What It’s Like Leaving It All Behind To Go Live in Italy

It had been two and a half years of sitting in that damn office chair, and I had become obsessed with figuring out how to get out of it.

I felt selfish for wanting something different so badly. Life was great.

We were living in St Petersburg, Florida where most weekends were spent lounging on some of the most beautiful beaches in the country. Our tiny apartment was perfect for us, with a stellar location where we could walk to the best parts of the city. We were a ten minute walk to the bay and spent almost every afternoon walking through the park that overlooked it, while almost always being accompanied by dolphins. We had great friends. We had our fur babies. And to top it off – we were months away from getting married in this place we had come to love so much, surrounded by the people that mattered most to us.

But when everything is great, isn’t it okay to want more?

Because we did. There was something that was off. We were both spending 40 hours a week in jobs that we weren’t getting satisfaction from. It was starting to wear on us both.

I was crunching numbers as an accountant for a reputable digital media company, but the monotony was really getting to me. Mike was working for a medical marijuana dispensary, which was a nice change from his stint working in the restaurant industry, but he too was ready for a change.

We’re both wanderers, after all, and eventually it would be time to move again.

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

It was less than two months before our wedding. We were sitting in our living room and had just gotten off a WhatsApp face-to-face phone call with a chef in Italy named Simona. Mike was silent for a moment as I stared at him with a giant grin on my face that I couldn’t show subtly even if I tried.

Simona had officially offered us the opportunity to come live in her farmhouse in the beautiful countryside of Italy in exchange for a little work for her and for us – the experience of a lifetime.

Mike would have the opportunity to work alongside a talented chef who had her own established company, traveled the world cooking, and was soon on her way to staging at one of the most famous restaurants in the world: the French Laundry.

Simona also had a vegetable garden that she needed help with, where she organically grew the vegetables and herbs she used to cook with. I had been constantly talking about how I wanted to get my hands dirty and what better way to get those hands dirty than growing in a garden in the Italian countryside.

Leading up to this day in our living room, we had been browsing a number of different opportunities on a website called Working Couples. We had many potential offers in the months leading up to the wedding.

We were offered the opportunity to manage a few luxury cabins right outside Yosemite, while living in a tiny cabin in the woods. We talked to a lady in Oregon who was looking for a couple to manage both her resort and restaurant near Crater Lake. There was another couple in Colorado in a town we had never heard of that was looking to have a couple take over their bed and breakfast, so that they both could travel themselves.

Each opportunity sounded right up our alley, but with each one we knew it wasn’t quite the right time. Each of these gigs offered a free place to live in exchange for work, along with a very small pay rate for the two of us – much less than what one of us was making in our current jobs. With that being the case, along with being in the midst of the last stages of planning our wedding – we knew we couldn’t just yet. Planning a wedding, even for two pretty chill people like ourselves, is a full time job in itself.

But when we saw the opportunity in Italy pop up on the Working Couple’s website, we couldn’t help but write her because, why not?

Once we did, we received an e-mail back from her pretty quickly.

We knew it was a bit crazy to consider packing “our life” up in boxes again and most importantly, finding temporary homes for our fur children to commit to just a couple months in Italy. We had been looking for an opportunity where we could bring them with us. But something convinced both of us that regardless, it was worth talking to her.

As soon as she picked up on the other end and our two screens met for the first time, it was a no brainer. Just like that, we loved her. And just as we had seen in her pictures on her website, blog, and Instagram, her smile was infectious. She didn’t stop smiling for a single second while we were on the phone with her. She radiated joy in her body language and every word she spoke. She was instantly like-able.

While she explained her garden to plate project to us and what we could expect, she quickly answered all of the questions we had written down for her before we even got to them. We would have the opportunity to live in her farmhouse with a car to drive and would be paid 500 euros per month in exchange for working in the garden, assisting in her cooking classes, and helping her in the villas where she worked as a private chef for vacationers in Italy.

I think it’s safe to say that most people would hear the 500 euros per month part and immediately think – there’s just no way. And it was definitely something we had to consider. But it felt right, a perfect fit, really, and we knew we could make it work. We had been saving so that we could get out and see more of the world again, and this seemed like the opportunity we had been waiting for.

After Mike’s short moment of sitting in silence he looked over at me, smiled, and said, “Well… I guess we’re going to Italy!” I ran over and wrapped my arms around him and felt this rush of relief run throughout my whole body. Though I knew the amount of factors involved in getting there were quite overwhelming, we were on to another adventure.

Fast forward nearly nine months, and we’re here. It wasn’t easy getting here, but as with everything else for us in life it was worth every part of the adventure.

