A Small Place in Italy

Eric Newby was a wonderful travel writer who chronicled his experiences as an escaped prisoner of war being protected and housed by Italians in his famous book, Love and War in the Apennines. His sequel of sorts was A Small Place in Italy, where Newby tells of returning to Italy with his wife to buy a casa. With characteristic dry wit and descriptive character sketches, he recounts the restoration of the ruined farmhouse and the bureaucracy and friends they meet with along the way.

I pulled it out of a box in the attic because it's been several years since I first read his narrative. I enjoyed it a lot back then, more so than other (uh...shall we say more self-possessed? Pompous?) memoirs about buying and restoring property in Italy. I'm also paying more much more attention to the details than I did on my initial reading.

Remember in this post when I told you we made an impulse buy of a special keepsake? Well, we bought a house! Okay, actually it is a very small apartment, but it is a habitable piece of property nonetheless. We looked at it during our sojourn in Basilicata and debated over it for a few weeks. We made the decision to buy just 16 hours before we left the country. It may seem crazy to you, but it made perfect sense to us, and it definitely made it easier to board that plane, let me tell you.

Oh yeah, did I mention that we made the purchase agreement over the phone? We had already met with the owner, who resides in Rome, and she took a liking to us. We stayed and chatted with her for a few hours, talking about all manner of things, and by the time we departed she had invited us to her vacation home in northern Le Marche.

For some reason - now we are not sure why - we debated over it for another solid week (after meeting the owner) while we packed and stored our stuff. Finally, the day before we were due to leave we looked at each other and said, "Good grief, what is there to debate about? It's cheap, it's actually habitable, and it is in a location we love." And so that decided it.

That, along with the fantastic view from the windows. And, the key selling point for Bryan, it comes with two cantine, hewn right into the rock hillside, where generations upon generations have stored their vino and prosciutto and other goods. It is also in easy reach of my ancestral villages.

We are waiting on the paperwork, but we will soon have our own small place in Italy and we couldn't be happier about it. While our lives are currently in flux, the one place on earth we know we will return to for the rest of our lives is Basilicata, (the motherland) and we have a home to go back to.