It began as a romantic dream. Maybe we would become expat writers in Italy, like the Brownings in the 1850s, Joyce in the 1920s, Mary McCarthy in the late 1950s, or (more recently) Anthony Doerr, who started All the Light We Cannot See while on a writing fellowship in Rome. “His latest novel was written in Florence, you know,” people would murmur admiringly. Or, “She finally found her voice when they spent a year in Italy.”
Okay, we were mature enough to know it wouldn’t really be like that. But as long as we were dreaming, why not dream big? We would spend a year in some mid-sized European city. We would become fluent in the language. We would know the best pizza place, the most fabulous boutique, the time of the week when the Uffizzi/Louvre/Prado was not crowded. We would know how to catch the bus.
Then we began to consider logistics. If we were going to be gone for a year, shouldn’t we rent out our house? How would we deal with mail? Bills? Medications? Could we leave our extremely elderly parents for that long? How would we see the kids and grandkids?
We scaled back. Maybe, as an experiment for the first year, we’d go for the longest time one can stay on a regular tourist visa: six month minus a day. But then: did we really want to be overseas for Christmas? Did we really want to deal with long days of cold rain in a foreign city? Did we really want to be away from our friends that long? Friends of ours who own a house north of Rome come twice a year, we learned — for a couple of months in the fall and a couple of months in the spring. That sounded smart. So, hmmm, how about six weeks?
Six weeks seemed good. It was long enough that we could settle in and spend ordinary days doing laundry and grocery-shopping, short enough that we could bring our laptops and sufficient clothes in a medium-sized bag. (Theoretically.)
We also had to pick a place within Europe. Michael spoke some French; I read some Italian. We negotiated and agreed that speaking Italian would put us roughly on a par with each other. So we started learning Italian piano pianissimo (or step by little step, the Italian equivalent of granny gear –a phrase taught to us by a sympathetic waiter). And we started traveling to Italy in granny gear, too — a week at a time, mostly because that’s all I had off teaching. We found Rome exciting but overwhelming. We tried some smaller towns (Orvieto, Ferrarra) and some resorty areas (Cinque Terre, Lake Como). We enjoyed them but decided we would be too isolated there for six weeks.
We settled on Florence. It was historic, pretty, centrally located, and manageable in size. Best of all, it was a place friends would want to visit. After two scouting trips, we decided that we definitely wanted to be somewhere in the Oltrarno — across the river from the crowded, crazy, historic area centered around the Duomo (where we loved staying the first time we visited) but not quite as far out as the pretty little hill-town of Fiesole (where we loved staying the second time we visited). I spent hours combing TripAdvisor, Airbnb, and VRBO for houses or apartments. And lo and behold, there it was — an affordable three-bedroom house in the Oltrarno, with a garden.
We booked it for six weeks. Since the thing that scared me most about retiring was how sad I’d be about the school year starting without smart kids to teach, we arranged to stay from late September through early November. We corresponded with the owner, we asked to see lots of photos and reviews of the place, and then one day in February, six months before we were supposed to leave, I pressed the SEND button. Off went the down-payment. Non-refundable, of course.
At that moment, with the click of a button, the whole project started feeling real. I was really going to retire. We were really going to go to Italy.
In the days that followed, I said that sentence to myself several different ways. Sometimes excitement buoyed me: we’re really going to go! Sometimes terror bubbled up: we’re really going to go?!?! Sometimes I could just take it philosophically, as a fact: yes, we really are going to go (So we need to plan, don’t we?) Sometimes I flashed between all of them in the space of a few minutes.
Now we’re here, in Florence. We’re halfway through our trip, and I would very much like to report that it’s all been great fun, very easy, the trip of a lifetime. Some days, that would be a true thing to say. On those days, I wriggle with delight as I walk from our place across the Arno. I say to myself, We’re really HERE, in Florence! For six whole weeks! There are the other kind of days, too — days when the shopping cart falls to pieces halfway back to our place, or the washing machine leaves the clothes sopping wet, or one of has a bad stomach bug. Then I mutter to myself (or to my husband, if he’s within earshot), Really? We’re here for six weeks? Were we CRAZY?
Maybe. With any experiment, only time will tell.