Cari amici, please bear with me. I didn’t intend to start this letter with a rant, but sometimes things need to be said. Once again I’m rolling my eyes after reading yet another proclamation, presented as unequivocal and universally true, about living in Italy—particularly the cost. Can people please stop making blanket statements? Does it cost the same to live in New York City as in Boise, Idaho? No. So why is Italy often presented as a one-size-fits-all constant?
The comment in question, a response to someone asking about the financial requirements for an elective residency visa, stated with absolute conviction that the cost of living in Italy—with no qualifications regarding circumstances whatsoever, meaning for everyone, everywhere, from Torino and Trieste to Taranto and Trapani—is “quite high.” This can be true and is true in some cases. However, it’s not an absolute. It’s definitely not true for me. For me, Italy is a bargain.
Here’s something undeniable, a hard-and-fast, yes, absolute truth: I could not have survived on my retirement income and savings if I had stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, I could never have retired. But in Italy, I could. That said, here’s another truth: I’ve just visited friends in Milano (if you read my previous post, yes, we did boomerang back there from Bologna to see Leonardo’s Cenacolo) and Como, where the prices are considerably higher than in Perugia for housing and somewhat (usually) higher for lots of other things. I doubt I could afford to live comfortably in either place—but there are plenty of Italian cities and towns where I could live even more cheaply than I do in Perugia.
What I’m trying to say is this—pleasepleaseplease don’t rely on labels like “expensive” or “cheap,” which have specific meanings to individuals and shouldn’t be used as blanket terms. Sites like Numbeo cite actual data for living expenses in various cities and towns (choose them from a drop-down menu), and sites like Immobiliare and Casa will tell you what housing prices are like in the areas that interest you. Are there outliers, exceptions to the rule? Of course there are.
Aside from cost of living, Italy’s cities and towns have unique personalities and vibes that accentuate the fact that there is no room for words like “universal” in this country. I was reminded of that this week when I walked through Modena, whose population is greater than Perugia’s but whose historic center feels minuscule by comparison. It’s a sweet little city, pretty, with a fantastic duomo, quiet on a Monday morning and (from what I saw) entirely shuttered during the pausa. This week I’ve also been in Milano, Como, and Bologna, cities whose populations and personalities are markedly diverse—Milano energized and elegant; Como charming and confidently seductive; Bologna soccer-crazed and wild with students, its beauty massive, monotone, severe. Some I’d been to before; some I hadn’t. Each city delivers the unexpected, whether in positive or negative ways. Each city offers its own chemistry, its own terms of existence.
So please, ignore all those absolutes. And don’t listen to online pontificators who insist that everything, everywhere, for everyone, is one way and one way only. Italy has many truths, and yours will depend on where you came from, what your resources are, and what kind of life you want to live.
Rant over. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Recently, I finished reading Ann Patchett’s latest novel, The Dutch House, a quietly powerful story about home and loss and our ties to the past, and the following sentence struck me as a good description of how recent immigrants sometimes feel in their adopted land.
“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.”
With that idea of suspension in mind, here are five ways to make adapting to life in Italy less traumatic challenging. Mind you, I’m not complaining, because I choose to live in Italy, and living here, like anywhere, has its particularities. So let’s preface this list by saying that the single most important way to adapt to life in Italy is to accept that you need to adapt. Unless you’re here against your will, you have no reason to complain (except for some amount of perfectly normal whining, as I have just done, because that’s what we fallible humans do).
Make no assumptions about anything, ever.
In Italy, nothing is ever true in general; you must always find out the specifics. For example, I lived in Lucca when I first moved to Italy, but soon thereafter I decided to relocate to Perugia. Because I lived in a ZTL zone (limited traffic zone), I went on the comune’s website to find out if I could get a day pass for the guy-with-a-van I’d hired to transport me and my stuff. Yes, such a pass existed—fantastic! So off we went to the appropriate office to apply for the pass, only to find that we couldn’t get one. Why not? Because I hadn’t yet declared residency, and the passes were only for residents. We argued and pleaded, and in response we got a shrug and a “non è possibile.” What fun it was to schlep everything by taxi to my guy’s van, waiting in a parking lot outside the city walls.
Here’s another assumption Americans, especially those used to finding deep-freeze air-conditioning everywhere they go, could reasonably make. It’s summertime, lunchtime, and you find a ristorante/pizzeria that looks promising. You want pizza. You may not have it. Why? Because in the suffocating heat of summer, no one wants to fire up the inferno (aka pizza oven), which makes perfect sense, and which is why many pizzerias are open for only for dinner in the summer. (Excepting, of course, those in areas with tons of tourist traffic.)
Be persistent.
It’s not unusual to hit roadblocks in Italy, and a newbie will assume they’re insurmountable. Possibly true. But it’s equally possible that if you try again on another day and/or with another representative of whatever bureaucratic agency you’re butting heads with, you will succeed. Here’s my favorite example of that.
