Italy: Vacation vs Relocation

March 28, 2017 Lynne 6 comments
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It’s a picture perfect, blue-sky, warm spring day in Umbria. If we were on vacation, we would be visiting a lovely hilltown, checking out a museum, eating lunch at a quaint local pizzeria, and after a brief rest, enjoying an evening stroll and dinner at the best restaurant in town. Instead, today I did two loads of laundry and cleaned the bathroom while Nick mowed the lawn and made dinner. That’s the reality of living in a place as opposed to vacationing there.

 

Laundry day! Everyone air dries their clothes in Italy.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. In fact, these mundane chores seem less ordinary in our lovely Italian rustico home. There’s no rush to get it done. There’s always time for a bite to eat, a glass of wine or a long walk with Bella.

 

Watching the laundry air-dry in the warm spring sunshine with a bottle of wine.

 

Nick and I enjoy a leisurely morning. We typically sleep until about 8:00 AM, have a couple of cups of coffee, catch up on our social media, watch the news and tidy up the house. By noon, we are ready to go out and run errands or explore. The only problem is that much of Italy shuts down at 1:00 PM and doesn’t reopen until 4:00 PM. Most local offices and stores close for this 3 hour siesta. To us, this seems very inefficient. How can a business just close up for 3 hours during what we consider the prime part of the day? I cant tell you the number of times we showed up in a town at 1:00 PM only to find everything closed. Or tried to go shopping in the early afternoon only to go home frustrated and empty handed. We’ve adjusted to the siesta.

 

Dining alone at 7 PM at La Locanda Del Conte Nitto in Amelia. No self-respecting Italian would go to a restaurant before 8 PM. The glass plate in the floor reveals a section of an old Roman road called the Via Flaminia.

 
The Via Flaminia was an ancient Roman road constructed in 220 BC, leading from Rome over the Apennine Mountains to Ariminum (Rimini) on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. You can see the ruts from the chariot wheels in this photo.

 

What we haven’t adjusted to is that the Italian dinner hour doesn’t really start until 9:00 PM. We haven’t gone out to dinner very often, and this is just one of the reasons why. An Italian dinner is a leisurely affair lasting between 1.5 to 3 hours. When we show up at a restaurant at 7:00 or 7:30 we are literally the only ones there for all if not most of our meal. It’s embarrassing. But were not used to eating a huge meal and going to bed. Eating early is a very American thing, but this is one habit that’s going to be hard to break.

 

Antipasto at Da Piero in Giove

 

Another reason we haven’t dined out much is that we live in a small hill town. “Hill town” sounds so romantic, but they should really be called cliff towns. Our town only has one restaurant, and it’s nice, but to experience any fine dining we’ve got to navigate the narrow, winding mountain roads down from Giove, and climb up the narrow, winding mountain roads to nearby “hill town” with more restaurants. Now that we know the roads a little better, we’ve started to go out more after dark, but in those first few weeks it wasn’t very appealing.

 

I always save room for dessert when we go out!

 

The final reason we haven’t eaten out much in the 5 weeks since we’ve been in Italy is the high quality of the ingredients at the local markets. It is mind-blowing how much better almost everything tastes here. Not only is the quality of the food phenomenal, prices on almost everything are cheap! One of our favorite activities is grocery shopping, either at the local market or at one of the weekly outdoor markets nearby. Nick loves to cook, and he’s been enjoying using the local ingredients to make us one fabulous meal after another. Bella and I are more than content to eat at home. That said, we are still hunting for a local gem of a restaurant where we can become regulars.

 

Thanks to the quality of the ingredients and Nicks cooking skills, we eat very well at home.

 

It hasn’t all been running errands and doing chores since we’ve been in Italy. We’ve visited Spoleto, Orvieto, Todi and Siena. We’ll be blogging about those trips soon. We’ve also visited some smaller towns like Orte and Amelia.

 

 

I can see how fast these 6 months are going to fly by, so we started a “must-do list” of the places we want to go and the things we want to do before we move on to our next home, wherever that may be. Otherwise, it would be too easy to spend our days in the Italian sunshine on our terrace, doing laundry, cooking, drinking wine and mowing the lawn.
 
Ciao,
 
Lynne
 

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6 Comments on “Italy: Vacation vs Relocation

  1. Hi there ,
    Do you guys think you may stay there or is it just 6 months for sure? I so enjoy your letters ..thanks for sharing .
    Patty ( ourduncan on IG )

    1. Hello Patty! We are planning to return home in September to visit our parents and kids, then head to Mexico for the winter. We haven’t decided whether to return to Italy next spring or try someplace new. We love Italy, but there are so many places on our “to-do” lists!

  2. Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an really long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyway, just wanted to say fantastic blog!

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