We have two lives…
And the second begins when we realise we only have one.
Confucius

I’m writing this first blog from the comfort of our new home in Italy - a beautiful old farmhouse set on 10 acres of land in the Pisan hills not far from the hilltop village of Lari in Tuscany. We’ve skipped forward nearly 2 years since me and my husband Nick first had the idea of seriously moving to Italy and changing the way we live.

We’d both fallen in love with Italy, honeymooning in Venice and Tuscany in 2011, and kept coming back for holidays, visiting different regions and learning more about Italian culture and lifestyle, when in 2016 we had the chance to live and work from Florence, albeit for a short time.

At the time, we were working as digital freelancers and were in the doldrums as our much-loved labrador had just died; the house felt empty without him (walks weren’t half as much fun), so the idea of working from Italy for a short time seemed just the thing we needed to give us a fresh look at life and a change of scenery.

The remote working worked well, even with only a 3G dongle for Internet access. We loved our time in Florence and didn’t want it to end; living everyday life in a country we loved, learning a new language, and experiencing a different culture was fun as well as a big challenge. When we returned to the UK, however, life and all its twists and turns gave us cold feet about whether we could make it work permanently.

Fast forward to 2020 and two life-changing things happened: Covid and Brexit. These events finally gave us the push we needed to make the jump. The first lockdown gave us the time to think and reflect like never before about how we were living our lives. Like many others, we were working from home and work life was merging into home life, so it was hard to tell one day from another. We were eager for an escape and initially thought we would just spend some time over the summer in Italy as we came out of lockdown, but the more we thought about it, the more we thought we could make full-time living in Italy a reality, especially when Nick was given the okay by his manager to work remotely.

We put our UK home on the market in July 2020, and to our surprise, it sold within a week. Surely this was a sign! :) We told our families that this was what we wanted to pursue, and then quicker than you can say ‘Negroni per due, per favore’ we were booking our first set of house viewings.