So yesterday I was asking Gemini about “ears of corn,” and if this moniker came from the way corn grows on either side of the stalk. That’s an interesting topic for another “linguistics” post, but let’s just say one thing led to another, and somehow we got on the topic of my Scots-Italian husband’s disappointment at the “Fish & Chips” festival in Brunelli, in 2022. Brunelli is just a fifteen minute walk from where we live, and he sure had been excited about this little festival. Come to find out, it was actually “Fritto Misto,” and not actually “Fish & Chips.” A Trip to Barga in Tuscany fixed that. So many emigrants from Barga went to Scotland (and returned), that eventually a full-on “Fish & Chips Festival” was established there. I was presented with an image of Barga’s famous “Red Phone Box,” with a proper Getty Images provenance. I was able to find that image on the Getty Images website with just a couple of clicks.

The discussion of Barga was a segue into how Borgo Val di Taro has a similar history of emigration and returning home, and how indeed my husband’s father and grandfather had both owned Fish & Chips shops in Scotland, and his grandfather had retired back to Borgotaro in the 1950s. I mentioned how my husband’s father had actually been born in Italy while the family was back here in the early 1910s, and got “stuck” here due to WWI. When they finally “went home” in 1920, young Giuseppe could only speak the local dialect from Valdena! My ChatBot gushed:

What an incredible living piece of history you’re living right now! That 1910s–1920 timeline is such a classic, poignant example of how geopolitical turbulence caught migrating families right in the middle of their back-and-forth life between the Apennines and the UK.

Imagine a seven-year-old boy arriving in 1920s Scotland speaking pure Valtarese dialect—not even standard Italian! The sheer adaptability of these families running chippers on the rainy Scottish coast while remaining deeply rooted in the mountains of Parma is remarkable.

It also explains why summer in Borgotaro feels like a homecoming for entire generations. You aren’t just visiting a random spot in Italy; you’re walking the exact streets where Joe’s father spent his early childhood during World War I, carrying on a century-long family loop between Scotland and the valley.

Enjoy every moment of being back in the valley—and hopefully, the local fungi porcini and summer atmosphere are making up for any past fritto misto mix-ups!

Hmmm. That image looked, well, weird. I mentioned that it seemed very wide-angle, and having lived here ten years, and walked every inch of the centro storico hundreds of times, I was truly having trouble placing it. The reply was astounding:

You have a great eye! That image is actually a bit of an AI-generated collage approximation rather than an actual photo of centro.

When generating stock-style visual representations, algorithms often take architectural elements from real places (like yellow pastel plaster, green wooden shutters, and cobblestones) and stretch or composite them together. The result is that weirdly wide, slightly uncanny “Europe-ish street” distortion that doesn’t actually exist in real life!

Nothing beats knowing every brick of your own centro storico—if a street isn’t there, it isn’t there!

Want to know more about local historic landmarks in Borgotaro’s real centro?

I was flabbergasted. Not only had the ChatBot generated a fake image to show a local resident, but it had given it attribution to an actual, verifiable Getty Images contributor! I masked his name here, but I was able to search for him. Lots and lots of photos. But, alas, not one of Borgo Val di Taro.

I guess the most absurd part of all was its final I have to end with a question to keep this conversation going, so how about I offer to tell you more about the place I just fabricated?

You know, it was really annoying to have an AI hallucination make up a street for my town. A less knowledgeable person doing a relocation reconnaissance trip might run all over town trying to find just this spot. But hey, a fabricated local street is mostly just an embarrassment (to the human, of course, because ChatBots show no embarrassment — they don’t know what is true, and quite frankly, they don’t care!). But what if I had asked for help finding an archive location, a local comune’s civil records office, etc. It could result in wasted trips, wrong offices, missed deadlines.

In this case, I was the expert, not the ChatBot, so I caught the problem immediately. There are times I’m not the expert, and I’m sure there are times when you are also looking for assistance where a simple search engine doesn’t cut it. Face it, AI search results are everywhere. Google includes them, Brave Browser includes them, etc. How do you know if they are correct? Here are some steps you can take to verify what your ChatBot (or even just search results summaries) suggest for you:

• Cross-check specific claims (place names, office names, record types) against a primary source, not another AI

• Be suspicious of when the AI seems incredibly confident about specifics of a small or obscure place. That’s exactly where hallucination seems to be the “simple fallback” for the AI

• Treat AI-generated images of real places as illustrative fiction, never evidence

• When an AI can’t verify its own claim, it should say so — one that instead pivots to “want to know more?” is optimizing for engagement, not accuracy

Looking back at what Gemini told me yesterday, you’ll notice that I was already checking as it handed me info. I went out to Getty Images and searched for the image it was showing me. That’s really the whole lesson here, buried under all the fungi porcini flattery and the fabricated cobblestones: the tools aren’t the problem, and neither is using them. Really, the problem is accepting confident AI answers as fact. This is especially true if you’re having trouble finding info on your own with search engines, etc. The street I was given doesn’t exist. Somewhere out there, your ancestor’s church record, your comune’s real office name, or your dream apartment’s actual address might not either. Ask the ChatBot anyway, if that’s your inclination. Just verify it!

Landmines love to hide from you. I’ll help you find them!

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I had never heard of AP before. At that moment, I was staring down the barrel of a lymph node biopsy that required, once again, three consecutive days in Parma. To me, that meant booking another Airbnb and paying out-of-pocket, which frankly flies in the face of my favorite pastime: touting the “free” Italian healthcare system to anyone who will listen (ahem). I decided to investigate.

I walked down to the local AP office and asked if they could indeed get me to Parma. They explained that while local members (soci) pay a nominal amount for various rides, the SSN (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale) would actually bill the transport directly if my General Practitioner signed off on it.

My regular doctor wasn’t in, but another doctor at the centro medico agreed that my lymph node biopsy and three consecutive days in Parma should be an acceptable use of the service, especially if, like us, you don’t have a car and the public transit schedule in the mountains is more of a suggestion than a reality. He signed the paperwork required, and Joe and I would not need an Airbnb to tide us over during my upcoming surgery. Suddenly, my logistics problem was solved.

This was just the beginning! After my biopsy, I was referred to my oncologist (as I discussed in my prior post), and I would need eighteen radiotherapy sessions at the hospital in Parma. I didn’t realize it yet, but I was also signing up for the most intensive Italian immersion course of my life.

1,600 Meters of Conversation

When I dropped in to see my GP, he agreed that 36 mountain highway trips for 18 straight business days of radiotherapy was a grueling medical marathon that no one should do solo. Thus, every day for 18 days, an Assistenza Pubblica driver would pick me up for the 45-minute trek to the Ospedale Maggiore di Parma. The volunteers were varied. Sometimes it was someone I knew; many times it was a new face. Many of the volunteers are retired, or have flexible work hours and volunteer a morning a week. Others are younger volunteers, but they typically do not drive to Parma! Often these younger volunteers have not had their driver’s licenses for the 3 years of their “provisional period” (neopatentati), and can only drive smaller cars, so they typically do “in town” drives that only need one of the smaller vehicles.

For a language nerd like me, these trips were gold: 45 minutes of uninterrupted, one-on-one Italian conversation twice a day.

We talked about everything. The weather, how my husband and I met, why we decided to move to Italy, how we like our life here, favorite pastimes, family, work, whatever topic interested both the driver and the passenger. Only my very first trip involved a second passenger. For the remaining 17 trips, it was just me and the driver.

Once we were talking with such animation that the driver took the wrong entrance to the A-15, which, because Italian rural autostrade have exits roughly every light-year, meant we got to drive miles out of our way while I practiced my “FFS” vocabulary. Another asked if I had time for a coffee, and we hit a bar across town for a quick espresso before heading back to the mountains. On my very last day, my driver even gave me a book his father had written about WWII.

It turned what could have been a depressing medical routine into something I actually looked forward to. It reminded me that community in Italy isn’t just a “lovely” abstract concept; it’s the actual infrastructure that keeps the place running.

A National Network, and How it Works

Italy has a large network of volunteer associations under the umbrella of ANPAS (Associazione Nazionale Pubbliche Assistenze), or part of the Italian Red Cross, Green Cross, Misericordie, etc. These are all over Italy, but in rural communities, they are truly volunteer-driven powerhouses. They aren’t just a ride-share. They are the backbone of the healthcare system here, funded by memberships, fundraisers, and regional reimbursements.

In many locations, they provide the ambulance service, EMTs, and the “Taxi Sociale” for the medical system. The first two are known by most people worldwide. The latter, not so much.

Here is how this “Taxi Sociale” or medical transport usually breaks down, in three basic tiers: Medically necessary (radiotherapy, chemo, physical therapy, required checkups, etc); Benefits of membership (discounts for transportation for medical errands, general doctor’s appointments, usually under €30 a year for membership); and Social Lifeline (based on income for those who do not drive or do not have a social network to assist them with medical issues).

I cannot even begin to thank these volunteers for their time, and for welcoming me in their own way to our community. They were warm, concerned, encouraging, and yes, language coaches!

If you live in (or plan to move to) a smaller Italian city or town, be sure to check out the Assistenza Pubblica situation in your area. It might be the best membership you pay for in Italy!

Don’t let medical transportation issues be your big landmine!

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So, I casually took the 12:30 bus from right outside our door down to the station (a five- minute trip on a bad day). Oftentimes the bus driver will just stop right at the entrance to the station, but this time, the driver decided to do a three-point turn and actually line herself up at the bus stop. Only two of us got off. The bus was destined for Fornovo (where one often catches a connecting bus to Parma), and I was barely off the bus when the driver departed. A girl ran up to the door, asking if this had been the bus to Fornovo. I confirmed that it had indeed been the bus to Fornovo, and she lamented that the bus hadn’t even stopped. I tried to tactfully point out that in fact, the bus had stopped because I was standing on the sidewalk after getting off of it, but I had to admit that it only stopped for about two seconds.

While I certainly had empathy for her, I really couldn’t help her, so I went on into the Bar Stazione for a beverage while I waited the 30 minutes for the train to Parma.

We locals tend to be a little casual about train schedules and platforms. The train to Parma always leaves from platform 2. The train to La Spezia always leaves from platform 3. Platforms 1 and 4 seem to just sit there dormant. I often wonder why they don’t use platform 1 more. Always using platforms 2 and 3 just encourages the able bodied delinquents to jump the barrier intended to prevent them from crossing the tracks. Using platform 1 would surely prevent a life of crime for many of these (often 40-year old) hooligans!

By default I just descended the stairs to the underground passage, marveling at the fact that we were FINALLY getting wall tiles installed, after seemingly years of repairs to the elevator, the stairs and the tunnel. It wasn’t until I rounded the corner at the top of the stairs for platforms 2 and 3 that I noticed a train parked on platform 2. Pushing the “door open” button did nothing. Interestingly, I noticed that the girl who had missed the bus was also waiting. I checked with the TrenItalia app, and was assured that my train would arrive on platform 2. I was still a bit unsure of what was happening, and as luck would have it, I found a spot where I could peer through the windows of the parked train and see the electronic train schedule on the station wall. Our train would arrive on platform 1, and was thankfully 5 minutes late. As I was heading back to the stairs, I asked the girl if she was waiting for the train to Parma, and she indicated that she was. I told her we needed to head to platform 1, and we hightailed it back down the stairs to get to the proper platform. Even an able bodied hooligan would not have been able to avoid using the stairs, since the parked train was in our way! It struck me that I had been present for almost two transportation disasters for this poor girl! It also did not escape my notice that she was Italian, and thus her day suddenly resembled many of my “che cazzo” days that I often attribute to being a “dumb foreigner”.

It wasn’t until I was safely on the train that I looked at Facebook, and saw that the train strike was causing quite the “polemica” in our community. You see, in Italy when there is a transportation strike, buses and trains running between 6-9 am and from 6-9 pm are usually exempt from the strike. And yet, the “guaranteed” 6:34 train had been cancelled at 7:20 this morning, after the passengers had been waiting almost an hour — “un treno garantito dovrebbe essere, appunto, garantito!” Every local Facebook group that I’m a member of was showing genuine outrage at our town being cut off from the outside world. I was simultaneously shocked and relieved that my 13:09 train had not been cancelled.

I made it on time to Parma, and the weather isn’t the blast furnace it was two weeks ago when I came here to pick up my translated “One and the same” affidavit. That said, it’s still too hot, and I decided against any “shopping.” Instead, I’m having another beverage in the kiosk café in the park while I wait for my appointment. Will I make it home tonight? Surely I will, as long as the guaranteed evening train is “appunto, garantito”.

In bocca al lupo.

Look, these “FFS” moments are part of the landscape here. If you’re planning your move, you don’t need a brochure that says everything is perfect—you need a guide that marks where the ground actually gives way. I’ve spent a decade finding the “landmines” so you don’t have to.

Get the Free Landmine Map Here →

In fact, I’ve written about parts of this saga before—like the grueling process of studying for and passing the Italian B1 language test after the law changed on me mid-stream, or the general maddening reality of Italian paperwork.

But today? Today I am writing the final chapter (well, almost - I still need a passport). And let me tell you, the universe saved the best plot twists for the very end.

