normal Italian school from the age of three. It seems to have worked. Up until 11 it seems that English is their first language but after that there is a marked shift and they are more at home with Italian. We send them home to England to summer camp so they can brush up on their written English and pretend to be Harry Potter in a posh boarding school (email me if you would like the details – it’s actually affrordable). It’s actually the best thing we can do for them because it also means that their horizons are broadened and they get to learn a bit about English culture too. I sometimes wonder if this is a selfish motive; there is nothing more unnerving than watching your child grow up in a culture you are excluded from. Because, make no mistake, if you are not born in Italy, you may speak the language perfectly and be totally integrated, yet you will always be foreign. Which is actually a good thing really, because only foreigners can get away with a total lack of make-up on the school run, a propensity to wear tracksuits and comfortable shoes, asking for a cappuccino after lunch and going on holiday somewhere other than the Versilian coast.
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