We’ve been in Allerona, Italy for over a month now. We host cooking classes at this farmhouse where people come in from all over the States and each time they enter the house and walk through the doors to the backyard, they are instantly taken aback by the beauty. They can’t believe we live here, and sometimes, though we’ve become accustomed to life in Italy and we’ve made ourselves very much at home here – we can’t either.

Life in Italy

Allerona, Italy is a very small town made up of no more than a couple thousand people. It’s not a town where you see tourists walking around and most people here speak as much English as we speak Italian.

We live in a beautiful farmhouse in the country side, about a ten minute drive from the residential part of Allerona.

The residential “bigger” part of town, also known as Allerona Scalo, has one small grocery store that is open (if it’s not a holiday) from 8am-1pm and then opens up again from 5pm to 8:30pm. Aside from that, there’s a coffee shop that is one of the only shops in town for kilometers in both directions open during siesta time (and, yes, that’s totally a thing here). It’s neighbored by a bar and a few other stores that we rarely see open.

The most action you see on the streets are older ladies sitting outside in groups chatting for hours on their door step. Traffic is caused by the old men in bulldozers driving down the road getting ready for harvest.

Allerona proper is a five minute drive uphill from us. It’s an even tinier part of town, majestic with it’s cobblestone streets. It’s an area where it appears as if its residents are always sleeping. There is one bar and one restaurant in the area, most of the time also not open.

A twenty minute drive from us is Orvieto Scalo, the biggest town nearby.  That’s generally where we go to do our grocery shopping, because it’s cheaper and there are more options.  Some days we’ll visit Orvieto proper, which is a tiny hilltop town that literally sits on a giant wall. It’s above the lower part of town and there you can find good wine for $2.50 a bottle, a market a couple days a week, and some of the best gelato around.  You can walk the whole area in less than an hour. 

Life at the farmhouse is a world of its own. Allerona is a town made up of only a couple thousand people, though you’d think by the looks of it a couple hundred, yet the town still feels big compared to the cobblestone house that lies in the countryside with its unpaved roads that you take to get there.

Most mornings begin watering the garden and tending to it, though we’ve learned that with a little bit of sunlight, lots of water, and some trimming here and there the plants do their thing on their own. They are quite magical, really.

We’ve learned that the not so prettiest vegetables can be the most tasty and we’ve also confirmed the fact that in America, we care WAY too much about the appearance of our vegetables. Looks aren’t everything, America.

When we’re not working in cooking classes with vacationers or college kids or heading to villas, we leave the farmhouse generally once a day, mainly to go to the grocery store which is usually a few hour event because Mike loves walking around grocery stores.

We have the opportunity to explore some days. We’ve been to Florence and Naples. We’ve cruised around the region of Umbria where we are, and the famous region of Tuscany several times.

We’ve gotten to experience some true Italian living such as picking grapes and making grape juice out of it and harvesting olives and watching it be pressed in to olive oil. We experienced our first Italian party surrounded by Italians speaking Italian and felt the purest feelings of joy and love even if we didn’t know most of what was being said. Our lack of the Italian language has been humbling.

We eat a TON of freshly made pasta and have so many tomatoes and so much eggplant in the garden that we really don’t know what to do with it all. All of the veggies and herbs out back are organic, which really just means we use nothing but pure sunlight and water to give them life. We can pick a yellow tomato straight from it’s branch or grab some basil, oregano, or thyme and eat it right then and there. We’ve grown a few things like basil, radishes, parsley, and peas straight from seeds and we’ve promised ourselves that we will never buy basil again now that we know how easy it is to grow.

We love to drive in our tiny little Ford Fiesta (the car we refer to as “the Ferrari”) and ride as we feel the fresh air on our skin, stare out the window at the rolling hills, and dream of making one of those perfect abandoned cobblestone houses our own one day.

It’s a simple life. It’s a time in our lives when we have all the time in the world. We have the kind of time where if we want to go to that famous gelato shop that’s an hour and a half away, we’re both game and make an adventure out of it. That time is something many people won’t ever have and we treasure it. It’s something that throughout extended periods of travel we’ve learned to love and appreciate, because all the time in the world – it’s not for everyone.

We take it all one day at a time. The future after here is a total mystery, and honestly, sometimes that can be a bit overwhelming. But for now – we’re living in the present while we enjoy talking about the endless possibilities that lie ahead. The potential options of where we can go and what we can do next are exciting to think about.

So are we happy that we said yes to that random lovely chef and packed up our life to move to Italy for a short time? Well, they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we’ll let you be the judge.

“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” -Alan Keightley