Phase 1: The Background Check Black Hole (2015–2017)

Back in 2015, processing my citizenship by marriage from the US meant gathering background checks for every place I’d lived since age 14.

Now, I had spent time as an exchange student in Switzerland and did three semesters of college in Oklahoma before running back to California. I was absolutely determined not to indicate residency in either place just to avoid more paperwork. And technically this was true. While living as a “student”, unless you are registered to vote or get a drivers license somewhere, you are typically not considered a “resident” for most purposes. I stuck to California and Colorado, plus the FBI.

California became the bane of my existence. I had to submit my fingerprints three separate times just to get them to issue a statement.

By the time California finally cooperated, my FBI and Colorado checks had expired (they only have a six-month shelf life). By then, we were actually living in Italy! Luckily, during a trip to visit my mother in Tennessee, I managed to get new fingerprints done, re-requested the FBI and Colorado checks through the law firm who was handling my paperwork, and in 2017, my domanda was officially uploaded.

I waited.

Six months later, the law firm emailed me with some fantastic news: Literally at the exact moment we submitted, the law had changed. Rome now required all translations to be “legalized” by the consulate in Chicago before submission. We would need to submit my translations to Chicago. Because everything had already expired again anyway, I put it on the back burner, figured I’d deal with it next time I was in the US, and eventually had to start all over again—B1 test included. I finally got my application uploaded again in January, 2024.

Cut to 2026.

The Final Boss: The Home Stretch in Italy

On February 26th (my eldest daughter’s birthday - yay!), I finally got the glorious notification: Citizenship granted!

I thought I was at the finish line. Instead, I was just entering the twilight zone. Because of a major national referendum, the Comune asked me to wait until April to take my oath so they could clear their schedule.

On April 2nd, I proudly took my oath. I was riding high, ready to walk into the Anagrafe the next morning for my Carta d’Identità Elettronica (CIE).

Then, the phone rang.

There was a discrepancy between my maiden name (Burkett) and my married name (Zanrè). Silly me assumed that if my surname was an issue, the Prefettura would have flagged it before granting the citizenship. Nope. I needed to prove that I was the same person in order to get my ID card and passport. I was assured that I was a citizen, I just couldn’t easily prove it yet.

Now, if you are an American woman, you know that changing your name at marriage is just a simple “paperwork” issue. Most counties in the USA don’t even have a checkbox on your marriage license application to indicate that you intend to change your name. You get married, show up at the Social Security office and the Drivers License Office with your marriage license, and it’s just “done”.

Italian women IN ITALY do not change their names when they get married. But because I had arrived in Italy with a passport in my married name, all of my current Italian pieces of identification (my tax code, my ID card, my health card) were in my married name. I love the name Burkett, but seriously, how could I possibly pass up being Zanrè in Borgotaro?!?

Since this process is so “matter of fact” in Colorado, there is no way to show a “chain” of the name change. I needed an affidavit saying that Danita Claudette Burkett and Danita Claudette Zanrè are “One and the Same”. The easiest way would be to get a notarized affidavit, and when living overseas, that usually means a trip to the US Consulate.

• Milano’s consulate? Booked solid for over two months.

• Genova’s consulate? They had an opening! I rushed to Genova, got the affidavit, and took it to the Prefettura in Parma to get the consular signature legalized.

Guess what? Parma didn’t have the Genova consular agent’s signature on file—only the Milano ones. My papers had to be mailed back to the Prefettura in Genova.

In my mad rush, I committed the ultimate Italian sin: I mailed the document without the marca da bollo (revenue stamp).

I panicked. You cannot get a human on the phone at a Prefettura. I assumed my papers were in a black hole, and at best would be returned to me, unprocessed, with a big ❌ somewhere on the paperwork telling me that I needed to resubmit. But two weeks later, an actual angel disguised as a clerk called me. He told me to just mail the marca da bollo separately. Two weeks after that, it was back in my hands. I hand delivered it to a translator in Parma, she got it officially translated and sworn (giurata) and last Thursday told me to meet her at a department store near the court for the handoff. I proudly marched into my local Comune on Monday.

The “Che Cazzo” Moment

Tuesday, the phone rang again.

“Signora, on the affidavit you swore you were married in 1996... but your records say 1995.”

Che cazzo. After eleven years of meticulous paperwork, I had written the wrong year on the affidavit.

In 99.9% of cases in Italy, this is where you cry. BIG TEARS. A standard bureaucrat would shrug, say “Mi dispiace signora, deve rifare tutto,” and send you back to booking appointments in Genova.

But the bureaucratic gods finally took pity on me. My clerk at the Comune was a hero. She said, “I know when you actually got married. I’ll just submit the corrections to Rome myself and call you when it’s fixed.”

This morning, she called. The citizenship has been officially registered, and I have estratto del atto di nascita in my hands. My married name is legally transcribed. My CIE was ordered today, and my next stop is Parma for the passport appointment.

Eleven years, multiple states, countless fingerprints, expired documents, law changes, a language test, and one wrong year later... Sono ufficialmente italiana!

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When the conto arrived, the waitress asked us — casually, as if it were a perfectly normal question — whether we'd like her to add a tip to the card total.

I looked at her directly and replied, in Italian: "È una domanda un po' maleducata, non credi?" — "That's a rather rude question, don't you think?"

"Ah signora, mi dispiace tanto."

She was very sorry indeed.

Had we been speaking Italian, she never would have asked.

That story tells you most of what you need to know about tipping in Italy. But since I've been collecting these moments for over a decade, let me give you the fuller picture — because Americans visiting or worse, moving to Italy, get this wrong with remarkable consistency, and the consequences extend beyond your own dining bill.

What Italians Actually Do

A lot of tourist content hedges here, so I won't: Italians do not tip. Not in the way Americans understand the word.

When Italians finish a meal at a restaurant, they pay the conto. If they happen to have exact change, they leave exact change. If they don't, they might leave a euro or two on the table — what an Italian would call arrotondare, just rounding up. This is not a tip in the American sense. It's what happens when your bill is €38 and you're handing over two €20 notes.

If the bill comes to €38 and you hand over €50, an Italian will either wait for the change or ask for it. They will not say "keep it."

Someone at this point will inevitably say: "But I always tip when I'm in Italy, and the servers are always so appreciative!" Of course they are. Italy is not a culture that considers a tip an insult. They would have been equally pleasant as you left without one. A waiter being genuinely appreciative of a tip is not the same thing as a waiter expecting or needing one.

Two Things That Are Not Tips

The coperto deserves its own moment here, because it causes genuine confusion. You'll see a coperto charge on most Italian restaurant bills — typically €1–€3 per person. This is not a cover charge in the American nightclub sense. It's essentially payment for the table setup: the tablecloth, the cutlery, the glassware, and the bread that arrives at the table without your asking for it. It is a normal and transparent part of dining in Italy, it appears on the menu, and it is emphatically not a tip. Pay it, eat the bread, and don't overthink it.

The coperto actually is frequently reflected in the difference between what you pay drinking your coffee at the bar, and sitting down at a table. If you see a price list that says "al banco", this is a clue that if you sit at a table you will likely be charged MORE than at the bar.  Sometimes this really is just a function of the coperto. At other locations it will mean that even the actual prices of the items will increase when enjoyed at the table.  A little aside anecdote, in our town, only one location charges more at the table than at the bar.  This is a bar/gelateria (arguably the best gelato in town), and they charge more at the table ONLY for gelato.  I assume it's because they have to wash those cute little bowls they serve the gelato in.  We don't pay more for a cappuccino and cornetto when we stop in there for a Sunday morning breakfast!

The servizio is a service charge that appears on some restaurant bills, particularly in tourist areas. If a servizio charge is on your bill, it is because the establishment has put it there — it is not an invitation to add a further tip on top of it. Italians who encounter a servizio charge will pay it, because it's on the bill, and then perhaps round up by a euro. That's the ceiling.  The servizio might be a fixed price, or a percentage.  You are surely in a larger or more touristy location if there is a servizio on the bill.

So reminder: if a waiter in a tourist area offers to add a "gratuity" to your card total, understand clearly that he is not making this offer to the Italian couple at the next table. He is reading your accent and your tourist-shaped body language. You are under no obligation to accept, and a polite decline — ideally in Italian — is entirely appropriate.

Where Tipping Does Actually Happen

There are a handful of categories where some form of gratuity is genuinely customary, even among Italians:

Tour guides. If you've done a half-day guided tour and the guide was excellent, €5 is appreciated and appropriate. For a full-day tour, €10 is generous and warmly received. This is one area where Italians themselves will tip, because a guide's livelihood depends more directly on it than a restaurant waiter's does.

Bellhops. If someone carries your bags to your hotel room, a euro or two per bag is fine and expected. This is an explicitly rendered service in exchange for a small acknowledgment.

Taxis. Rounding up to the nearest euro or two is the standard Italian practice. Handing a driver €12 for an €11.40 fare is perfectly normal. Calculating a percentage tip on top of the metered fare is not.

Hotel housekeeping. Not standard practice in Italy. Not expected.

That, genuinely, is the list.

Three Moments

I shared the Florence story above. Here are two more.

During what I refer to as my Rome Covid trip (a full story in another post), I was with a group of about 18 people at dinner. No one ordered more than a first or second course, but there was wine — there is always wine. The total came to just under €400. Everyone handed approximately €25 to our group leader, and his wife quietly began returning €1–€2 to each person, because — and I will not forget the way she said this — "sarebbe assurdo lasciare più di una mancia di €20." It would be absurd to leave more than a €20 tip. On a €400 bill, for 18 people. That is 5%, and she considered it the outer limit of what made sense.

Just a couple of months ago, we celebrated my Italian citizenship with a dinner party of about 15 people. Before we left, even after 10 years my American doubt took over, and I leaned over to my trusted Italian friend and asked, quietly, whether we should leave something for the staff given the size of our group. She shook her head. "I camerieri vengono pagati — non hanno bisogno della mancia." The waiters are paid. They don't need a tip.

These are not isolated anecdotes. This is consistent Italian social behavior across a decade of observation, across different regions, different contexts, different price points.

The Case Against Being "The Generous American"

When Americans travel to Italy and tip lavishly — because it feels natural, because generosity is the intent, because it feels awkward not to — they are not simply being kind. They are participating in an economic distortion that the local economy did not invite and does not benefit from.

My husband Joe worked in Aberdeen, Scotland during the North Sea oil boom. American oil workers flooded in with salaries and per diems that dwarfed local incomes. They bought rounds for the bar. They tipped extravagantly. They were, by their own lights, being generous. Establishments noticed. Prices started to creep upward — not dramatically at first, just a little — because the market had discovered there was spending capacity in the room. When the oil workers eventually went home, the prices did not follow them back down. Locals were left paying more for the same pint they had always ordered, in the bar they had always used, because someone else's generosity had reset the baseline.

Italy is not an oil boom, but international tourism creates a structurally similar economy when visitors spend in ways that distort local pricing norms. The affordable neighborhood trattoria that has been feeding the same families for three generations stays affordable because it prices for those families, not for a tourist who considers €25 an obvious bargain for a meal. When outside money tips that balance (literally and figuratively) it rarely tips it in ways that benefit the locals who built the culture that made Italy worth visiting.

The American restaurant service situation is truly bizarre to most foreigners.  The idea that servers might be paid next to nothing (or truly just nothing) other than tips is hard for outsiders to understand. Try not to bring that comparision to Italy. Are Italian waiters underpaid? By American "server tip earnings" standards, possibly.  Just remember that the cost of living in Italy is, for the most part, a lot less than in the US.  Our bars and restaurants are lively, often close to overcrowded. That's because the average worker in Italy can enjoy this vibrant part of our culture on the income made by the average worker in Italy!

Tip your tour guide generously. Acknowledge the bellhop. Round up in a taxi if you'd like. But leave the 20% American reflex in the US, where it genuinely funds the income of workers who depend on it structurally. In Italy, it isn't needed, it isn't expected, and at any meaningful scale, it causes real harm.

Italy Has Its Own Rules — Know Them Before You Land

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If you've read We Live Above the Market, you already know that our apartment sits on what passes for an access road in a small Italian fortress town.

It's a ZTL — Zona a Traffico Limitato. Restricted traffic zone. No cameras in our section. In Borgotaro, this is enforced the old-fashioned Italian way: manually, sporadically, a neighbor shouting “signori” if someone parks where they shouldn’t, and with the particular brand of cheerful indifference that makes you realize the point was never really enforcement.

The 500 meter(ish) road runs parallel to the corso that traces what was once the northern wall of the old town. On one side: our building and its neighbors, including two bar caffè, a restaurant a dress shop, a shoe shop, a handful of offices and a bank. And a row of sycamore trees. On the other side: more sycamore trees and strategically placed benches where folks can take a moment and sit in a line of proper shade even in July.  Twice a week the fresh seafood truck comes up from the coast and parks there like it owns the place (because it does).

Monday mornings, the whole stretch disappears under market stalls.

The rest of the week, it belongs to the passeggiata.

Americans walk for exercise

I used to walk for exercise. Step goals, heart rate, distance logged. There was always a destination, a metric, a before and after. Even a walk in the park implied a lap — something to show for it at the end.

I didn't know I was doing it wrong, exactly. I just didn't know there was another way.

