Why Italy Became Our Dream

View from our balcony

Let’s begin with the fact we are 76 and 74 respectively, so some people admire our gutsiness to move and pursue our dream at this age (and some think we are a bit crazy). However, we quickly discovered cappuccino and pastry for breakfast is a great way to start the day. How about the fact I harvested our figs and apples last week and two weeks earlier harvested our wine grapes, wild blackberries, plums, and lemons. Earlier we harvested cherry plums, mulberries, and loquats. Our persimmon tree is bursting with persimmons, probably ready for harvest next week. We can’t wait for our peach, cherry, avocado, pear, lime, and olive trees to bear fruit next year. Oh, and I didn’t mention our Downy Oak Orchard, which was a headscratcher at first until we learned that truffles grow at their roots. We love truffles. By the way, the apples and cherry plums just became pies.

However, let’s start at the beginning. We first visited Italy in December 2019 for a week and fell in love with it. Eleven months later Cathy had a diagnosis of ovarian cancer at the height of the COVID epidemic. After four torturous years of chemotherapy and all the incredibly painful symptoms of cancer and chemo, her oncologist entered the exam room in June 2025 with a huge smile on his face (something you always want to see on your oncologist’s face) and announced the cancer had shrunk to almost nothing and wasn’t doing anything. After that five-year ordeal, I asked Cathy what she wanted and she said, “I want to move to Italy.” It took me about three days to wrap my head around that and then I said, “All right!” And so, we began the process.

We watched hundreds of YouTube videos from “A Home in Italy” and “Abruzzo Rural Property,” where we learned what to look for in buying a home in Italy. Realtors Dave Benson on “A Home in Italy” and Paola Savino of Abruzzo were incredibly helpful. One day in April 2025, I came home from work, and Cathy excitedly told me to watch a video from Paola’s YouTube channel, “Keys to Italy.” The video was for a home in the small village of Molina Aterno and two of her representatives toured the home and property as if they were buyers. You can still see the YouTube video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3bpBWF6W1o&list=PLAGmxas_RYsyDGl_34Hl4yHX62vOK66XG&index=16. We both immediately fell in love with the two-story, five bedroom, beautifully furnished villa, and almost fainted at the price reveal of 86,000 Euros. (Housing prices in Italy are unbelievable. In Florida, this would be a million-dollar home.) We quickly contacted Paola and said we wanted that home. She arranged for a visit, and we saw the home on June 5, 2025. It was as beautiful as the video and we confirmed the purchase, which was finalized on October 15, 2025. That was the easy part. However, we had to sell our home in Gulf Shores, Alabama to purchase the Italy villa. Of course, just as we put it on the market, there was a housing crash, but we did sell it on August 5, 2025. We also had to obtain an Italian visa so we could live in Italy for more than 90 days. That is easier said than done. The Italian bureaucracy is daunting. We hired Lexidy Law Group to help us with all the hoops we would need to jump through and they were great. Our Italian Lawyers, Alessia Peschiera and Susan Soldi have been wonderful and walked us through every step of the way. Their first advice: move to Texas because the Houston Italian Consulate was more liberal than the Miami Consulate. So, we moved to Austin for three months near Cathy’s best friend, Kim, and became Texas residents. We successfully met all the qualifications for an Elective Residence Visa with the Houston Consulate in November. Finally, we left on December 1^st, shipping all our home items by sea (it took 12 weeks) and our dog and cats by air (they were far more expensive to transport than we were with all the Italian veterinarian requirements, but we were not going to leave our fur babies behind). By the way, Attiye and Chantsu, our kitties, and Sunny, our little guard dog, love roaming the yard and the adjacent field. They always run home when we say, “Treats!”

On December 2^nd, after traveling 2 ½ hours through the mountains from the Rome Airport, we arrived at our new home around 9pm and discovered that the boiler was not working. The temperature was around 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and we were in an unheated home. Lots of blankets and comforters. A local plumber fixed it two days later and the radiators were now working. In the past ten months we installed a new kitchen—for some reason Europeans take their kitchens with them when they sell a home—waited until late January for our clothes and furniture to arrive, cleared a mountain of debris in the yard, trimmed enough dead trees and tree limbs to provide a year’s worth of firewood (now we need to install the fireplaces), painted our offices and bedroom, discovered several favorite local restaurants (the food is unbelievably delicious), oohed and aahed over the brilliant red poppies dotting the yard and the entire Spring Italian landscape, found out the winters are mildly cold (only two beautiful snow days), and the summers are very hot. And we love every minute of it. We sit on our porch every morning having breakfast and coffee looking at our beautiful evergreen tree grotto front yard (now growing grass after removing ten wheel barrel loads of rocks, stones, and pebbles—we do live on a mountain—and fighting with the large ant colony that kept stealing the grass seeds). Every morning we say thank you!

