Autumn Song

It’s still very dark when we wake. My husband, clean shaved and dressed, makes his own breakfast while I’m still nursing my coffee in my bed. There’s a 7 hour time change we’re adjusting to on this first morning back home in Tennessee after 2 months in our beautiful Umbrian home, and Italy is still deep on our minds.

Dan dreamed of Italy last night. After my shower, I’ll spread pistachio cream on a Costco croissant in hopes of vaguely capturing the pleasant morning routine I had at Matucci’s, my favorite cafe in the stunning medieval hilltop city of Citta Della Pieve, Umbria. “Vorrei un cappuccino e un cornetto pistacchio, per favore,” I learned to say… quite fluently, actually. Truthfully, it didn’t take long for the girls there to bring me my order before I even had a chance to say it. It was hard to say good-bye to them. “Ciao! A presto!” I waved to them as we left. “See you soon!” We’ll be back for another 2 months, Lord willing, this fall.

Purchasing a house in Italy and spending months at a time there is a strange kind of adventure to suddenly delve into at our age… in our 70’s. I blame it on Alice, a very sweet 92 year old woman who had a great impact on me years ago in the town of Leavenworth, WA where we lived at the time. We went to the same church, and although Alice usually drove herself, she didn’t do night driving, so we’d take her with us for evening events. She talked non-stop the whole way there and the whole way back. She told us of adventures she’d enjoyed with her husband before he died, and she said that there were two more things she wanted to do before she herself passed on: she wanted to go on an African safari, and she wanted to go to Australia.

“The way I see it is this,” she said. “I can die sitting in my armchair in the living room watching TV… or I can die by falling out of a tree while watching lions on an African safari. So, I’m going to Africa.” Alice did both of those things before she passed on at a ripe old age of about 95. Her spirit of adventure was contagious.

My husband is an “Alice” kind of person. His own spirit of adventure is not the least bit intimidated by age or health. (Alice had a heart condition that never stopped her.) So after we returned a year ago from probably our 15th trip to Italy–but who’s counting?– this time with our two oldest grandkids, Dan was inspired by an idea to look for a house to buy there. Our goal has been to take our grandkids– two or three at a time– to Europe as they graduate from high school. Our reasoning is that if we are sitting in our living room reading about current world events on the internet or watching on TV, the world appears to be a very frightening place. But our desire is to introduce our grandkids to travel in order to break the intimidation as they interact with other cultures and talk with people who speak a different language. We want them to find out that people are people, whether here or there, and that the world is indeed a remarkably beautiful place. And the history! Oh my! We want our grandkids to experience the authentic history of these gorgeous medieval places!

After returning home from that particular trip, it occurred to Dan that having a home base would be so much better than booking hotel rooms or AirBnB’s, traveling around with suitcases. He began searching for possible houses and locations in the quiet, peaceful ancient Italian hilltop cities of Tuscany or Umbria that we love so much– and before we could blink, pieces fell miraculously into place for us to purchase a completed renovated four story house (with a stone wine cellar containing 180 old bottles of wine below the ground floor) built around 1,000 AD in the Umbrian city of Citta Della Pieve, just a few miles from the border of Tuscany. Now–in the latter chapter of our lives– we spend part of our time in Italy, and part of our time at our home in Tennessee.

Like all the best surprises in life, we’ve discovered that what we’ve gained by having a house in Italy is infinitely more than we’d ever hoped for or dreamed it would be! This is the first of a series of articles on what we’ve discovered by owning a house in one of the most beautiful places on earth, in one of the most hospitable cultures on earth. I’m eager to tell you about the people, the houses, the festivals, the weekly market, the many stunning medieval towns that surround us there, the food… So stay tuned, and experience with us the adventures of living in Umbria.

Ciao!