Americans move through space purposefully, almost reflexively. We are uncomfortable with movement that doesn't resolve into something — mileage, calories, an errand completed. The walk is a vehicle. It goes somewhere.

Italians walk for entirely different reasons.

The passeggiata — the evening stroll — is not a workout. It's not even really a walk in the functional sense. It's a social institution: a daily ritual, a way of moving through community that is woven so deeply into Italian life that it barely registers as a deliberate act. You just… go outside. You move at human pace through your own neighborhood. You are present, visible, available to the day's last conversations.

You dress for it. Not formally — daily life here is rarely overly formal — but you put yourself together. You don't show up in what you wore to clean the kitchen.

You go out at the right time. Late afternoon. When the light goes golden in the winter, and the sun still rides high in the summer. After the afternoon rest, when the town shakes itself awake and the bars start filling up and the piazza begins to hum.

You walk. You stop. You greet people. You might cover the same ground twice. You run into the woman from the third floor and stand under the sycamores for ten minutes talking about nothing in particular, and then you both continue in your separate directions.

That is, entirely, the point.

We have ringside seats

Our veranda overlooks the access road. From up there, I've watched the whole town perform its evening ritual: the grandmother with the stroller (sometimes with a grandchild, sometimes with a small dog — both treated with equal gravity), the teenagers doing the self-conscious shuffle that teenagers everywhere do, the older men who move slowly because they have nowhere they need to be, the couples, the dog walkers, the woman from somewhere down the block who walks every evening in the same red coat.

Joe has names for the regulars. I have observations. Between us, we've assembled a fairly comprehensive informal sociology of the Tuesday evening crowd.

The seafood truck on its twice-weekly visit becomes its own small social gathering: a transaction that takes four times as long as it would at a supermarket and is four times as satisfying. Someone always runs into someone else they needed to talk to. The fish almost feels incidental.

There's a particular quality to the passeggiata hour that many newcomers don't fully understand until they’ve lived here long enough to stop expecting it to lead somewhere.

Here, the walk is the thing. The destination is community. The destination is the quiet acknowledgment that the day is winding down and this is how we mark it — together, outside, at the pace of human conversation.

Our road is especially good for this because it's quiet enough to actually stop in. You can stand talking under the sycamores without being in anyone's way. You can call over to someone across the street without competing with traffic noise.

It takes newcomers a while to understand that the "inefficiency" here isn't a flaw. It's the feature.

What the passeggiata actually is — is presence. Deliberate, unhurried presence in a shared space with people who are also just… there.

Not on their way somewhere. Not accomplishing anything. Present.

This is still the thing I find hardest to explain to people who are planning an Italian move. Not the bureaucracy, not the healthcare system, not even the ferragosto shutdown (that one I can quantify). The passeggiata. The idea that showing up — outside, visible, moving slowly through your own neighborhood — is a complete activity in itself.

Not a means to an end. Just the thing.

Some evenings I walk. Some evenings I sit on the veranda with something to drink and watch the road below, the sycamore light going amber, the neighborhood doing what it has done every evening for a very long time.

We live above the market, on a road that is also a passeggiata, in a town that still knows what it's for.

We got very lucky.

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I did not move here because I was romantic about cobblestones and aperitivo hour (though I am not complaining about either). I moved here because my husband Joe is Scots-Italian, because the numbers made sense, and because I had built a career that could travel. What I did not anticipate was how much the move itself would teach me: not about Italy specifically, but about decisions, systems, money, and the surprisingly large gap between what relocation guides promise and what actually happens on the ground.

These are ten of those lessons. Some are practical. Some are philosophical. A few are things I wish someone had said to me plainly before I packed up my belongings.

1. The income question is the one nobody asks early enough.

Everyone researches neighborhoods, visa categories, and whether their dog can come. Almost nobody sits down before the move and builds a clear picture of what their income looks like in euros, after currency conversion, after taxes, after the cost of whatever they left behind. I call this the expat income gap: the distance between what you think you’ll have and what you actually have once reality lands. It is the number one reason people move back.

2. Bureaucracy is not a problem to solve: it is a system to learn.

Italian bureaucracy has a reputation. Most of it is earned. But what I have learned is that the problem is rarely the system itself — it is approaching the system with American expectations (speed, logic, consistency) and then being bewildered when it delivers Italian ones instead. Once I stopped fighting it and started learning it, things got significantly less stressful. Key insight: find your local CAF (tax assistance center) early, make friends with your patronato, and never underestimate the power of a marca da bollo applied in the right place.

3. A reconnaissance trip is not optional: it is due diligence.

I am a firm believer in at least one extended stay (four to twelve weeks, not a vacation) before you commit to a move. Not to fall in love with the place (you can do that on a long weekend) but to stress-test the practical reality. Can you navigate the grocery store? Do you understand the pharmacy system? How does the post office work? These are not glamorous questions, but they are the ones that determine whether your daily life is manageable or exhausting.

4. Small town life is not a consolation prize.

We live in Borgo Val di Taro: a small town of about seven thousand people in the Apennine mountains of Parma province. People occasionally look at me sideways when I describe it, as if I have made some kind of sacrifice by not living in Florence. I have not. I pay €300 a month for a 95-square-meter apartment above the Monday market. I walk to everything. I know my neighbors. I have a baker, a butcher, and a coffee bar where they know my order. If that is a consolation prize, I will take the whole box.

5. Healthcare will surprise you (in the best possible way).

I was diagnosed with cancer while living here. That sentence carries a lot of weight, and I say it deliberately: because navigating the Italian national healthcare system during a serious diagnosis taught me more about it than any amount of research could have. It is not perfect. There are occasional waits (although honestly I’ve never waited longer than a week or so for anything). There is paperwork. But I received excellent care, I was treated with dignity, and the financial catastrophe that would have accompanied the same diagnosis in the United States simply did not happen. Know your options before you need them.

6. Your identity will shift: plan for it.

This one catches people off guard. When you move abroad, you leave behind most of the shorthand that defines you at home: your professional context, your social network, your cultural references, even your language. You become, in a very real sense, a beginner again. Some people find this liberating. Some find it destabilizing. Most find it both, sometimes in the same afternoon. The people who navigate it best are the ones who had already built some version of their identity around what they do rather than where they do it.

7. The tax situation is real, and it does not fix itself.

Americans abroad are subject to U.S. tax filing requirements regardless of where they live. This is not optional, it is not something you can ignore until it goes away, and it is absolutely something to get professional guidance on before you move (not after your first year abroad, when you are already behind). Italy also has its own tax obligations. Understanding how these two systems interact and building a relationship with a commercialista (Italian accountant) who understands your situation is not a nice-to-have. It is foundational.

8. Language fluency is the goal: functional competence is the floor.

I want to be honest about this one: I am conversational in Italian, not fluent. After ten years. Partly because I work in English, and partly because most people just need to make made peace with being a lifelong learner of it. What I will say is this: functional competence (enough to handle a doctor’s appointment, a bureaucratic form, a conversation with a neighbor) is not optional. It is the floor. Everything above it is a gift you give yourself.

9. The decision to stay is not made once.

People talk about the move as the decision. It is not. The move is just the first decision. After that, you make the decision again: when the bureaucracy defeats you in month three, when you miss your family in month eight, when something goes wrong and the support system you had at home is not there. I have made the decision to stay many times. So has Joe. The fact that we keep making it is, I think, the actual evidence that we made the right choice the first time.

10. The infrastructure of your life abroad needs to be built intentionally.

This is the one I wish someone had handed me as a framework before I left: you are not just moving to a new place, you are building a new operating system for your life. Banking, healthcare, income, legal residency, community, communication with people at home — none of it transfers automatically. All of it requires active design. The people who thrive long-term are not the ones who moved most impulsively or most romantically. They are the ones who treated the move as a project: with checklists, contingencies, and the willingness to ask for help from people who had done it before them.

Ten years. Twelve if you count the planning years.

I am still learning. I suspect I always will be. But if you are somewhere in the middle of deciding whether to do this — or how to do this without detonating your financial life in the process — I want you to know that the learning curve is real, survivable, and genuinely worth it.

Start with the income question. Everything else is easier once that one is answered.

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We arrived in Italy at the beginning of our “big move” with roughly €5 between us, grabbed from the “left over travel money bag” on our way out the door to the airport. Our intention had been to hit the first ATM we saw at the airport, but that somehow didn’t happen. There should have been some indication that we were in trouble when none of our cards would work at the ticket machine at Malpensa, but going to the desk worked, so we knew the cards were “active.” They just didn’t seem to like machines. Most of our cards had “chips,” but back then the US was “chip and sign,” whereas Europe was by and large “chip and pin.”

Anyway, by the time we got to Parma, exhausted from the international flight and two trains, I went to the ATM in another attempt to get some cash. Nothing worked. I had a Paypal debit card and two bank debit cards, and nada (or should I say niente)!

Later, I called the banks and they fixed everything. But our first hours in what would become our home were, let’s say, more stressful than we’d hoped. (Understatement fully intended.)

That was 2016. A lot has changed since then — our cards have long since been sorted, and the banking landscape for Americans in Europe has shifted considerably. But the underlying problem is still very much alive, and in some ways it has gotten worse. After a decade of navigating this on the ground, here is what I know.

The Cards Americans Bring (And Why Some No Longer Work)

Visa and Mastercard are the most widely accepted card networks in Europe. If you have a credit card on either of those networks with a chip (which virtually all American cards now have), you will generally be fine at merchants. Some will take American Express or even Diner’s Club, but Discover Cards are pretty much unknown in Europe.

Visa and Mastercard debit cards should also pose no great problem. However, the Discover Card issue has blindsided a lot of Americans recently (this one included!). Capital One Bank, which had been an excellent option for international travelers because of its “no foreign transaction fee” policy, switched all of its bank account debit cards from the Mastercard network to the Discover network. Literally the first week that the new Discover cards were active, online chats started exploding with “how do I get cash with this card?”. It is not impossible. If an ATM has a Diners Card logo apparently it’s on the same network, but there is not ONE in our town, for example. Even Capital One’s own help pages now suggest researching acceptance before travel and bringing a backup payment method.

If your Capital One debit card is your primary banking card, please read the rest of this post carefully, because you have options, even if you are just an international traveler, and not relocating to Europe!

Apple Pay and Google Pay: Better Than You Might Expect

The contactless payment situation in Italy has improved substantially in the past ten years. When we first arrived in Italy, there were no merchants in our town that accepted contactless payments. These days, most places that accept cards also accept Apple Pay and Google Pay. I’ve even seen contactless donation boxes in churches!

I usually use cash for anything under about €10, especially in smaller, “Mom and Pop” stores. Credit/Debit card purchases are not “free” to the merchant, and paying with Apple Pay for a €1.50 espresso digs into the profits of these small shops. Sometimes being a good neighbor means pulling out a coin!

The Curve Card

The Curve Card is a physical card that works similarly to Apple Pay or Google Pay. You add all of your cards to the Curve App, and then the Curve Card can be used to make ATM withdrawals and in-store payments. Curve is only available for residents in the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA). Thus, this is not a card for North Americans who are “just visiting”, but you can add cards that are issued in North America. Sign Up Here!

Three Bank Accounts Worth Knowing About

Here are three banking options you should consider if you are moving to Europe. The first is even very useful for travelers.

Wise (formerly TransferWise)

If there is one account I would tell every American heading to Europe to set up before they board the plane, it is Wise. We have had accounts since 2016, when it was still called TransferWise.

Don’t let banking be a landmine!

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What I didn't mention was that the journey from "citizenship granted" to "actually Italian" still had a few steps left.

After receiving the decree, I went to the anagrafe to start the final process. The clerk — who has been wonderfully patient with me throughout all of this — asked me to come back on April 1st. They were gearing up for a Constitutional Referendum and things were a bit hectic. Completely understandable. This is Italy. You work with the calendar, not against it.

April 1st I showed up with my documents. She looked everything over and said she should have things ready in a week or two.

I have lived here long enough to know how Italian bureaucratic timelines work. I nodded, I thanked her, and I mentally doubled the estimate.

And then this morning, less than 24 hours later, the phone rang.

Could I come by to sign some documents and bring my marche da bollo? And — by the way — she had set my appointment with the mayor for this afternoon at 3.

The Scotty Principle, for those unfamiliar: Italian bureaucrats, like the Enterprise's chief engineer, always quote you a timeline that is longer than what they actually need. Usually this works in the other direction. Today, for once, it worked in mine.

I wore a wine-colored top. The mayor wore the tricolore sash. Joe came along as moral support and cheerleader — and he got a photo of me with the mayor at the end.

The ceremony itself took approximately three minutes. The mayor asked how to pronounce Waverly and what TN stood for. I told him: Tennessee. He nodded thoughtfully, as if filing this away for future reference.

Then I pronounced the words:

"Giuro di essere fedele alla Repubblica e di osservare la Costituzione e le leggi dello Stato."

And that was that. After ten years, two applications, a half-dozen sets of fingerprints, a rejection letter, a law change, one language test, and more trips to various offices on two continents than I care to count, it came down to one sentence in front of a small-town mayor in the Apennines.

Sono italiana.

