Italy - Easter Holiday with Sheila

Sheila's Italian House

Finally, it’s getting spring-like here in Switzerland, but it’s been a long time coming. Over Easter, it still felt like winter to me and I’d arranged to visit Sheila who has just bought a house in Italy. Well, I guess she’s owned the house for two years now, but it still feels to me as if she’s only just got it.

I took the train down from Zurich because she’s out in the countryside of Abruzzo near a village called Palmoli. If I’d have taken a flight to Rome, I’d still have needed four hours on the train to get to Vasto (the closest place with a train station) and would also have had the hassle of getting from the airport to Rome station.

The ten-hour journey itself was smooth and fairly easy and made me realize that I must spend a weekend in Milan at some point (where I changed trains) because it’s so close and the train is good (I was traveling first class on the way down – special offer! – but even economy is fine).

I was picked up at Vasto by Craig (the English builder / handyman that Sheila has been using) in an old and bumpy car/landrover type thing (sorry, I don’t know my cars). It was night time so I didn’t get to see much other than experiencing the bumpy roads.

People say I was brave to move to Egypt, but I don’t think that’s nearly as brave as what Sheila did. She bought a house in Italy in the middle of the countryside that was not deemed habitable and it had no heating, no electricity, and no bathroom. I just bought a flat by the sea that was ready to move into and had English-speaking electricians and plumbers in house if anything went wrong. That wasn’t brave at all!

After a lot of people making promises and not doing anything, Sheila ended up having most of her work done by Craig, who probably overcharges but he at least gets the work done. If I’ve understood correctly – the Italian system just seemed weird to me – she was allocated a project manager by the commune (county), and he has also done quite a bit of the work.

Anyway, somehow, I’m not sure how she managed to do it, she’s turned one room into a bathroom, got electricity in the flat, and had an air conditioner (aka heater) installed. The latter was in place just before I arrived. She has a fireplace, so before I came, she’d been surviving by making fires, but apparently the chimney is too small and needs a flue so if it’s windy, she gets smoked out.

Even though the weather had suddenly turned for the better as I arrived, it was still really cold at night, so I have no idea how Sheila coped without the heating. She’d bought me a nice thick duvet, so even though I’d go to bed thinking I’d be too cold, I slept really well. My mother would have put that down to the country air!

I was also impressed at how many people she knew and how well she’d settled in. It’s a small community, so I think everyone likes to know what everyone else is doing. The big piece of gossip while I was there was that one of Sheila’s neighbours, who is often drunk, had driven into town and up onto the pavement and written off his car. No-one was hurt, but this was still high drama.

Her neighbours are basically farmers, so they often give her produce such as milk direct from the goat, olive oil from their own trees, home-grown vegetables, etc. It’s probably about 20 minutes walk to Palmoli which is the nearest village (but it has a castle) and there are allegedly buses every hour going to Vasto, but because it was Easter, these didn’t run while I was there.

It’s also a bit back in the dark ages – one of her neighbours can’t understand why, if he’s single, and she’s single, they shouldn’t (insert rude word here – he wasn’t subtle!). On the plus side, because it’s a close community, everyone helps everyone else, and she’s been invited to several parties, so it’s very sociable.

The countryside is beautiful and her house comes with quite a lot of land. I spent some time sowing some of her flower seeds, since I don’t get to do gardening very often and it was wonderful to spend some time out in the heart of nature. It wasn’t massively hot, although we did have some lovely days, which was enough for me to get badly sunburned on my face as I hadn’t realized just how sunny it actually was. Oops.

We looked round a large villa that was for sale (150k including a lot of land and enough facilities to be self-sufficient) but currently being rented out by some Dutch holiday makers just around the corner. It was beautiful. Sheila said that she knows someone else – I can’t remember what nationality, maybe also Dutch? – who had just bought a house in Palmoli itself for just 5k (because everyone knows what everyone else is doing). There are some real bargains to be had!

The whole experience put me in the mood for buying property again (which is always a bit fatal), so I’ve recently wasted a lot of time skimming through various property portals. I’ve always liked the idea of living the “good life”, although I suspect in reality I’d just want it in short bursts. However, I need to remember that my current aim is, and should really remain, to save and pay back my debts (current mortgage). But the temptation to ignore that just now is very strong…