How to Move to Italy

I would have imagined an Epiphany would be loud. A moment accompanied by a flash of bright light that might leave a permanent mark on an object close by. Something between Harry Potter’s lightning bolt scar, a slice of toast with the image of Christ on it, and the sword in the rock at Rocamadour. The type of word that should always capitalized. All this was if I’d ever considered having an Epiphany at all, which I’d never given much thought to, before it happened.

I was Epiphanied when I was in the kitchen on a totally ordinary night while making a simple salad, not even bothering to add a shallot and mustard to the olive oil and vinegar. Many years after it happened to me, I wonder what others are doing the exact moment when it hits, the moment when it’s clear that their life, from top to bottom, has to change because they are stuck, and not living the lives they really want to be living. It struck me, with force and complete clarity, between whisking the dressing and pouring it on and I agreed it was right.

Something had to change. And nothing after was like it was before. And all roads finally led to Italy—but not Rome.

The passage above is from a book I am writing about our 12 years of living here. I often share on Itch the things that capture my attention about living in Italy, but nothing about how we actually did this move, and why. The book (fingers crossed) goes into detail, but here are a few headlines about how we approached making this change, which have become clearer to me over time.

Change. As a family, we’d always loved to travel—Europe in particular. John and Donella were as avid to have adventures as I was. Sebastian was eight and up for whatever his older sister thought was a good idea. The routine of our California life, no matter how wonderful discrete elements were, started to feel a bit stifling and we were restless. As a friend recently told me, you gave yourselves a great gift—the permission to change.

One year only. The framing of the move was as a family year abroad—a kind of sabbatical from our “real” lives. We said we’d keep going with this idea until someone said “no”—and no one did. The kids’ school said it would a worthwhile thing to do and that they’d catch up easily; the real estate agent told us we could easily rent our house furnished; and our clients didn’t care where our base of operations was. This idea, before I had a fancy term for it of prototyping a life change, was the most critical thing we did. We could have stepped back into our old life in an instant, so we didn’t have anything to look back on and mourn. It allowed us to live in the moment and move forward without regrets.

The Golden Ticket. After George W was re-elected we decided to pursue dual citizenship. John’s grandparents came from a small town in Calabria and we painstakingly pieced together the voluminous paper trail needed to prove citizenship by blood in Italy. We were successful, and John and the kids held Italian passports. I was a citizen-in-waiting due to my marriage to an Italian. (Little did I know I was marrying an Italian when we said our vows.)

We listened to our hearts. Our Italian passports opened up the EU to us, including the UK at the time, and initially we weren’t even considering Italy. The criteria at the beginning were that our adventure needed to occur somewhere hip and happening, and close to an international airport. We ended up in a place that didn’t even remotely fulfill either requirement. We investigated Amsterdam, Berlin, and London, among other places, but nothing was really getting our hearts pounding. One night, we had dinner in a chaotic, exuberant, family-run Italian restaurant and the idea of moving to Italy hit us. All of us suddenly sat up straighter and started talking at once. We knew we were now on the right path. Plus, it would give us a chance to figure out what being Italian actually meant.

Research. After deciding on Italy, we talked to about a dozen families who’d done similar sabbaticals and learned a great deal. The family who’d had the most profound and interesting experience had lived in a tiny village where they bonded deeply with the locals—a different experience from friends who’d ended up in Florence or Rome with a complete infrastructure for expats—and hyper-local felt like the more interesting path.

Bravery. We investigated international schools and discovered that kids who attended often didn’t learn the language or culture of the country that they were in, beyond the basics. Students were from all over the world, often at the school for just a year or so before they moved on, and although the experience was certainly international, it wasn’t necessarily Italian. Donella (and by extension her little brother) decided that they wanted to go to local schools to become fluent. They started Italian schools not speaking a word of Italian. Now they speak like natives and have often delighted in having not entirely appropriate conversation with friends, in partial dialect, right in front of us and we can’t keep up. It’s handy to have a secret language your parents don’t know.

Off Roading. We were comfortable going “off road” because it was initially only for a year. We chose our village sight unseen, driven by finding an apartment or house where we wanted to live. After looking at about a thousand short-term vacation rentals online we found an apartment that was beautiful, mysterious, and as different from our California home as possible—four restored nuns’ cells in a convent from the 1600s. The owner was willing to rent it out for the year, with everything from sheets to spoons. We weren’t worried about the kids’ education as it didn’t need to track to any American standards. If we went back, they would get back on the path and in the meantime they’d learn far more interesting things than rote curriculum. Our work with clients continued and often involved international travel, so we had the freedom to be based anywhere.

Trusting the universe, and ourselves. I’ve always been a worrier and a planner, but for this move it was all up to chance—the village, the apartment, the school, living in Italy—no way to control anything. We just had to go with it, and I’ve become comfortable in this mode. The universe sent us two perfect mentors for the kids, which was the biggest gift possible. For the first year they’d pick them up from school, have them over for lunch, and help with homework and Italian. We couldn’t have been successful in making the move work for everyone without them.

The Conversation. In retrospect, one thing that amazes me is that at the end of the year we never had The Family Conversation, complete with columns of pros and cons, about whether to go back to California. None of us even thought of discussing a return to our old lives. We were having too much fun, had too much yet to figure out, and we wanted to see where the adventure led next.

Regrets? Almost none, except missing some family moments. People we love come to visit, and for more intense, intimate times than what we often had together back in our frenzied California lives. What we lost in frequency we’ve gained in depth. We’ve all changed in ways that we like. The kids have thanked us multiple times, saying that this was the best thing we could have done for them—and they wonder about who they would have become had they stayed in California, in what they view as the more narrow American path. But, I do miss readily available fresh cilantro and Indian food.