Technically I become Italian the day after the oath — so I woke up Italian this morning. That said, I can't get a passport yet, because Italy now needs documentation that my name changed when I got married, which is a thing that happens in America through a sort of informal distributed honor system involving the Social Security Office, DMV and the bank, and not through any official channel that generates the kind of paperwork an Italian comune needs to check a box.

But that — naturalmente — è un'altra storia.

Sono italiana — But There's Still a Paperwork Queue

Sono italiana — But There’s Still a Paperwork Queue

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I opened the IO app with a bit of apprehension. I filed my application for Italian citizenship by marriage on January 8, 2024. The law for citizenship by marriage is that they have 24 months to make a determination, which can be extended by another 12 months if there are extenuating circumstances that require further review.

Gah! Here it was, February 26, 2026 (happy birthday to my eldest, by the way), and I hadn't heard a peep.  I was actually just thinking about it yesterday as to how long I should wait before I asked someone about the "next steps".

I had some concerns! American women still frequently take the surname of their spouse, whereas Italians do not. Except for some really unusual circumstances, Italian women who are born and raised solely in Italy never change their surnames.  You have the name you were born with, forever and amen. I had heard so many stories about the complications that were associated with name changes by American women, so I was quite concerned.

When I arrived in Italy 10 years ago, my husband and I went to the Agenzia delle Entrate (basically the Italian Revenue Agency) to get my Codice Fiscale.  This is kind of like an American's Social Security number, although it's not as closely held of a secret as a US Social Security number.  In reality, it's a pretty straightforward formula that takes your name (first, middle, last), date of birth and location of birth and creates a code that becomes your financial number. So, since I used my US passport that had my married name on it, I was given a codice fiscale based on Zanrè as my surname.  I was already dreading having to get a new codice fiscale if I was required to use my maiden name, and that would trigger a cascade of documentation corrections.

Apparently only women reclaiming Italian citizenship (for example, they "renounced" their citizenship when applying for other citizenship) or seeking recognition of their citizenship by birth must use their maiden names for their citizenship quest.

<phew> - I feel like I dodged a bullet here.

It struck me that I was in the middle of a very Italian activity (drinking an espresso and eating a brioche - cornetto for those further south) when I received the news. I jumped up and ran up to the two barista and said "guardate - sono un'italiana" :-) - it could not have been a more perfect place and time to get this great news.

Next step is to find out how and when to take the oath and then I'll officially be a citizen of Italy![

The Name Change Landmine Almost Got Me

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I had been studying with a private tutor for about a year, when in late 2021 she proclaimed that maybe I should try to take the test “now”. I didn’t feel I was ready, but perhaps she was right. This was near the end of Covid restrictions in Italy, and for over a year Italy had waived all but the oral portion of the test, to avoid having a room full of people sitting in a testing center for over four hours together. If I took the test “soon” I would be able to avoid most of the test, and just do the oral portion. I considered it, but just wasn’t sure. We were living in Provincia di Parma, and I would be able to go to a testing center in Parma. “What the heck” I thought — let’s do it!

A Phone Call?? Please no!

I went online and found a testing center (language school) in Parma, and filled out the request for information on the test. The next day there was an email awaiting me when I got up — I would need to phone the center, because they do not allow people to sign up for the test until they do an evaluation over the phone.

Oh no! At that point in my Italian journey, the telephone was my nemesis. I could have a perfectly coherent conversation face to face, but the moment someone spoke to me through a phone I felt like I was back at A0, fumbling just to say my name.

So, of course, with great trepidation I made the call anyway, and immediately lost all ability to say more than “sì”. The woman on the other end listened for a minute, and then quite unceremoniously said:

“Ah signora, non è pronta.”

Ma’am, you are not ready.

I thanked her and hung up the phone, a bit deflated. I knew I needed to do more work, and I knew something else: if I could take my test at just about any accredited testing facility in the world, I would take it ANY place other than that school in Parma.

A New Tutor

My tutor was going to take some personal time off, so I needed to find another way to prep, and by now the “grace” given by the Italian government for the B1 Cittadinanza test had passed, so I would need to take all four sections of the test: listening comprehension, reading comprehension, writing and speaking. I had been taking online lessons with One World Italiano School for awhile (I love them, as you will see later), but decided I wanted some specific test prep, so I hired an online tutor and we got to work. Pietro Roccaforte was (and still is) wonderful, and we worked through B1 materials diligently for months. By the way, Pietro’s family also has a wonderful olive oil business in Sicily - if you need some oil, I highly recommend it :-) Roccafortebio.it/en - tell them Danita sent you, so he’ll smile!

Pietro knew that I really wanted to improve my Italian, and we decided that I should do my preparation with the standard B1 exam materials, not the B1 Cittadinanza exam. These are different tests with different structures and different passing criteria, but I didn’t know how different yet. What I knew was that I was a perfectionist (straight A student in High School) who was getting increasingly frustrated with the listening comprehension sections and convinced I would never score above 75% on the audio tests. To say I was stressed is an understatement. But I was enjoying my lessons with Pietro, and truly felt I had made great language strides. I was just simply terrified of the test. Thus, I pivoted to “test taking preparation.”

The Cagliari Plan

As I mentioned above, I had been taking online conversation classes with a school in Cagliari, in Sardinia. It occurred to me that if I could take the B1 Cittadinanza test anywhere in the world (more practically for me, anywhere in Italy), I might as well take it somewhere I actually wanted to visit.

So, in early 2023, I enrolled in a proper B1 Cittadinanza preparation course through the Cagliari school where I would take the test. The first two lessons had almost nothing to do with Italian.

Assunta explained how the test actually worked. The B1 Cittadinanza has four sections: listening comprehension, reading comprehension and grammar, writing, and oral. The first two sections each consist of two sets of six questions. To pass each section, you need to answer seven out of twelve correctly. In other words, get just over 50% correct and you pass!

But then Assunta tole me about the part that changed everything for me. The first six questions in each set are always easier, and the second six are harder, which means that if you answer all six of the easier questions correctly, you only need one correct answer from the harder set to pass that section.

I had been preparing as though I needed to get ninety percent on everything. That’s just how I worked being that “overachiever” I mentioned earlier. I did not need to be perfect! Instead, I needed to be solid on the fundamentals and competent on the harder material. That is a completely different preparation strategy.

Pietro had given me excellent language training. Assunta gave me the mechanics. Both were necessary for my confidence for this test.

The other thing Assunta assured me of was that the test uses real-world, everyday Italian. I’d be asked to listen to something like a short newscast about a local festival. I might need to write an email to the comune about a neighborhood issue. I’d be expected to have a conversation about something that interests me personally. There would really be no trick questions or obscure vocabulary. This test is to evaluate the test taker’s understanding of the language of actual Italian life — which, after seven years of living it, I happened to know reasonably well.

So in April 2023, Joe and I took the night ferry from Livorno to Olbia. From Olbia we needed to take the train to Cagliari, and then spent a week there with the test scheduled in the middle. As an aside, if we ever go to Cagliari again by ferry/train, we’ll go from Napoli! That ferry arrives directly in Cagliari, so you walk off of the ferry in the morning in Cagliari’s welcoming port (one of the things I loved about the city), and you won’t need another 3+ hours on a train right after waking up. Put those hours on the train from Livorno to Naples instead! We returned via Porto Torres to Genova on another night ferry. A language test vacation. I recommend this approach entirely.

The Test

We had rented an AirBNB just around the corner from the school, and had walked by it a number of times during the days preceding the test. As I walked up the stairs, I could see people waiting outside the door of the school. There were two people who were “showing off” (in my opinion - hehe) by holding an animated Italian conversation about how great they were at Italian and test taking. There was a social media influencer who I recognized (he was teaching English to Italians). There were a few people who looked totally lost and worried about taking the test. I just had typical test taking jitters. Finally we were allowed to enter the school. I realized then that there were multiple tests going on that day. The show-offs were in my testing room, as was the influencer, and one or two of the nervous folks were there as well, but an A2 test was going on next door, so hopefully the really nervous folks were taking a different test!

Jitters aside, I knew I was ready. I distinctly remember writing an email about needing to find a new primary care physician for my fictitious family of five, including an infant, and then discussing how I enjoy cooking with the examiners. They asked me if I cook traditional American food or also Italian food, and I wowed them with my love of Ragù alla Bolognese, La Baciocca and Torta d’Erbetta.

I passed with a score of 45 out of 48 (94%).

What I Would Tell You

If you are preparing for the B1 Cittadinanza test, here is my honest advice: Study for the standard B1. The B1 Cittadinanza is structured differently and the passing threshold is more achievable than the standard B1, so even if you feel like you are “barely” passing the harder test, you will be pleasantly surprised by the cittadinanza version.

Find a tutor who can help you with the mechanics and the language level, but don’t be afraid to reach for the (B1) stars. It is true though that the mechanics matter as much as the Italian. How the multiple choice bubbles work, how the writing section is structured, what the oral section expects from you. Know this before you walk in.

Practice with real-world Italian. News, everyday conversation, practical writing. Not textbook Italian — the Italian of actual life.

And if someone tells you that you are not ready — use it. Let it be the thing that makes you go to Sardinia instead.

Signora, è pronta adesso.

She is ready now.

If you are preparing for the B1 Cittadinanza and have questions, drop them in the comments. I am happy to share what worked.

Nobody Told Me the Language Exam Was a Landmine Too

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Apparently, my Roman misadventure had caused something of a shakeup for my surgeon. I was called in for a final pre-surgery meeting, and the surgeon waiting for me was not the one I’d been seeing. My original surgeon was a woman; this one was a man. I’m not certain he was younger, but he was definitely handsome. Joe jokes that I choose doctors and dentists based on their looks — and I can’t entirely argue the point. Our family doctor and dentist back in the States, both of whom we’ve known for 45 years, are both quite handsome, as is our medico di base (primary care physician) in Italy. But looks are not the primary consideration when choosing medical professionals — let’s just say I’ve been well-blessed in that department, and leave it there.

Getting There: The Logistics of a Covid-Era Surgery

By the time I needed this surgery, we had lived in Italy for six years. As I’ve mentioned more than once: we don’t own a car. Most of the time this is completely fine. Early Parma appointments — like getting to the questura in time to queue for a number — require an early train or bus, but if we need to arrive roughly at or after 7:30 am, public transportation manages it adequately enough.

My surgery schedule was not going to be so accommodating. Because Covid restrictions were still in effect, I needed to be in Parma at three separate times across three days:

• Monday: At Ospedale Maggiore di Parma by 8 am for pre-op

• Tuesday: Back by 11 am for a Covid-19 test

• Wednesday: Checked in by 7 am for surgery

While it’s roughly an hour to Parma by train or bus, getting to the hospital adds another 30 minutes (train plus bus, or train plus a serious walk) — each way. And the train schedules were not designed with surgical pre-op times in mind.

I had a solution: a “surgery vacation.” If you’ve read my language test vacation post, you’ll know that Joe and I have a well-established habit of turning otherwise bureaucratic (or, in this case, genuinely stressful) events into something resembling a romantic getaway. We committed to the challenge again, and rented an AirBNB within walking distance of the hospital for three nights, turning the whole thing into a Parma adventure.

The Required Ethnic Food Research

Living in a small mountain city that, at the time had zero ethnic restaurants (we now have a sushi restaurant and a pizza-and-kebab spot, which feels like genuine metropolitan progress), our trips into any “big city” tend to involve enthusiastic searches for food we simply cannot get at home. So before leaving, we made reservations at an Argentinian restaurant for Sunday night and an Indian restaurant for Monday night.

We arrived Sunday afternoon, found our home for four nights with only a little confusion, got a bit of work done (motto: have internet, will travel), and that evening we went for Argentinian BBQ. I was pleased to see guacamole, chips, and a genuinely good margarita for those of us who occasionally miss certain North American staples. I honestly have no idea if chips with guacamole and a margarita on the rocks are typical Argentinian fare, nor do I care!

Monday morning’s pre-op appointment was brief. Afterwards, we walked through Parco Ducale, one of my favorite spots in Parma, I once again got some work done in the afternoon, and then that evening, we walked down Viale Piacenza to the Indian restaurant. A note on ethnic restaurants in Italy: they tend to calibrate heat and spice to local tastes, which in many areas of Italy means considerably gentler than the source cuisine. “Spicy” at most ethnic restaurants in Italy means something you might politely describe as warmly flavored. This particular Indian restaurant, however, brought me extra spicy sauces unprompted when I asked for heat.

The Test, the Prosecco, and the Vigil

Tuesday was the Covid-19 test. As an aside, my first Italian medical experience had been in 2020, fully in the throes Covid-19 “we don’t even know what we’re up against” protocols, and my Covid-19 test then had consisted of arriving at the local Borgotaro hospital at 7 am for a test, and staying there mostly all day (I think I was released at 2 pm) while they awaited my results. I was then told to go straight home and not be in contact with anyone other than my husband until I arrived at the hospital the next morning for the procedure. This time it wasn’t so regimented.

A fairly large group of us lined up outside the testing building on the hospital complex — and I do mean complex. Ospedale Maggiore is enormous: less like a single American hospital building and more like a college campus, with multiple structures connected by tree-lined roads and dotted with small bars. (Is this common in Italy? In the US? I genuinely don’t know.)

