It seems only fitting that I start this little story in the beginning rather than in the middle, which is where I am at the time that I write this. Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to identify where the beginning is. And even if I could figure it out, would you really be interested in reading about it? Probably not. In any case, it would be worth giving you at least a little background about who we are and how we got here.
I am a blessed husband and father. My wife and I made the very conscious decision to begin having children only a few months after we were married. These kids (there are six of them now!) are an immense blessing (one that is sometimes disguised as an insurmountable trial). When we were married, my wife and I both knew that ours would be an international life. She was born and raised in central Italy while I grew up in sunny Southern California. We knew that neither of us could completely abandon the ties of our native country nor would we want to. We also wanted our children to benefit from the richness and diversity of international experiences. (I highly recommend international travel, by the way. There is simple no better way to shed that center-of-universe-syndrome attitude we tend to have about our own life experience). So, after many years living throughout the United States–from the Pacific Southwest to the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest–we finally found ourselves in the position to act on it.
The timing was perfect, so we sold everything we could, moved what we did not sell into storage, and with one suitcase per person headed for Italy. Although at the time we thought we had things pretty figured out, we learned pretty quickly that we had much more to learn. In fact, with a couple of years behind me now, I can comfortably say that Italy has been a most incredible classroom. It has been a place to learn about each other, about ourselves, about people and relationships, and so much more. Let me just tell a little bit about how it began.
Before we moved, we had made plans to live in the city of Rimini. For those of you not familiar with Rimini, it is a lovely seaside city, of course with lots of history, on the Adriatic sea (that is, the east coast of Italy). My wife’s mother’s family had moved to Rimini many years earlier from Sardinia (an island of the west coast of Italy). They settled there and ran a bar for many years (a bar in Italy is more like a café in the US) until the family decided to close the bar and retire. My mother-in-law still had a little apartment there in the same building where an aunt and uncle lived that was empty. The plan was to occupy it for a year as we organized our next move back to the US. Shortly before leaving, but too late to change our travel plans, it became clear that that living arrangement would not work out (that is a story for another time). We scrambled to find another place to live, finally deciding that our best option would be to live in a small vacation home that my father-in-law owned in Alghero, a lovely little city in northwestern Sardinia. This came with a fair number of compromises. It was on an island and any travel we hoped to do in Europe would be more complicated. The apartment was very small (only two bedrooms!) and in some ways in need of repair. Nonetheless, we bolstered our courage with statements like “it’s only for a year…we can do anything for a year” and “it won’t be that bad–in the end we’ll still be in Italy and having the experience we want.” So, with our confidence intact we got on the plane, all of our kiddos following in a line like little ducklings heading off to the pond for the first time.
Little did they know. Their innocence and total trust is still remarkable to me.
We stayed with some friends for a few weeks after we landed. The plan was to get organized for the trip to our new temporary home. It was not long, however, before we had some reports that the reality that awaited us was very different from our expectations. For instance, we found out that there was no heating nor air conditioning in the apartment. That might sound like a little thing, but the more we thought about it the more we realized that we were compromising away most of what had originally enticed us to come. We needed a new plan. So, we started to figure out something new. And more than a year later, after a whirlwind of ups and downs, after creating and discarding hundreds of plans, we bought a little house in the beautiful hills of Tuscany. The house was in need of major repair but was lovely and felt like home from the very first moment we stepped inside.
So that’s how it happened (in a very reduced form). We live surrounded by beautiful chestnut trees in the enchanting hills of central Italy. It’s our little oasis. It’s more than a home. It’s a physical manifestation of a destination that took years for us to find. And this is our story.