Back in 2018, when I was a newbie living in Lucca, I wanted to visit friends in Perugia. We were meeting for lunch because dinner wasn’t possible—one friend lived outside of Perugia, and she had to catch the last bus home at 7pm. (Train service to her town had been interrupted.) But from Lucca, no train would get me to Perugia in time for lunch. I could get partway there, to Firenze, and there I would sit until sometime in the afternoon.
Actually there was one morning train, but for some reason it wasn’t purchasable. I could see it there on the ticket machine screen, grayed out but visible, as if to say yes, I am exactly what you need and you may not have me. Hoping the problem might be with the machine, I talked to a clerk—but alas, it was true. I couldn’t buy that ticket because it was only available to travelers connecting from a Frecciarossa train. Nothing could be done, the clerk said. Case closed.
Fuming, I went home and told my friends the bad news. “Go back tomorrow and talk to someone else,” they said. Skeptical me argued there was no point, but they insisted. So I went back, and this time I talked to a different clerk who, halfway through my explanation of the problem, threw up his hands in disgust. It was wrong, and stupid, he said, and, still muttering, turned away to pound on his keyboard. Moments later he whipped two tickets out of a printer—one from Lucca to Firenze and one from Firenze to Perugia—and leaned forward, his voice soft and conspiratorial. “When you get to Firenze, throw this ticket away,” he said, pointing to the first ticket. “If anyone asks, you came from Bologna on the Freccia, but you lost your ticket.”
Lesson learned. Thanks to a clerk who was willing to break a nonsensical rule, I made it to Perugia in time for lunch.
Know where to go for information.
Don’t trust websites for local businesses. Your comune, the regional or national health system, and other such entities usually have reliable information, but for the little guys, Facebook rules (unfortunately). Companies, stores, restaurants, and so on are far more likely to update their Facebook pages than their websites. Even Google has more accurate information most of the time. Better yet, call the place in question. And remember, posted hours are sometimes accurate and sometimes not.
Ask the questions you don’t know you need to.
Don’t expect that procedures and practices will be explained to you. Just as it might not occur to you to ask how something you’re accustomed to doing in your home country is done here, it also doesn’t occur to people here that you’re used to a different way.
Here’s an example. One time when my doctor had ordered a full blood analysis for me, she said, rather pointedly, that she’d included a urinalysis. “Fine,” I said, wondering why she thought it necessary to tell me. I wondered, but I DIDN’T ASK, and therein lies the problem. (Granted, not a big one—this time.)
When I showed up for my blood draw, the phlebotomist asked for my urine sample. You see, the reason my doctor mentioned the urinalysis was that I should have gone to the pharmacy and bought the appropriate sterile container, then collected the specimen the morning of my exam and brought it with me. Who knew? I was used to being given a container at the time of the exam, and my doctor had no idea that was how it was done in the U.S. For her, it was perfectly normal to go to the pharmacy for a container and bring the specimen to the lab.
All this to say that if you’re asking yourself a question, make sure to redirect it to someone who can answer it. There’s usually another piece to the puzzle.
Cultivate patience.
In general, things in Italy take more time than most Americans are accustomed to. Have a list of five or six things you want to crank out in an afternoon? Consider yourself lucky if you get half of them done. Expect to wait, and wait, and (sometimes) wait—for example, I never go to the vet without expecting to be there at least an hour and a half. And if you value your time an iota, for the love of gelato and bucatini all’amatriciana, do NOT go to the post office on the designated days/times when pensioners pick up their checks. Unless, of course, you like standing in a line that snakes out the door and down the piazza.
Insomma . . . (in conclusion)
Maybe I’m sounding like a broken record: adapt, be open to change, don’t have ironclad expectations, your mileage may vary, cultivate patience. Obviously I’m responding to what I see over and over again in expat groups—the persistent spread of misinformation (often well intentioned, but still wrong), the proclamations of so-called experts, the constant barrage of invent-the-wheel-again questions. There are experts on social media, and you need to learn to seek them out.
In the meantime, I hope to be a voice of reason, to speak from experience but not expect that your own experience will always (or ever) align with mine, and to illustrate that living in a foreign country is no small feat—at least until it stops feeling foreign. But I’m me, and I have my particular talents and weaknesses, my particular mix of age and experience, needs and desires. I live in Perugia, not Milano or Bologna or Como, not Chiavari or Lecce or Gioia Sannitica. I’m learning how to navigate, how to comprehend, how to live. Nothing I say is carved in stone.
© 2022 Cheryl A. Ossola
Poem of the week:
“Good Bones” by Maggie Smith
I have discovered that the 3/4 Ps in Italy have helped me cope with buying a house and upgrading to a liveable standard. They are Patience - Politeness - Plenty of Prosecco.
Another excellent entry, Cheryl, thank you. I loved the immigrant quote. I need to check out that Patchett book.
Also, what would have happened if you had taken a chance and let the moving van park in a ZTL without the day pass? How big of a ticket would it have been, and might it have been worth your while (versus all the schlepping) to chance it? See, this is how I look at things: forgiveness vs permission kind of thing.
Bigger question, do people establish residency 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 moving in, is that the order the cretini in the comune want you to do things? I know you were moving out, but people need moving vans for both scenarios, no?