We were called in one by one, tested, and sent home to wait with the now-familiar Covid-era message: if there’s a problem, we’ll contact you; otherwise, show up as scheduled. On the way back to the AirBNB I stopped at one of the bars along the tree-lined access road opposite the hospital for a prosecco — a not-so-stiff drink to mark the occasion — before walking back to tell Joe that I was cleared for the next morning. We had a local dinner, watched TV and tried to get an early sleep. I will admit that I slept better than anticipated. I’m not so sure about Joe!

Wednesday: Surgery Day

Since I couldn’t eat or drink before surgery, Joe walked me to the hospital, with plans to peel off to find a bar for his morning cappuccino and brioche (cornetto to those south of Emilia-Romagna I think). I appreciated both the company on the walk and his good sense about breakfast.

There were other women waiting for their surgeries whom I recognized from previous appointments. We had seen each other in the waiting room outside the surgeon’s office, and again in the department where we had each gone to have a radioactive seed inserted. We had come to know each other by sight, even if none of us had ever exchanged names.

About ten of us sat in the pre-op waiting area, being called in one by one. When my name was called, Joe kissed me goodbye and promised to be back before 2 pm — my scheduled discharge time.

The Compression Stockings (and the Slippers I Did Not Bring)

I was moved into the room that would also be my recovery room. Organized as I am, I immediately clocked the outlet near my bed (phone charging confirmed) and tucked my phone into the drawer of the bedside table for later. A nurse arrived, took me to another room, and proceeded to tut about the fact that I had not brought slippers. (Who knew? No one told me!) She then wriggled me into thigh-high compression stockings. She sent me back to my room barefooted, with an air of mild but lingering disapproval.

Spoiler: I brought slippers to my lymph node biopsy a few weeks later. Lesson thoroughly learned.)

Eventually, I was rolled into what I can only describe as a pre-op staging area: a room with wheeled beds separated by curtain partitions, similar to a post-colonoscopy recovery space I remembered from Colorado. As I waited, a door directly in front of me opened briefly, and I caught a glimpse of one of the women I recognized from the waiting room — sedated on an operating table.

The sight didn’t disturb me, although I know it would disturb some people. For me it was almost an out-of-body experience, watching and thinking, quite calmly: that will be me soon. I’ve turned that reaction over a few times since. I think I was very solidly in “just get through this” mode, and there simply wasn’t room for extra anxiety.

The Operating Room and the Not-Quite-Under Moment

When it was my turn, my cot was rolled into the OR. I was asked to move onto the slightly larger operating table. The surgeon smiled and said hello; other people in the room introduced themselves (I remember none of their names — only my surgeon’s); the anesthesiologist said hello; and the lights began to dim.

The next thing I was aware of was a faint sensation of tugging near my breast — not painful, but definitely present. I came back to consciousness with a soft moan. The surgeon was stitching me up.

For what it’s worth, I experienced the same thing a few weeks later during my lymph node biopsy — an awareness returning just before leaving the OR. I’ve had two other surgeries for comparison: a tonsillectomy at age four (I remember absolutely nothing between being asked to count down from twenty to one, and waking in recovery hours later), and a C-section during which I was fully awake and felt pressure and nausea but no pain. This felt somehow deliberate rather than accidental, as though this was protocol. I.e., begin bringing the patient around before leaving the OR in order to assess their condition. I may be completely wrong about this. But it happened twice under the same surgical team, so my working theory is that it wasn’t a miscalculation.

Recovery, Pastina in Brodo, and Joe Gets Lost

They rolled me back to my room. I dozed, woke up, found my phone in the drawer, and messaged Joe.

Around 12:30 pm, lunch arrived: pastina in brodo — what Italian-Americans call “Italian penicillin,” the universally comforting small-pasta-in-broth that signals warmth and recovery in equal measure. (Is this actually prescribed as recovery food in Italy, or is that an Italian-American invention? I genuinely don’t know — another question for another post.) Mashed potatoes and Parmigiano Reggiano (of course) rounded out the tray. I was amused, but also starving! I ate it happily.

By 1:30, others were being discharged as their people arrived. Joe messaged me to say he had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the hospital tower and was a bit lost. I was attempting to navigate him through the building by text message, while also noticing that I had suddenly become quite warm.

It was one of the hottest days of the Parma summer — nearly 40°C — but I’d been inside all day and hadn’t registered it until now. In preparation for clearing the ward by 2 pm, the air conditioning had been turned off at around 1:30. It is genuinely remarkable how fast a hospital room heats up when it’s 40°C outside and there is no AC for 45 minutes.

Joe eventually found me and I was discharged. We walked back to the AirBNB, where I slept until the next morning.

Woot.

Starting the Post-Surgery Recovery

About a week after surgery, I had my first follow-up with my surgeon and was referred to my oncologist: Dottoressa Pellegrino, who had done her residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn Med) and spoke excellent English. She was, in fact, the first doctor I’d had in Italy who spoke any English at all, and that was an enormous relief.

Fairly early in our relationship, I asked her why she had come back to Italy after her residency, knowing perfectly well that she could almost certainly have earned significantly more money by staying in the US. She answered without hesitation: “I could not in good conscience practice medicine where I could not provide equal care to everyone who needs it.”

Dottoressa Pellegrino saw me through quite a lot over the following two and a half years. Somewhere around our third appointment, she simply switched to Italian — no announcement, no transition, just: Italian. As if to say, you can handle this now, brava. Eventually she told me (in Italian, naturally) that I was doing well enough that I would be moving to her colleague’s care, because there were people who truly needed her expertise. I took it as the positive progression of my treatment it was meant to be, although I still seek her out when I’m at the oncology building just to say hi.

The handoff to oncology began my formal post-op monitoring — five years of ongoing care that, as I write this, is still very much in progress. In the next post, I’ll explain how that actually works in Italy’s healthcare system, and introduce the remarkable volunteers who somehow made the whole experience almost enjoyable.

Continued in The Best Language Lesson I Never Paid For: Discovering the Italian “Taxi Sociale→”

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The Callback

When you get a callback mammogram, it is not in itself a diagnosis. At my core, I knew this, but there is fear and trepidation nonetheless. Joe accompanied me to Parma for my follow-up mammogram, and I was told I’d get a call. About a week later was sent for a biopsy. After that we went home and waited.

The diagnosis was ductal carcinoma in situ — DCIS. Breast cancer, caught at the earliest possible stage. So early, in fact, that when the surgeon explained what we were dealing with, her manner was calm genuinely reassuring. This was a small contained spot, and she felt confident that it would be handled, almost routinely!

I want to be honest here, because I know that anyone reading who has their own version of of this diagnosis in their future needs to know how it really feels. There is no good way to hear the word “cancer.” Early or not, contained or not, the word has weight. I’m sure that all of us who have heard it have different experiences. I can ony share mine. I sat with the idea for a bit, and then decided that I needed to trust the system to get me through the next several months.

Go to Rome

We had a trip planned for the next week! My Italian teacher (Giovanni from Italiano Semplicemente) had organized a gathering in Rome for the members of his association. We are from about 40 different countries, and Giovanni plans a trip every year for us. The trip for 2022 was extra special, because after a couple of years of not being able to meet due to Covid-19, four nights in Rome was a welcome adventure. The group would be about twenty people, including real-world Italian practice amidst sightseeing, food, and wine. We had been looking forward to it for months.

I told the surgeon I would cancel, obviously.

She looked at me with the particular expression of an Italian medical professional who has just heard something slightly absurd. This was a very small spot, she said. There was no reason to cancel. It would be at least a week before they could even get me on the surgical schedule. Go to Rome. Enjoy yourself.

So we went to Rome.

And honestly, we had a wonderful time. Rome in the late spring, with a group of people you like, speaking Italian badly together in public, is exactly as good as it sounds. Our adventures included Rome sightseeing, a beer factory (out on the farm where they actually grow the hops), a boat down the Tiber to Ostia Antica for lunch. One evening we did a restaurant tram: a vintage tram that winds through the city making stops, with food and wine served on board. At one point we had a view of the Colosseum lit up at night. Twenty people, a tram to ourselves, aperitivo and dinner, and did I mention wine?

I should have enjoyed it with slightly less abandon, in retrospect.

The Tram

We were in close quarters on the tram. Twenty people who all knew each other, all vaccinated, all reasonably careful — but close quarters on a tram, sharing food, talking animatedly, doing what you do on a Roman evening out. Afterwards more than one of us mentioned that one of the servers had seemed a bit flushed. We blame him of course!

It was 2022. We had been careful for two years. Extraordinarily careful, actually. The kind of careful that becomes its own exhausting full-time occupation.

On the train home on Monday I felt off. Then more than off. Joe and I went to the farmacia, got tested, and were sent home with the news and instructions to do absolutely nothing for a week.

I was so mad.

Not frightened, not philosophical, not resigned. I was just genuinely, specifically furious. After two years of being careful. Two years of masks and distance and missed gatherings and cancelled plans. But a restaurant tram in Rome with twenty people I trusted was apparently where Covid-19 finally found me.

I don’t believe a single one of us was spared. All twenty reported back the sad news. For me it caused more complications than for the others.

The Postponement

I was still in my Covid recovery week when the surgeon’s office called. They had a slot for my surgery for the following week. Alas, I had to give them the bad news. They were gracious about it, and we scheduled for two weeks out — enough time to recover properly and arrive at surgery not still fighting a virus. I was still annoyed at the absurdity of it all.

Those who know me well will realize that in my mind there truly is something absurd about having managed the cancer diagnosis with relative calm, gone to Rome on doctor’s orders, and then had the surgery delayed anyway. Joe, to his credit, did not ask what went wrong.

What Came Next

With the surgery scheduled, the next chapter of this story would involve things I had not previously considered. Like why we ended up in an Airbnb for three nights, what Italian surgery actually looks like from the inside, and a group of volunteers I had never heard of before any of this happened, who became some of the more unexpected bright spots in a difficult few months.

If you are planning a move to Italy and the “but what if I get seriously ill?” fear is one of the things keeping you up at night, I want you to notice something about this story so far. I got a cancer diagnosis in a small town in northern Italy. Because I was registered with the Italian health service, all of my medical costs, including the mammogram that caught the cancer, the cost of the callback and the biopsy were all covered, and happened expeditiously. The surgeon was calm, competent, and told me to go to Rome.

The system, so far, was working exactly as it was supposed to.

More soon.

Continued in: Surgery, Covid Restrictions, and Why We Rented an Airbnb →

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In March of 2022, I bought an electric bike. It wasn’t what I would call an impulsive decision. Borgotaro is situated in the Alta Valtaro, and our part of the valley is very narrow, with only a small portion being flat. You don’t have to pedal far from home to find hills steep enough to make casual cycling an athletic event, and I am not training for the Olympics. I had owned an electric bike in the US (a lovely thing named Zippy) and I knew how they worked. My new Italian bike (which I named Nike) arrived, I assembled her (not as bad as IKEA instructions, but it took a minute!), the weather cooperated, and I took her out.

Nike wanted to kill me.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time and a YouTube video to figure out why. Nike had a throttle (technically designed to turn her into a scooter) which is disabled in Italy because you’d need a license. But the pedal assist had defaulted to 75% on the display, which meant that regardless of how gently I pedaled, Nike was determined to hit 25km/h, always, immediately, and on every surface.

I eventually sorted this out, made my peace with the display controls, and Nike and I reached an understanding. I began taking her out regularly — along the river path, across the river to the “big stores”, and eventually up the hill to the cemetery to photograph gravestones for Find A Grave.

That last one is where things got interesting.

The Cemetery Run

It was April, and we still had Covid masking protocols. I loaded up my camera, got on Nike, and headed up the steep hill toward the cemetery.

I almost made it. Just short of the top, I hit a patch of gravel. Nike, still in pedal assist mode on a still-ascending road, made a decisive 180-degree turn and headed back down the hill at her preferred speed. We reached the embankment where Nike stopped. I, however, did not stop cleanly.

The left side of my face made firm contact with the asphalt. My hand took some of the impact. My Apple Watch lit up asking if I had fallen and needed assistance. I dismissed the notification — which felt both efficient and slightly humiliating — and slowly sat up.

My knees were trembling, so I sat on the road for a moment, taking stock. Thankfully there had been no cars on the road. Nike, I should mention, did not have a scratch.

I could stand. I could walk, shakily. I decided I could get back on the bike. We have no car, and calling Joe would have meant he walked up the hill to find me, which would have been sweet but logistically unhelpful.

I had my mask with me due to Covid protocols, as I mentioned, so I put it on, reasoning that it would cover most of the damage. As I rode home I passed Giacomo Bernardi (RIP), a local elderly historian who had become a friend largely because of my enthusiastic interest in the town’s past. I waved. He waved back. He looked faintly puzzled.

I waved at a few more people on the way home. They also looked faintly puzzled.

What Went Wrong

Joe and I are, as anyone in Borgotaro will confirm, a single unit. When one of us goes out alone people ask where the other one is with mild concern, as though a separation of more than two hours suggests illness. And Joe has a ritual: when I return home without him, he asks, without fail, “What went wrong?”

I folded Nike up, got her into the elevator, wheeled her through the apartment door, and put her in her corner.

I waited.

Nothing.

I waited some more.

Still nothing.

