Summary

The month’s photo was taken from the very edge of the front yard at the house level. It reveals winter’s arrival, colder temps and wind. Lots of fog in the valleys and the mountain’s silhouette with the sun just rising.

We celebrated the holidays in Italy for the first time, including Mark’s 60th birthday. Sadly we must now leave Italy from January 2nd through the 30th due to visitor visa limits. We are hopeful upon our return we’ll be able to complete the purchase and conclude our immigration formalities/residency visa. December we have continued to focus on making the house more comfortable. The construction team continues with the Wagon Wheel room and Water Tank roofing. Our friend Billy made the trek from the US to spend some winter time with us before he headed back to LA for his own Christmas with family. We’ve made good use of the Garden Tractor, and are eyeing a full-sized tractor for larger property work that is needed.

Construction / Purchase

The construction teams continued daily to remove the roof on the wagon wheel room, then installing large beams and cementing rebar around the roof line. They also performed this same cement work around the tank room. Seems the tank room doesn’t meet the earthquake standards as well. The workers show up rain or shine. It means we have to suffer construction noise during the day, unless we go somewhere (shopping, day-trips…). The good news… there is progress! They believe they will wrap everything up by the end of January which will allow us to complete the purchase. Italian Christmas holidays run through January 6th, so they’ll return on the 7th to finish up and install the new septic tank. Since we’ll be gone at that time, they will have free reign to shutoff power and water as they had planned. If all goes as well, we’ll return on January 30th to finally complete the purchase of the house, and stay for a few more weeks before we leave again to the US for the consulate (or rent something cozy in England if things need more time with the immigration committee).

We believe this new tank replaces the existing one which seems to be struggling. It will likely be replaced before we return so we’ll miss the education.

Driveway Repair

Our driveway meets up with the white road and is basically a dirt road lined with trees, leading to our entry gate. During the construction, very large trucks came down this dirt driveway and mixed with the rain created a sloppy mess in which the construction team, the gas delivery and even we could not safely drive without a lot of sliding or potential of getting stuck. The construction team smoothed out the ruts and delivered some rock, so the driveway is good as before. We’ll need a better plan long term, but this short term fix is just fine.

Immigration

After plan A failed us, we have resubmitted with plan B and are hopeful this results in a green light to schedule our appointment with the LA consulate where they would issue the Immigration Visa that allows us to come and go without the 90 day restrictions. We think we’ll know more by end of January, so until then we are planning to leave early January for an exotic location. The good news is that our Italian immigration attorney seems to be confident we are very close. Hopefully when we return on the 30th we’ll need to fly out to LA to visit the consulate.

Healthcare experience

One of many challenges we’ll face is figuring out our healthcare in Italy. Having just retired, we were using COBRA to maintain our US coverage since retirement. Now that we are living in Italy, US coverage isn’t as useful, but we also aren’t residents so we must fill the gap for a bit while our immigration completes. As we are pretty healthy, the first likely exposure to the Italian system would be medication refills. Since we are cash payers right now, we’d have to have a prescription from our US physician and present that to an Italian physician to fill for us. We wanted to test the system before we needed it, so we set off to find a physician. Our immigration attorney suggested starting with Doctors In Italy. Their website clearly explains the details, they have English speaking physicians and seemed perfect for our situation. I scheduled a virtual visit, €50 and the standard computer hardware and internet. Appointment arrived, he was kind, helpful and spoke fairly good English. I explained my situation and he seemed to understand the assignment. I told him the meds I needed and he explained that he’d send a prescription via email that I could print and take to any pharmacy. After some back and forth on medication alternatives, as Italy doesn’t carry the ones from the US and consulting with my US physician we landed on my choices and he sent the prescriptions as expected. There is an Italian spreadsheet published which tells you by medication name, how much you will pay for the meds. Maybe not shocking, but the price is maybe 1/10th of US costs or less. We visited a local pharmacy where I asked if they had the meds and the costs, they confirmed and showed me the price for 30 days. Great experience for our challenge and finally something that could have been hard was easy. We won’t need to fill anything until spring, but good to know how it works now, vs when we are on the Italian health system early next year.

