When my wife and I turned our lives upside down to follow a dream, we knew there would be unintended consequences. Still, we never imaged we’d end up living like hobos.
But for 10 years after we sold our home in Canada to finance the creation of our tourism business in Abruzzo, Italy, that’s exactly what happened.
We were so focused on getting the business up and running, and then making it thrive, that where we actually lived was always an afterthought.
After we sold our place in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, we moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment a few blocks away. The idea was to continue working our day jobs, live small, and save during renovations on our historic Italian villa in the town of Torre de’Passeri.
It was supposed to be a year – tops.
Two-and-a-half years and a couple blown budgets later, we finally moved to Italy to oversee the last big projects at the villa, which was to become the homebase for our small-group, all-inclusive tour company.
We travelled lean. A few suitcases, some books, three guitars, and a couple old dogs. The personal things we wanted to keep – photo albums, art, my wife Lisa’s degrees, wedding pictures, etc. – went into a rented garage.
At the time we thought we would live in one of the five villa bedrooms for a couple years until there was enough business for it to make financial sense for us to rent an apartment.
Nine months later, due to some good marketing luck, we needed that room to meet demand. So, we had to move out before we opened in the spring of 2016.
Here’s how much thought we put into where we would live: we asked our cleaning lady if she knew of a furnished apartment for rent; she said she had one; we said OK after a two-minute viewing. The dogs and suitcases were transferred.
The house was, and still is, on a typical southern Italian village downtown street – basically a donkey path they put cobblestones on 200 years ago with alleyways shooting off in random directions.
As a result, the buildings are right in front, behind, beside and on top of each other. This allows you some benefits, like listening to the neighbours fight over which pasta goes with which sauce. But it has drawbacks too. Like listening to your neighbour working out a gastro issue after pairing the wrong pasta and sauce.
We were a curiosity in the reality tv show that played out daily on the tiny street. The neighbours were politely, but persistently, trying to figure out how we could be dumb enough to make the mistake of leaving successful careers in North America to move to their town.
But the big problem for me was there was almost no natural light. It was cold, dark, damp.
So, we moved back to the villa at the end of the first season, and when season two approached, we had to find another place. After taking a peek at a furnished apartment above our accountant’s office on our town’s main street, we took it.
It had way more natural light and way less neighbours-in-your-faceness. It also had 100% more teenage girls hanging out on the corner screaming under our bedroom window. And there was 10 times as many teenage boys on noisy-as-hell scooters racing up and down main street trying to impress those girls.
Then there was the uncomfortable level of religious art and icons adorning the walls in the apartment. It was everywhere you looked.
In my opinion, anyone who needs seven paintings of saints, three mother and child pieces, and depictions of Jesus at all 14 stations of the cross must have a pile of deep, dark, ugly secrets to cover up.
For the next five years, we bounced back and forth between this den of piety during tourist season and the villa in the winters. Then, for the first year of Covid, we were at the villa. It was a nice way to spend the lockdowns, and it also gave us a taste of having a home again.
We’d been flitting around, untethered, and I realized I was missing the grounded feeling you get from having a home, not just a place to sleep. We were missing a place for us. A place with our bad colour choices, not somebody else’s. Our art on the walls. Our junk in the closets.
With business returning to almost normal last year, we decided it was time for us to reward ourselves with a place of our own.
We like Torre de’Passeri, so we decided we would look for a house close to town with good outside space for our pack of mutts. It didn’t take long to find a sweet little farmhouse on a hill overlooking the town. You can actually see it from the villa.
We closed the deal in December, started living in it mid-January, and moved the last of our stored junk in last week.
By North American standards, it’s pretty small, and we have a few projects we want to do, but after only a couple weeks, I can tell you, it’s exactly what we wanted - and needed.
It already feels like home.
Turns out, I don’t like being a hobo.