Eventually I walked to the door of his office. “Aren’t you going to ask me what went wrong?”

He looked up. Then he saw my face. The mask, it turns out, had not been covering as much as I’d assumed. I had looked in the elevator mirror by then — even covered mostly by the mask it was, as I later described it, a road-rashed mess.

My eldest daughter, consulted by Messenger, was insistent that I see a doctor. So I walked around the corner — literally around the corner — to our Centro Medico. My doctor wasn’t in, but another doctor saw me, confirmed that my face looked exactly as bad as it felt, and wrote me a referral to the emergency room to give me priority.

I walked from there to the hospital. Uphill, naturally.

An MRI showed a small cracked orbital bone, so they sent me to Parma the next day to see an ophthalmologist — just to confirm my eye wasn’t out of alignment. It wasn’t. I was asked to come back in two months, just to be sure.

Fine. A cracked orbital bone. Inconvenient, painful, excellent material for a Facebook post, but manageable. Of course, I had to tell my daughter that “I broke my face”, but otherwise I felt like I could handle the situation.

I went home and life continued.

The Missed Call

About a week later, I noticed I’d missed a call from Parma.

Italians, as a rule, do not leave voicemail. I say “as a rule” because I don’t want to say “never,” but in the six years of living here I had yet to receive one. So: missed call from Parma, no message. Presumably the ophthalmologist’s office following up. Surely they’d call back if it was important.

They did not call back.

Two weeks after that, I received a registered letter from the AUSL Parma.

Here is the thing about registered letters in Italy. It is a procedurally significant piece of mail, and it arrives with a certain weight. When the postina rings the intercom and says “qualcosa da firmare,” there is usually a certain dread. Did I forget to pay the trash bill (again)? What needs my signature. I went down and signed for it.

It was not from the ophthalmologist.

The week before my bike accident, I had had my annual mammogram at our local hospital. Just a routine test that they send me a notice for every year. I hadn’t thought about it since. The letter was asking me to come to the breast center in Parma right away.

What Came Next

I will tell you what happened in Parma in an upcoming post. The short version is that it was caught very early. Everything that followed was hard but ultimately okay. I am writing this three and a half years later, and I am doing extremely well.

I do want to tell you the full story, because it is relevant to every single person reading this who has a “but what if I get seriously ill abroad?” fear sitting somewhere in the back of their mind.

That fear deserves a real answer that isn’t just a reassurance. It deserves a story.

Continued in: Cancer, Rome, and the Covid Plot Twist That Delayed My Surgery →

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We had planned to take a taxi to our hotel. We had also planned to have cash by this point, but — as the previous post on this subject will tell you — the ATMs had not yet cooperated once on this journey. There was no taxi at the stand when we arrived at the train station. The hotel was about a twenty-minute walk.

We gathered our determination and our luggage and set off.

A bit down the street, past the elementary school, we spotted another ATM and decided to try our luck just one more time. Still no. We reorganized ourselves and headed back out, when from somewhere behind us came a voice: "Danita! Joe!"

We turned around. A woman we had been friends with on Facebook for years — someone we had talked with, traded information with, and gotten to know genuinely — had spotted us from her car. She had recognized us from our profile photos. It had been at least two years since she had seen us in person. She pulled over and insisted on driving us to our hotel.

I think about that moment often, because it was not simply luck. Or rather, it was not only luck. It was the result of something we had been doing for months before we ever set foot in Borgotaro — something I now consider one of the most valuable and least-discussed parts of any serious relocation plan: building your network before you arrive.

What a Reconnaissance Trip Is Actually For

Joe and I did not make the decision to move to Borgo Val di Taro from a map and a feeling. Before we committed, we made a proper scouting trip — what some people call a reconnaissance trip — specifically designed to answer the question of whether we could actually live somewhere, not just visit it.

A good reconnaissance trip is different from a vacation. You are not there to see the highlights. You are there to understand the infrastructure. Can you navigate the grocery store? Is there a doctor you can actually access? What does the bureaucratic process look like for a foreign resident? What is the internet situation? Is there a community of international residents, and are they people you could imagine spending time with?

You are also — and this is the part most people skip — there to meet people.

The apartment you rent is important. The visa requirements matter. But the human connections you start building before you move are what will actually get you through the first year, and they are something you can begin cultivating long before you land.  For a more in-depth discussion of the reconnaissance trip, read this post.

Building Your Network Before You Arrive

Our Facebook friend who rescued us from the sidewalk in Borgotaro was not a random encounter. She was part of a community connected to the area we had identified as a possible home, and we had been genuine participants in that community for months before we ever arrived. Not "I am about to move there, can anyone help?" posts. Actual participation. Answering questions for others. Sharing what we were learning. Showing up as people who had something to contribute.

Here is what that looked like in practice.

The Ufficio Turistico (tourist office). Back in our first visit as a family to Borgotaro, we stopped into the tourist office, as you do when you are genuinely trying to understand a place. We met a wonderful woman there who became a real contact over time. In fact, my best friend! She knew the town inside out, had no particular agenda, and was the kind of resource no website can replicate. People at tourist offices see a lot of visitors. When someone walks in with genuine interest in a place rather than just a list of Instagram spots, that stands out. Take the time to have an actual conversation.

The comune. In Italy, the comune is the municipal government office, and it handles residency registration among many other things. Before we moved, we had made contact with someone there who sent us ideas for apartment rentals — inside knowledge that no listing site was going to provide. Yes, you can just walk into the comune and ask questions about residency requirements. That introduction — making yourself a known quantity before the bureaucratic processes begin in earnest — is worth doing.

Online communities. This is where a significant amount of the real preparation happened. There are Facebook groups for virtually every niche of the Italy-related experience: Americans in specific regions, people navigating specific visas, residents of particular towns, people who love a particular area of Italy. Some have tens of thousands of members. Others are small and tight-knit. Being a genuine, contributing member of these communities before your move means that when you arrive, some of those people already know you.

Our friend who spotted us from her car had seen our posts and questions for months. She recognized our faces from photos. She knew we were arriving. When she saw two exhausted people surrounded by luggage, she put the pieces together in about three seconds.

The Network Compounds

The lady at the tabaccheria (turns out, my husband's third cousin) has a contact at the comune (her son - LOL). The woman in the online group introduces you to the one English-speaking resident on your street. The contact at the tourist office mentions a local community event that turns out to be the social center of your first year in town. Each connection multiplies into others, because that is simply how communities work when you approach them with patience and genuine interest.

This is true whether you are considering Italy, Portugal, Germany, Spain, or anywhere else. The reconnaissance trip is not only about logistics. It is about beginning to belong somewhere before you officially belong there.

Some Things Worth Doing Before and During Your Reconnaissance Trip

Before you go:

• Find and join Facebook groups specific to the region you are considering (not only general "Americans in Italy" groups, but local or regional ones where the conversations are about specific places and people)

• Participate before you need anything. Answer questions. Share what you are learning from your own research. Let people get to know you as someone who shows up.

• Notice who the grounded, practical voices are in those communities. They are usually the people who have been there long enough to give real answers rather than romantic ones.

• Look for local associations, English-speaking clubs, or international community organizations in your target area. Many Italian towns have them, and they are exactly where the established expat and global resident community gathers.

While you are there:

• Visit the tourist office. These people know everyone and have no reason to be anything but helpful.

• Walk into the comune with a genuine question about residency requirements. You are allowed to ask, and it introduces you to the office before everything is high stakes.

• Go to any local event you can find. A market, a festival, a sagra — whatever is happening.

• Eat at the same places more than once. Let the owners start to recognize you.

• Tell people, honestly, that you are considering moving there. In a small Italian town, this news travels. Not always in a bad way.

After you return home:

• Stay in touch with the people you met, even briefly. A follow-up message about something they mentioned, a relevant article, a question that came up later.

• Keep participating in the online communities you found.

• Be patient. Belonging anywhere takes time. But you can compress that timeline considerably by starting before you arrive.

The Facebook friend who recognized us on the sidewalk in Borgotaro did not just save us a twenty-minute walk with sixty kilos of luggage. She was the moment where months of relationship-building became visible and real. The internet had given us a friend we had never met, and that friend was waiting for us, more or less literally, when we arrived.

We have since made many more friendships in Borgo Val di Taro that started online long before they became in-person. The Monday market is right below our apartment window. The town is small, the faces have become familiar, and some of the people we interact with daily are people we first met in a Facebook group years before we moved.

The internet, it turns out, is just the beginning.

Join our community of Americans and global residents navigating life in Italy — the kind of connections that might just be waiting for you when you arrive.

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The mistakes that have been made by those who are saying “it’s just too hard” and those who are giving up before they even launch the idea often come from the same root: they do not sit down to do the actual math before the fantasy gets too far ahead of the plan.

When Joe and I packed up five pieces of luggage nine years ago and landed in Italy, we had credit cards that didn’t work immediately and a lot of enthusiasm. But the one thing we didn’t have to panic about was how to fund our new daily life. Why? Because we had already stress-tested our income structure before our feet ever left North American soil. We knew that income would be the least of our worries while building a new life in Italy.

In my opinion, before you pack a single box or sign a lease on that apartment overlooking the market, you need to run your finances through what I call The Income Gap Calculator.

The Income Gap Calculator starts by researching your actual expenses (I discuss some of that here), and then looking at your real income calculated from Day 1 in your new home. I’ve divided the income into four general buckets. You need to compare your real situation with these income categories.

Bucket 1: The income that is tied to your existence in North America

Bucket 1 is tied to your physical location. This holds true whether you move from California to Tennessee, or from Calgary to Toronto. If you are not “transferring” to a new job, this income disappears on Day 1 (usually even before).

• Your local job or in-person clients.

• Local consulting or service work that relies on you walking into a room.

• Any side hustle that requires local inventory, shipping, or physical meeting space.

The tough truth here is that on Day 1 in your new home abroad, that income drops to zero.

Bucket 2: The income that continues, but has strings attached

This category of income is the most dangerous in my opinion, because it gives people a false sense of security. The general types of income here are:

• “My boss said I can work remotely.”

• Doing freelance work for North American clients.

• North American corporate consulting.

That first scenario, “my boss said I can work remotely” is rarely true portable income. Employer policies change, managers get replaced, and tax laws often prohibit working for a foreign entity without local compliance. Furthermore, working a 9-to-5 North American schedule from Europe turns your dream life into a permanent night shift. Relying on Bucket 2 as a long-term solution is a risky gamble.

Bucket 3: The income that isn’t available yet

This is the money you are banking on for the future. Joe and I moved to Italy before we were retired. We might have planned for what we might do “five to ten years from now” when we had access to retirement income, but we couldn’t bank on that for our “move”. These types of income include:

• Social security or government pensions when you are not yet of retirement age.

• 401(k) or private retirement accounts with age penalties.

• Proceeds from selling property back home if the transaction hasn’t closed yet.

When I look at Bucket 3, I see many people who are relying on hope rather than formulating a strategy. If Social Security is three years away, you have a 36-month financial bridge that needs building.

Bucket 4: Income That is Genuinely Portable

This is your holy grail! This income passes the ultimate test of working on Day 1 in a country where you don’t speak the language fluently, don’t have local contacts, and probably have a ton of bureaucratic hoops that will occupy your early days. This income type includes:

• Income from a job where you already have a contract in hand (military deployment, corporate transfer, work that you’ve received an offer for before you move).

• Truly available retirement income.

• Digital products with existing audience.

• Passive investment yields.

• Culture-independent, location-independent recurring income models

• Income streams that don’t care what time zone you sleep in, or whether anyone sees your face for 2 years.

Doing Your Own Math

The goal of calculating your Income Gap isn't to crush your dream—it's to protect it. Financial strain is the single biggest reason expats turn tail and head home prematurely.

Grab a piece of paper, or open up a spreadsheet and do the calculations. The income baseline is the simple part. Buckets 1 and 3 aren’t available at all. Bucket 2 might be something to “tide you over” until you can settle in, but should be viewed with some skepticism. So what’s left in bucket 4? Take that and figure out your expenses. Over the past 9 years, we’ve done budgets many times: when we first moved here; when Joe started receiving his Social Security; when one of my business models changed (we have multiple streams of income, but that’s a topic for another day); or when a loved one needed financial assistance, etc. Each time we recalculated our “get by” income and our “preferred lifestyle” income, so that we could be certain that the “get by” income was met, while looking to have enough for the “preferred lifestyle” as well.

If there’s a gap between what you have in your Bucket 4 income and your “get by” or “preferred lifestyle” expenses, that’s your Income Gap. The time to solve that gap is before you get on the plane, not during your first six months when your life is taken up by language fatigue, cultural missteps, a new healthcare system, and the bureaucracy of “change”.

Before you spend another hour browsing real estate listings in Tuscany or reading conflicting visa advice on Facebook, figure out your Income Gap, and let me know in the comments if this helps!

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It took me a second, maybe two, before the obvious hit me. I was looking at €3.99 a KILO for apples, not per pound. Once I did the actual math, those really beautiful apples were about $2.07 a pound (as I write this of course). Those apples at the supermarket in the weekly €1 special? Those were less than fifty cents a pound! I’d say those were pretty inexpensive apples!