Landscape projects

Since we got here I was regularly walking a limited portion of the property due to the heavy growth of grasses and bushes. I have been wanting to clear a walking path around the outer perimeter of the entire property so we could take advantage and visualize everything.

I took a Google maps image and mocked up the potential path and then set out to use the garden tractor to cut through the grass and brush. I’ve made great progress and soon the path can be easily walked. Sergio also helped find a larger tractor we are considering as the property is too large for a garden tractor alone, which I have pushed to its limits.

Learning Italian

George has started private Italian lessons with Carolina, who lives near Orvieto and is a journalist. She is very precise, but has a great sense of humor, and is helping make the challenging learning process fun. (Un)fun facts… there are 21 verb tenses in Italian… even most Italians don’t use them properly. The language is so old that they have specific words for just about anything you can imagine, many of which have no relation to anything useful for English speakers. (eg button hole is asola in Italian, but it has no relation to the Italian words for button or hole)

Mark continues with daily Babbel lessons, Italian Word Of The Day and ChatGPT bot that is very interactive and supports his pace for learning. Long road to being comfortable speaking, but progress nonetheless. At this stage Mark feels many words are now familar and he is understanding better than he can speak. Mark refers to his Italian as Crayon, while George’s is Cursive. Both can be understood, but one just sounds better.

The water system

Another deep dive into what it takes to live on a rural farm. The water is supplied by a well and a number of pump and filter systems to keep the water delivered safely. We recently had the water turn to a trickle and because we don’t know how it all works, staring at all the pieces we are feeling very vulnerable. The image below is from the internet, but it gives you an idea of the various components. There is also a picture of our systems. After reviewing each we definitely have a better idea of how it all works, but we’ve asked the plumber to provide additional details and maintenance schedules so we can keep ahead of any failures. Nothing worse then getting in the shower on a cold morning and having things go cold or just shut off.

You can see in this infographic the various wells, pumps, tanks, softeners. Ours has an additional UV treatment that occurs.

The photo below reflects our system and a picture of the storage tank.

We await further clarity from the plumber to make sure we have it all well documented.

Christmas season

Its been lovely witnessing how the Italians express themselves and celebrate during the holiday season. For one, they basically shutdown on the 24th thru January 6th. They also create nativity manger scenes all over the city. They are big fans of lights and almost every house is adorned with something to twinkle or blink. In Orvieto, they too get into the season. Buon Natale!! Buon Anno!! Hoping everyone is enjoying the season. Hugs ❤️❤️❤️

Calabrian Black Squirrel

Though we still hear gunfire daily, suggesting animals are out and about, we only saw a squirrel and another Red Fox this month. As they crossed the road, we could easily make out the squirrels fuzzy ears. As best we could tell, this appeared to be a Calabrian Black Squirrel, dark in color and those fuzzy ears. We’ve only seen the one, so if more should surface we’ll have a better chance of being sure. Wanna keep track of the animals we’ve seen? Animals of Colonnetta.

Cittaslow

Cittaslow is an organisation founded in Italy and inspired by the slow food movement. Cittaslow’s goals include improving the quality of life in towns by slowing down its overall pace, especially in a city’s use of spaces and the flow of life and traffic through them. Orvieto is one of these SLOW towns. We believe this philosophy is what called to us in finding a home and a slower pace. Coming from LA we are having to learn and remind ourselves of the value in slowing down.

Slow for a better life

We are looking for “towns where men are still curious of the old times, towns rich of theatres, squares, cafes, workshops, restaurants and spiritual places, towns with untouched landscapes and charming craftsman where people are still able to recognize the slow course of the Seasons and their genuine products respecting tastes, health and spontaneous customs….” (from Cittaslow Manifesto).

That’s probably enough for December. We hope you all had wonderful holidays and we wish you all the best in the New Year.

Hugs

Mark and George