In February, I kept wondering why my pants were nearly falling off all the time. I got on the scale and learned I had lost 35 pounds in two months. I had been trying to get under 200 pounds for thirty years without success, and now weighed 182, the same as when I was thirty. Cathy lost a lot, too. It wasn’t just the hard work in the house and yard, it’s the food. Italian food is unprocessed, mostly organic, and has no chemicals or preservatives. It was one of the reasons Cathy wanted to move here. After the cancer, she knew she needed to maintain a healthy diet. It means going shopping every three days, because the food spoils quicker, but the healthy and delicious food is worth it. Plus, our 15-minute trip to the grocery store requires us to travel our curvy little mountain roads through breath-taking mountain views. It never gets old. What makes us sad is how America is poisoning its people for profit. We have an obesity crisis in the US and now we know why. Italy will not even allow American food to be imported here. We swear that the vegetables, eggs, meats, dairy, and so on also taste better here. And I didn’t even mention the wine. I just learned Italy produces more wine than France or Spain. Each region has its local flavors. We live in the Abruzzo region in the middle of the Apennine mountains, and the local wines are distinctive and delicious, particularly Montepulciano D’Abruzzo.

For Father’s Day, Cathy bought me a trail cam. Last night we caught on camera a stunning white, wild horse, moseying through our front yard (eating my grass)—yes, they have wild horses in the mountains—and leaving a lot of horse poop (great for our composter). The first week we put the trail cam out in the back yard and saw on respective nights a Dad and Mom porcupine, a doe, a fawn, and a large 12 point buck. The funniest video we have is of a red fox in the early morning being harassed by three magpies (large crow-like birds). They would swoop down and pull at his tail or fly over his head just out of reach. He would snap and lunge at them to no avail and was clearly one frustrated fox as the birds seemed to be laughing at him. Last night, the dogs in the village were barking up a storm, and as I was taking out the recycling containers, I clearly heard a bear huffing and woofing about a quarter mile away. In the winter I heard a chorus of wolves howling at the full moon a few miles up the mountain behind us. In the spring, one morning I identified 28 different bird species singing and twittering using my Cornell Lab Merlin Bird app. In the evening bats zip around eating the ever-plentiful insects—Italian flies are really annoying. Last week I was on a Zoom counseling call when I heard lots of jangling bells outside. I could not imagine what it was until I looked out my office window and saw a herd of sheep walking by our driveway on the street. So, I imagine you have guessed we live in the country. Actually, we live in the middle of three national parks. We love it.

Every day seems like a vacation, but we also take vacations. We had great fun riding the train to the small beach town of Pineto on the Adriatic Sea (which is across from Eastern Europe). The Italian trains are so much better than ours in the US, it is a great way to travel. The town was a bit like Key West. I also surprised Cathy and took her to the Amalfi Coast in southwestern Italy. Neither of us has ever seen anything more magnificent with its soaring cliffs overlooking a crystal blue sea and many tiny, artsy beach towns dotting the coastline. We stayed in a hotel perched on the side of a cliff and when we peered over the porch balcony outside our room, it was 200 feet straight down to the water. We dipped our feet in the Tyrrhenian Sea (which is across from Africa), so we have now been in three seas in the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Adriatic, and the Tyrrhenian. We still have to sample the Ionian Sea in northern Italy. Next on the travel agenda is Venice and Milan, as well as Paris, Barcelona, Athens, and Gobeckli Tepi in Turkey. We have an Italian ID so we can travel throughout Europe now without hassle.

I don’t want to idealize the Italian people, but we have routinely found them welcoming, kind, hard-working, and friendly. Even with the language barrier (honest we are trying) our neighbors are very nice. The Abruzzo culture seems to truly treasure children and taking care of the elderly. We often see a teenager patiently walking with a very old grandmother or grandfather on their arm to the store or the cappuccino bar or just to take them out. Finally, Italians love bicycles and motorcycles. An elderly man or woman riding their bicycle through town or the mountain roads is not an uncommon sight. LOL. The one thing Italians don’t seem to appreciate are dryers. So, we have become very Italian and hang our laundry out on the railing clothesline over the balcony just like the neighbors. We are even getting used to the fact that the clothes are not as soft as if they were dried in a dryer.

So, this is our story and it’s only been 10 months. Cathy has some great fashion and sewing projects in the queue, as well as her plan to make our home a sanctuary. I will be working on reviving our spiritual work, teaching, and writing books. We can’t wait to see what is next.