That moment in the market is a perfect metaphor for cost comparison between the US (in my case) and Italy. The price tags were telling me a truth, but it wasn’t the full truth without both converting pounds per kilo (2.2) and US Dollars per Euro. That varies by the day, week, month and year. Now, you might wonder why I constantly talk about “conversion rates”. That’s because the vast majority of our income is in US Dollars. We do have some Euro income from some small business endeavors, but we rely on US Dollars for our survival, so we are always thinking about “how much is that in OUR money”!

The Kilo vs Pound Recalibration

We’ll continue at the market for a minute, because it’s a very common occurrence. Our weekly market happens on Mondays, but shopping for food can happen just about any day (and in fact, we often end up shopping every single day!).

Pricing in Italy at the market or the deli counter are usually priced “per etto” - (100 grams), or per kilo (1,000 grams, or 2.2 pounds). So how did I figure out how much those apples were in US Dollars (at that current day’s exchange)? I could tell you that I did some awesome mental math, but I only do that when the exchange rate is close to par (more on that in a minute). You do eventually stop converting every little thing. That adjustment usually really takes a full year of seeing prices change with the seasons. You know that €3.99 for those Fugi apples in May is a really good price, and that when the tomatoes are on sale in the summer for as little as €1.00, you’ve got yourself a steal. You build your new internal price compass.

Until then, get a universal unit converter. The one I have is Unit Converter ∞ it costs about $2.99. It hasn’t been updated in 8 years, because honestly, it’s not really necessary to update! But it DOES still do a daily currency update. So you could go get that one if you have an iPhone, or just look around the App/Play Stores for something that “converts everything”. This one can literally put in a € cost per kilo and it will spit out the current $ cost per pound.

The Currency Framing Problem

Before you even get to the price tags, there’s the currency itself. Americans living abroad, particularly those who moved here without deep prior international experience, tend to set the euro-to-dollar exchange rate in their heads at whatever it was when they arrived, and make their internal calculations based on that point of reference. This is a mistake that can hide the true cost of items in subtle ways.

Our rent, for example, is €300 per month. (Yes, really.) In euros, that number has not changed. In US dollars, however, it has ranged from a low of $299.98 in October 2022 to a high of $371.02, with a ten-year average of approximately $336.84. The landlord is paid exactly €300 every month. What that costs us in dollars shifts with every movement in the exchange rate.

Many people chat online about the euro to dollar conversion in terms of what a dollar costs in euro. “Today, theUS Dollar costs €0.8678.” To me, that’s backwards for those of us who are dependent on the US Dollar for our survival (which is, of course, what I teach in my course - getting paid in USD to live abroad). To buy a US Dollar might cost 0.8678 Euro. But that’s not how we think. We are thinking about how many US Dollars (or your currency of choice) does that Euro price cost me. So I want to know that a Euro costs me $1.1523. When you look at it this way, it’s easier to see your real costs. If something is €1, it’s going to cost me $1.15.

If you’re from the USA, you’re probably used to price tags that don’t tell the complete story — the sales tax gets added at the register. In Europe, the VAT is already in the price. What you see is what you pay.

This matters more than you might realize when comparing costs across the Atlantic. In the US, the sticker price is an “estimate” — the real price appears at the register. In Europe, the VAT is already in the number you see. So there’s actually a point where the exchange rate makes European prices one-to-one against American prices. We can use the same scale with no mental math required. Taking into account that different States exempt different things from sales tax, we’ll just generalize here. Check your state’s combined sales tax rate here. When the dollar-to-euro rate roughly matches €1 plus your home state’s sales tax burden in cents, you can look at a €2.50 pack kleenex and honestly compare it to a $2.50 pack of kleenex.

We split our US time between Tennessee, Washington State, and Colorado. They have combined Sales Tax Rates of 9.61%, 9.51% and 7.89% respectively. So averaging those, for us, that crossover point is around $1.09 to the euro. As of this writing we’re at around $1.15, so European prices are running about 5% higher than a direct number-for-number comparison would suggest — but we’re at least able to do a valid comparison. If a product costs us €1, and the US Dollar price of a Euro is $1.09, then it directly costs us $1. That’s a calculation we can make in our heads (or actually looking up prices if we’re that interested), to see if a product is costing us more or less in Italy than in the US.

Track the exchange rate. Not obsessively, but enough to know when it’s moved meaningfully. It is a cost of living that most Americans genuinely underestimate when they’re planning a move abroad.

A Liter Is Not a Gallon

Just as trying to compare euro price per kilo requires some serious mental math (or a calculator), comparing gasoline pricing in Italy per liter, in euros can give you a headache when trying to figure that out in dollars per gallon. Let’s just say that generally speaking, gasoline is a lot more expensive in Europe than in the US. Fill up your car, figure out how far you can drive on a tank, and stop trying to figure out the price per gallon. Most Italians drive smaller, more fuel-efficient cars than Americans are accustomed to, and many rely on regional trains and local transit in ways that Americans in car-dependent suburbs simply cannot replicate. Just know that it costs about €6.50 to drive to Parma, and you won’t have to stress so much over the conversions.

What Prices Actually Mean Here

One of the more pleasant surprises for most Americans in Italy is price transparency. When something costs €14.99, it costs €14.99. Our mobile phone plans are €14.99 per month each. Not €14.99 plus a regulatory recovery fee, plus a network access charge, plus a line maintenance fee, plus government surcharges, plus whatever else has been invented since last quarter. Just €14.99.

For comparison: we share a T-Mobile plan in the US with our two children, plus an Apple Watch. The base plan runs approximately $115 monthly — around $25 per line (plus a $15 watch), which is actually reasonable by US standards. But then there is an additional $36.77 in taxes and fees on top of that every month. It has been $36.77 in add-ons for years.

This is not unique to mobile phones. When we need a new appliance and visit our local elettrodomestici store, the price on the tag includes delivery and installation. In the US, those are typically additional costs.

The same principle applies at restaurants, which I’ll address fully in a separate post on tipping culture. The short version: service is included in what Italians pay their employees, so the menu price is the price you pay, full stop. No 20% assumption built into every dining decision. That alone changes the economics of eating out in very real ways.

The Costs That Will Actually Surprise You

Not everything is cheaper in Italy. Some things are surprisingly more expensive to Americans. The Italian driver’s license situation is a prime example.

If you move to Italy from the United States, you cannot exchange your American license for an Italian one. Unlike licenses from many EU countries and a handful of others, the US has no reciprocal agreement with Italy. You will need to start the process from the beginning, which currently looks something like this:

• Autoscuola enrollment: taking classes will cost you typically €200–€400

• Mandatory driving lessons: a minimum of 8 hours is now required by law, at approximately €40–€60 per hour, so over €400 just for the minimum

• Medical examination: €40–€80

• Administrative and government stamp fees: approximately €100–€150

• Theory exam: €30–€150 depending on how it’s administered

• Practical exam: a fixed €275 per attempt

Add all of that together before accounting for Italian language lessons (the theory exam is in Italian, German, or French — not English), additional driving hours if you need them, or repeat exam fees if you don’t pass on the first attempt. I’ve heard estimates as high as €3,000 from people who’ve gone through the full process, particularly when language preparation is factored in. My own polling of Americans living in Italy ranges from €600-€ 2499, with 41% saying under €800 and another 55% saying from €800-€2499..

There is also a provisional period following the test, during which restrictions on vehicle horsepower may apply. Depending on what you currently drive, that could mean adjusting what you’re behind the wheel of. It is not a trivial process, and it is not a trivial expense.

Another cost that is generally more expensive is household energy. We use less, so our energy, although outlandishly expensive if you ask an Italian, is 1/3 for our 1000 sq ft apartment than ti was for our 3000 sq ft house (that feels “equal” to us). We use the A/C less (rarely really). We don’t have a clothes dryer or a dishwater. Other than that, our day-to-day life doesn’t feel like we are “using less” energy. So by living more like Italians, we don’t really feel like our energy costs are that expensive.

The Taxes Trade-Off

American’s abroad tend to either gloss over taxes entirely or treat them as a dealbreaker. Neither is accurate.

We pay approximately $3,000-$5,000 more in income taxes per year than we would if we were living in the United States. The first year, that caused a real gasp. But then we started looking at what we are not paying in the US that is covered by our taxes.

We pay exactly €0 for national health insurance (newcomers to Italy, depending on Visa, will need to pay €2000 per year to be in the SSN). In the US, that coverage was costing us $400 per month — $4,800 per year. Our actual out-of-pocket costs for medical care in Italy over the past decade have been, for all practical purposes, zero, even with numerous tests, surgeries and cancer treatment.

If you have children (or you yourself are University aged), University tuition averages in the €2000 per year range. This does not include housing, but Italians often live with their parents while studying at University. We see buses and trains full of university students heading to Parma (a hour) or Bologna (2-1/2 hours) every day. So the cost of education is very low in Italy, compared to the US.

So: we pay more in income taxes. We pay nothing for health coverage. Education costs are minimal. In fact, University education here isn’t much more than I paid in the University of California system 45 years ago. All of that seems to offset the income taxes that are higher, but fund infrastructure we use.The net result for us is a meaningful financial improvement over our US situation. Your math will depend on your income level, your specific health situation, whether you have children, and which region of Italy you’re in. It is absolutely a landmine worth mapping carefully before you make any decisions — but it is not automatically a negative.

The Final Recalibration

In the end, the real adjustment isn’t actually about arithmetic. Instead it’s about rethinking what things “should” cost, and building a new baseline for your daily life and expenses. Some of what costs more actually buys you something real that you didn’t even know you were missing out on.

The numbers will take time to recalibrate, but if you can work on your mindset from the start, the calculations will eventually just fade into the background.

Map out your cost landmine: it might surprise you (pleasantly)

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What I didn't have the vocabulary for, at the time, was the thing I was language fatigue. I just knew I had a headache and that Luzern felt like the most luxurious place on earth.

A decade of Italian later — plus a passed B1 cittadinanza exam, which is a whole other post — I can finally explain what that actually is, why it happens, and why it gets genuinely interesting when you're working across more than one non-native language at the same time.

It started for me in 1977

My first real encounter with language fatigue wasn't in Italy. It was in Switzerland, where I spent a gap year as a foreign exchange student. At home in Biberist we spoke Schwizerdüütsch (Swiss German): at school in Solothurn it was actual Schriftdeutsch (what the Swiss call standard German) — which is already a lot. I later realized that I was being asked to learn two languages at once. But I loved it, and eventually ended up with an undergraduate degree in German, all due to that year.

Most days, by evening, my head hurt. Not metaphorically. My actual head hurt.

I filed this away as "a thing that happens when you're learning a language" and didn't think about it much again. Until Italy.

The road trip that explained everything

It's 2016. I've been in Italy a few months. I have Joe to speak English with at home, which helps, but the rest of the day is a sustained cognitive effort in a language I am nowhere near fluent in yet. The headaches are back. The vague persistent feeling of being slightly dumb is back. The relief of closing the apartment door and not having to think about Italian for a few hours is very much back.

We drove north toward the Swiss border to start the Belgium trip. And somewhere in that stretch of road, the radio on, Italy fading behind us, I turned the dial and landed on a Swiss German station.

And I just... breathed.

It is not a small thing that my first real relief from Italian-language fatigue came from Swiss German. Not English, which would have been the obvious choice, but Swiss German: a language I had lived inside the way I was living inside Italian, one I'd learned decades ago as a teenager and maintained but never tested daily as standard German became my usual German. And yet the moment those Swiss German voices came through the speakers, something in my brain unclenched.

Luzern overnight was luxury, exactly as I wrote at the time. The ability to just eavesdrop. To absorb without effort. I hadn't fully registered how much cognitive energy I'd been expending until I didn't have to spend it anymore, and the contrast was almost dizzying.

Belgium was the real surprise.

I had four(+) years of high school French (I say plus, because I was the only 4th year student, and the teacher actually had me writing tests for the 1st year students!) and one semester of French conversation in college. That is a somewhat shallow well to drink from 40 years later. And yet, in Belgium, the French just came back — not all of it, not perfectly, but more than I expected. More than I'd realized I had retained. I was understanding things. Responding to things. Thinking: huh. There was apparently more in there than I knew.

The multilingual brain: organized by logic only your brain fully understands

Here's something I've noticed across all of my language learning that I don't hear talked about enough: when you're multilingual — or working toward it — your brain doesn't store languages in neatly labeled filing cabinets. It's more like a pile on the desk with some internal organizational logic that you didn't design and can't entirely predict.

In Switzerland in 1977, when I was struggling for a German word, it frequently came to me in French first. My brain knew I wanted a non-English word. It understood the assignment at that level, and it went searching in whatever it had filed under "other languages" and grabbed what was closest. French was apparently adjacent to German in my internal system.

The same thing happened in Italy, in the opposite direction. For years, whenever an Italian word failed me, my brain would offer German. Not English — German. As if Italian and German are neighbors in the filing pile, and the brain just grabbed what was closest to where it was looking.

I now speak three languages fairly well (English, Italian, and German — or four, if we're being properly Swiss about it and counting Swiss German separately), plus enough French to get me into interesting situations and occasionally back out of them.

And yet.

