Another dream dies

The reason we came to Italy, aside from the food, was to move ahead on our efforts to get dual citizenship. That part of the program was completed while we were in Montagano.

The reason Danny and I are sticking around for a few weeks more is because Danny has for some time been dreaming of buying a house on Italy's southern Adriatic coast.

He liked the idea of being somewhere besides the U.S., for reasons I'm sure I don't have to explain. (Pogroms and Nazis figure into it.)  He also liked the fact that the weather in this part of Italy is hot and dry, not unlike that of his favorite place, the California desert. And he particularly liked that real estate in Italy generally, and here in particular, is cheap compared to California. He'd seen on line that you can buy a three-bedroom house here, a short walk from the beach, for about a quarter of what a hovel in the Bay Area would cost you. How could he not be interested?

I was more resistant to the idea, mostly because it's so far away from my real life and getting to and from this place seemed like a lot of hassle and expense, including 20 hours of air travel plus a six-hour train ride from Rome. But I agreed to add a couple of weeks to our trip to spend some time here and see if the sun and sand might change my mind.

If you read the previous post, you know that nature hasn't been particularly cooperative. The oppressive heat of our first week here made me homesick for the gray, cool summers of El Cerrito. Undeterred, Danny arranged for us to go see one particular house that he's been eyeing for months now, a three-bedroom, two-bath, fully modernized place that's a five-minute walk from the water and is on the market for 110,00 euros--about $125,000 at today's exchange rate. If you know anything about California real estate prices, you know that's about a tenth of what something equivalent would cost in the Golden State.

On Wednesday, June 28, we drove over to the next town to see Danny's dream house. The Italian real estate agent was on hand, but he didn't speak much English, whereas the owners, a very nice British couple, were on hand and did, so they showed us around. They looked to be in our age bracket, perhaps a few years older (or maybe they just spend more time in the sun).

The house was lovely, nicely arranged, with air-conditioning in all three bedrooms and a well-equipped kitchen. They're selling it fully furnished, down to the attractive array of dishes and pots. I winced inwardly when I saw the hope in their eyes as we came in the door, and again when they admitted that it has been on the market for two years.

They said that the oppressive heat--it was again in the mid-90s--was uncharacteristic for June; usually it only gets that hot in August. They told us the low (by California standards) property taxes, 800 euros a year, and described all the improvements they'd made. They assured us that, unlike many houses in the area, theirs had documents proving that the house had been built legally on land with clear title. I imagine those are some of the reasons the house is priced a bit higher than some similar ones in the neighborhood.

We thanked them for showing us around, told them--sincerely--that their house was great, and said we'd be in touch. As soon as we were alone I said to my husband, "Face it--we're too old for this."

He agreed. "I liked starting out with a new place, in a new place," he said. "It would make us feel young. But now that we're here, I don't think we have the energy for this."

Nice as the house was, it and the whole area--the weather, the look of the streets, even the food--weren't nice enough to make us forget, even momentarily, how far away this is from our friends, our children, our medical providers, from all our support systems, and how much effort and stress it would take to buy a place and the keep it going. Twenty or thirty years ago buying a house in an Italian beach town might well have looked like an adventure; now it just looks like an ordeal.

We ran into the agent the next day in Lecce and told him, in clumsy Italian, that though we'd really liked the house we'd decided we were just too old to buy something so far from our home base. He looked like he understood, and he didn't disagree with us.

If anyone reading this is feeling more peppy, here's the listing.

It really is a very nice house. And they say the beach nearby is marvelous. But we didn't even bother walking over to look at the beach; we just went back to our air-conditioned rental and took a nap.