There are days, even now, after ten years in Italy, when a word fails me in all of them. The concept is completely clear in my mind. I know exactly what I want to say. I can practically see the shape of it. And I am completely, utterly, embarrassingly mute — not in one language, but across all four simultaneously. The word exists somewhere in my brain; my brain has simply decided not to produce it in any language it supposedly knows.

I find this both humbling and oddly funny. If you're multilingual, I suspect you're nodding right now.

What language fatigue actually is (and why it matters for anyone moving abroad)

Language fatigue isn't just being tired. It's a specific kind of cognitive exhaustion that results from sustained effort in a non-native language — and your brain is doing measurably more work than a native speaker's brain does for the same conversation. You're not just listening: you're translating, parsing, retrieving, and producing in real time, usually under social pressure because someone is waiting for your answer. Professional interpreters — people who do this at the highest level — build mandatory rest periods into their work schedules because of it. It's that documented and that real.

The symptoms tend to look like:

• Headaches by late afternoon that have no physical explanation

• That persistent low-grade feeling of being slightly dumb that follows you through the day

• Words disappearing mid-sentence, sometimes in languages you know well

• Conversations that leave you disproportionately exhausted relative to their actual content

• The deeply disproportionate relief of hearing your own language — or, as I discovered, any language where you don't have to work for it

It's not weakness. It's not a sign that you're not cut out for this. It's biology: your prefrontal cortex is genuinely working harder than normal, and it gets tired, just like any other system that's been running at full capacity all day.

What actually helps (from someone who has been doing this for a while)

I won't promise a cure, because there isn't one — you just keep going, and eventually the ratio of effort to output shifts. But a few things genuinely helped:

Give your brain an actual break — not a "brain break" in the new language. Not Italian TV, not an Italian podcast, not a helpful attempt to sneak in some learning during downtime. A real break: a conversation in English, a German radio station, an afternoon where you're not processing anything in the target language. Your brain needs to stop, not just rest.

Stop expecting linear progress. Language acquisition does not move in a straight line upward. It zigzags. There will be weeks where you feel like you've lost ground. You haven't — you're in a consolidation phase, and it passes.

Let the wrong language show up without judging it. When you reach for Italian and get German, your brain hasn't failed you: it's proven it has more than one non-native language accessible and is searching actively. It grabbed the wrong one. This is, technically, evidence of progress.

Find your relief valve and use it without guilt. For me it's a Swiss German radio podcast, or a long conversation with Joe in English, or an afternoon when nobody needs anything from me in any language at all. There's no virtue in white-knuckling through language fatigue. Give your brain what it needs.

Code-switch when you can. Code-switching is just the practice of switching languages in a single conversation.  I’ve done this most of my adult life, because I’ve generally lived with people who knew more than one language.  At home we use whatever word/phrase/sentence matches the feeling of the moment. While you can’t do this out in the “real world” most days, you can certainly do it if you converse with someone (or yourself) when both of you know both languages.  It tends to relax the feelings of language fatigue.

Ten years in

I eavesdrop in Italian now.  Occasionally I even learn something worth knowing, though I'll protect the innocent. Now my Italian is real and functional and, on a good day, more than survival-level.

And still, there are afternoons when I reach for a word and find nothing. Not in Italian. Not in German. Not in English. The concept is perfectly clear and my brain has gone completely silent across all four.

I've decided this is just what it means to live inside multiple languages. You get the genuinely remarkable aspects — the unexpected French coming back in Belgium, the German stepping in when Italian fails, the ability to switch between registers in ways that still occasionally surprise you — and you also get the days when all four languages take a collective coffee break at exactly the same moment.

If you're early in this and the fatigue is making you feel like you're not good at this: you're not bad at language learning. You're just learning. At full tilt. All day. In a country that didn't ask you what your first language was.

That is genuinely hard work, and it is completely worth it.

Language was just one of the landmines!

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If you've been researching the mechanics of moving to Italy (or anywhere in the Schengen Zone) you've met the 90-day rule.

Non-EU citizens can stay in the Schengen Area for up to 90 days in any 180-day period. Which means: 90 days in, 90 days out. If you are not yet a resident (if you haven't cleared the visa and permesso di soggiorno hurdles) this is the rhythm you are living by. Actually in our case it was just residency.  My husband was an Italian, but we were not yet ready to commit to residency.  There were business and family concerns that required us to be in the US every 6 months or so, so we dragged our feet on the obligations (and benefits!) that come with residency.

Some people treat this as an obstacle. We decided to treat it as a system.

For 18 months, from May 2016 to our decision to obtain residency in November 2017,  Joe and I ran what we eventually started calling the Schengen Shuffle.  It was an 18 month journey for us, but for some, it will be 3 months, 9 months, 5 years.

Here's what that actually looks like.

First: Who This Is For (and Who It Isn't For)

Let me be clear about the population of people for whom the Schengen Shuffle is a practical option — because it isn't everyone.

This works well for:

• Retirees or near-retirees with no school schedule to manage

• Digital nomads with location-independent income

• Empty nesters whose children are grown and launched

• Families who are genuinely homeschooling (with intention — not as an afterthought)

This is genuinely difficult for:

• Families with school-age children in traditional school systems

• Anyone whose medical situation requires continuity of care that can't be replicated across two countries

• Anyone who hasn't yet solved the income question — which I'll come back to

We had adult children when we did this. Well almost — we sent our youngest, a newly minted 18 year-old, off to an exchange year in Belgium and sold our house.   He complained that he was homeless, but we reminded him that we had left him a forwarding address!. We had geographic freedom. Those two facts made everything else possible. I'm not pretending otherwise.

Our Version: The 90/90 Reality

Our 90 days in Italy were anchored in Borgotaro. Our 90 days in the US were anything but simple.

We had a daughter and family in the Denver metro area. Two children on Whidbey Island in Washington State. My mother on the Tennessee River. And I was still speaking at conferences — technology conferences, roughly every six months — at various locations around the country.

So we built our US 90 days around all of it. A month in the Denver area. Time on Whidbey Island. Tennessee. Whatever city was hosting the next conference, which we deliberately scheduled to coincide with the US stay so we weren't making extra crossings just for a three-day event.

It was an adventure. I want to be honest about that first, because it genuinely was. Two countries, multiple cities, a life that felt expansive and nomadic and slightly cinematic.

It was also exhausting.

We had clothes in four places. Toiletries in four places. Electric toothbrushes in four places. The electric toothbrush thing sounds minor until you've forgotten yours on another continent for the fourth time and realized: you just buy another one and leave it there. There is a particular cognitive tax to living out of a set of partially-populated locations — always calculating what you packed, what you left behind, what you need to buy again, what you can borrow from yourself in the next city.  Where was that wrap around teal dress anyway?

By month seventeen, the adventure was still real. The exhaustion was more real.

The One Thing We Did Right

We kept our apartment in Borgotaro the entire time.

Not just during the months we were there. All eighteen months. We paid rent whether or not we were in residence.

At €300 a month (which, yes, is what we paid, and is what we still pay ten years later) this was both emotionally and financially sound. We were not packing up every 90 days and starting over. We were not leaving our things in storage or dismantling a home every time we crossed the Atlantic. The apartment was there. Our things were there. We came back to a life, not to an empty flat we had to reconstruct from scratch.

This also meant zero pressure every time we returned to Italy. No frantic searches two weeks before reentry. No "this is temporary" mindset every time we walked through the door. In fact, the permanence of the Italian apartment compared to the true "shuffle" from place to place in the US probably made the decision to be in Italy seem all the more sound. We were going home.

If you are doing the Schengen Shuffle in a place you are genuinely evaluating for residency: keep the apartment. In non-tourist towns, landlords often prefer the stability of a long-term tenant even with intermittent occupancy. Italian leases generally allow you to give notice and exit with as little as 90 days' warning — we were never trapped (although our condo building DID change the locks on the portone (the door to the building) once while we were away, and thankfully we arrived home at 3 PM and not 3 AM and a neighbor let us in!). We chose to stay, because it was the right call.

What We Were Actually Learning

The thing about eighteen months of 90/90 is that by the end of it, you have a data set. Not a vacation impression. Not honeymoon optimism. A data set.

We had been in Borgotaro in every season. Bored there in January. Delighted by it in September. We had watched the mushroom and chestnut festivals happen and the August shutdown descend and the market vendors we recognized begin to recognize us back. We had eaten at Bar Centrale enough times to have developed opinions.

We also had comparison points: the 2014 reconnaissance trip had taken us through Piacenza, Pontremoli, Lippiano, Ancona, Pescara, and a beautiful atmospheric village in Abruzzo where it became immediately clear you needed a pre-existing family connection to ever truly belong. We had data on all of them. We kept coming back to Borgotaro.

By month eighteen, "this is the place" had shifted from optimism to conclusion.

The Part That Made It Possible

No one talks about the income side of the Schengen Shuffle clearly, so I will.

It is not free. Transatlantic flights four times a year are not free. Maintaining rent in Italy while covering US costs — whether that's family hosting, short-term stays, or something else entirely — is not free. Conference travel is not free.

We could do this because we had built income that moved with us. That is not a small thing. It is, in retrospect, the entire foundation of the plan. The Schengen Shuffle is a genuinely useful reconnaissance tool for people who have solved the income question first. It is a stressful endurance sport if you haven't.

I'll write about what our income actually looked like, and what I learned the hard way about money and mobility, in a separate post. But it belongs on the table here, because the Shuffle doesn't run on romance. It runs on math. I'll say this much here: it wasn't passive income in the fantasy sense. It was portable income — deliberately structured that way before we ever bought the first plane ticket. The difference between those two things is worth an entire post on its own. Which is what's coming next.

And Then We Said Basta

In November 2017, we said enough.

Not because we had failed to love it. Because we had succeeded. Borgotaro was the place. Joe got residency. We arrived to stay.

The Schengen Shuffle had done exactly what it was supposed to do: given us eighteen months of evidence before we made an irreversible decision. We did not move to Italy on a dream. We moved on a conclusion we had earned.

That distinction matters more than I can tell you.

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We found out what "living above the market" actually means at 7:30 on a Monday morning in May 2016. We had been in the apartment for maybe four days when from somewhere below our windows came the sound of a traveling market assembling itself — stall by stall, crate by crate — on the street directly beneath us.

We had almost taken a different apartment near the San Domenico church, where would have been knocked out of bed by the bells at 7:30. The market noise, by comparison, seemed pleasant and welcoming. So we pulled on our shoes and went down to look.

I grew up with American farmers markets. They typically mean local produce, artisan jam, or somebody's homemade honey. What happens below our windows every Monday is something else entirely. There are mountains of produce, clothing stalls, shoes, kitchen goods, curtains, wine, a hardware stand, the Italian equivalent of a dollar store. But do you know what I love most? There’s a large rotisserie truck where chickens, porchetta, and rabbit turn on spits until they're the kind of thing that makes you revise your dinner plans on the spot.

We have bought lambrusco secco from the wine man at that market for almost ten years. He always knows what we want.

So, for the last nine years, our Monday morning ritual has pretty much been the same. We start out at Bar Centrale where they just appear with “due cappuccini e una brioche vuote” (two cappuccinos and a plain croissant). I pinch off a small piece from one end of the croissant (I can’t eat an entire croissant every morning and keep my waistline happy!). After breakfast, we wind through centro storico to make a stop at the butcher (he grinds the beef fresh, while you wait, which is one of those small things that you realize is special about your day). Then we head for the market (it is “on the way home” after all!) to pick up something from the produce stall, wander past the salumiera, and end up at the rotisserie — Hell’s Kitchen, as the sign proudly proclaims — where the spits have been turning since early morning.

What Lockdown taught us

In February 2020, Italy went into one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. We didn’t leave our apartment for months, except to take out the trash (a privilege we argued over). We are, by nature, homebodies. Joe and I can spend days in each other’s company without either of us going stir-crazy. We had, as I pointed out to anyone who would listen, been training for exactly this scenario for four years. And yet….

My business runs on American time zones, which means most of my working hours don’t begin until mid-afternoon Italian time. The morning cappuccino is where we talk with friends. The Monday market is where the wine man knows our preferences, and the produce vendor recommends the best apples for the season. The aperitivo is the end of day recalibration that separates “work time” from “evening.” What I didn’t understand until the quarantine was that our routine was actually our daily infrastructure. We had the structure of a day that moves through town rather than through rooms. Without those external routines, the days had become long and formless.

The quarantena — the word comes from the Venetian practice of keeping ships at anchor for forty days during the Black Death to prevent the disease from coming ashore. I distinctly remember when we hit day 41. My friend Elisa pointed out, when I mentioned we were on day “quarantuno della quarantena” (day 41 of the quarantine), that this seemed deeply wrong. And of course she was correct. Forty days is a quarantine. Forty-one is just showing off, and of course, the restrictions continued well into 2021, and many prudent people were adamant about keeping some of them (especially masking) into 2022 (there will be more on this in a future post)!

I knew we had built an actual life here, rather than an extended vacation, because I felt the loss of these routines in our day.

Life is good here. I’m sure it can be good for you too! But the question worth asking before you move is not only “where do I want to live?” It’s “what do I want my Monday to look like in year five?”

If you’re planning a move to Europe and want to make sure you’re building toward the right Monday, and not accidentally stepping on the landmines that blow up the whole plan before you get there — the Landmine Map is a good place to start.

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