A few more wrinkles

Ecco Massimo!

We took another meeting with our real estate agent this morning. I am beginning to appreciate that at least some of the difficulties I have been blaming on his lassitude probably reflect the problems he's having with the city (whose xerox machine has not been working since last Thursday, which has temporarily brought that end of things to a halt); the notary (who suddenly decided that all the transfer-of-property documents must be translated into English, to be sure we know what we're signing); and perhaps the sellers as well, for all I know.

Poor Massimo. He really does seem to be trying his best.

The word today was that the town surveyor is going to go to an outside copy shop, which would solve that problem; and Massimo is going to see if the translation studio where Pam works will be acceptable to the notary as a source for the document translations. Tomorrow we're all meeting again, with the seller's dad, who's standing in for her, and hopefully then we'll find out if we can get the sales agreement signed this week. Fingers crossed.

That apartment on Via Cavour

And the winner is...

At least one reader guessed right: the three-bedroom on Via Cavour ended up being our first choice once we were actually here in Fidenza, despite our earlier difficulties trying to buy it long distance. And despite that empty room where a kitchen used to be, and despite the real estate agent's apparent lassitude in moving the deal forward.

There's the building, above. Our apartment (I hope!) will be the second floor, the balcony that doesn't have any plants yet.

We have now signed a contract, and so has the seller, agreeing on the price and all the other details. We are hoping to go to a notary and sign the next document, and hand over a deposit, on Wednesday, at which point we will get a set of keys. Then once the town signs off on the property documents (whatever that means), we all meet with the notary yet again, pay out the rest of the money, plus taxes, commission, the notary's fee, and so on and so on, and then the apartment will be fully and officially ours.

But whether that first meeting really will take place on Wednesday remains a bit vague; it took a lot of annoyingly American pushiness to browbeat the real estate agency into giving us a more or less firm date. Agent Massimo and his boss sometimes act as if we are badgering them to give us money, instead of the other way around. All of which continues to give me agita about whether this really will go through.

Ma coraggio!

Here are a few pictures of the interior...

 The place where a kitchen will go...

...the master bedroom (after we paint out that mural)...

...the living room...

...and the view from the balcony looking east. That little tent up the street is the outdoor seating for La Strega (The Witch), my current favorite bar/caffe in the neighborhood.

Pam took this photo for us (can you spot us on the balcony, way up the left?) to show how close the apartment is to the Latteria, our favorite local source for cheeses, prosciutto, and other necessaries. That's the Latteria on the far right.

To explain our enthusiasm, here's what the Latteria looks like inside. I wish this photo could convey how deliriously good it smells in there.

Allora, avanti! Let's hope this all goes ahead as planned.

Fountain of youth

One aspect of getting old that I never thought to worry about during my younger days is the way you run out of things you need. By now Danny and I have accumulated so many kitchen gadgets, so much furniture, so many knick-knacks and shoes and garden tools, that the kind of acquisitive browsing we used to enjoy has come to feel sadly pointless. We keep being reminded that shopping is for people who are still filling out their households and their lives; ours are so full that all that's left is to empty them out.   

One aspect of buying a second house, however, is the excitement of once again having a reason to go shopping. That's especially true of buying a place on another continent, since shipping the hoard of duplicate household goods we've already amassed would cost more than buying new--or so we have convinced ourselves. 

Doesn't Danny look happy in this glam Italian kitchen?

So while we wait for our real estate situation to clarify--Massimo, call us!--we have been haunting Ikea (pronounced ee-KAY-ah here) and a variety of other household emporia. We can't buy anything yet (there's that jinx again), but we figure it's safe to just look. 

For some reason I can't fathom, Pam and Romano seem just as interested in this project as we are, possibly more so, and have been chauffeuring us all over the greater Parma area to look at sinks, tables, and other necessities. Here they are with Danny in Ikea, discussing kitchen layouts. Romano, who always wanted to be an architect, has already begun drawing up plans for several possibilities.

I always like going to Ikea, where I can indulge my fantasies of a completely organized, utterly tidy, Marie-Kondo-worthy life. Happily, there's a branch right outside of Fidenza. But I was also thrilled to discover that the area boasts a lot of used furniture stores, ranging from nicely arranged showrooms full of high-end bedroom sets to my favorite, the Mercatino dell'Usato, which roughly translates as "Little Shop of Horrors." It is crammed with everything you can think of that people no longer want. Here are a few snapshots from today's outing.

The Mercatino has giant credenzas, dolls, used wedding dresses...   

...and dusty old wine and liquor bottles that probably sat in some granny's dining room for the past half-century.

We thought this table-and-chairs set had possibilities.

Danny was intrigued by the selection of tools. (Actually, this was at a different used-furniture store. It was quite an afternoon.)

 They sell art, too. I covet that painting of the pig-faced lady, but they want 50 euros for it.

Maybe I'll go back for it. We'll have a lot of walls to fill.

Citizenship update

Here's some good news. Shortly after my previous post on this topic went up, I heard from Peter, our citizenship guru, that my children and I have effectively been recognized as legit Italian citizens by the Italian government. Woot!

At least, this is what I understand from Peter's somewhat baroque explanations of what has gone down. Apparently the Italian consulate in New York has at last certified that none of the three of us ever renounced our Italian heritage, clearing the last legal hurdle to being recognized.

Before we can claim any concrete benefits, though, Montagano, our sponsoring town in Molise, has to pull together all our records (birth certificates, marriage records, and so on) and transcribe them into the town's own record system. Then the whole collection has to be sent along to the national government as well. Once that's completed, we can return to Montagano, see all our pals there, have a drink at the Circolo Union, and get our official Italian identity documents. When that might be, Peter was unable or unwilling to guess, but I'm fairly confident we'll be able to take care of this sometime this spring.

Prosciutto di Parma, salame, and torta fritta (fried bread)

Danny took this photo at a celebratory lunch shortly after we got the good news. Prosciutto and soft puffs of bread cooked in hot lard are a local tradition and a delicious combination.

I just hope our Southern Italian friends don't feel betrayed by our decision to make our Italian base in the north. Maybe we should bring them a whole Parma ham as a peace offering.

Disclaimer

I'm not holding out on my readers just to heighten the suspense, as some have suggested. Yes, we have decided on an apartment, but the negotiations are snagged--temporarily, I trust--in an odd in-between state that makes me hesitate to proclaim this as a done deal.  The truth is that I'm convinced that doing so could jinx the whole transaction.

Everyone assures us that all is "a posto," in place, and that we have nothing to worry about. Which just makes us worry more. Why are they being so nice, unless they're planning to screw us?

Fidenza tonight is blanketed in winter fog. How can anyone tell what's going on?

I don't believe in God or fortune-telling or astrology, but I do have a deep, profoundly irrational belief that crowing about anything prematurely will surely cause lasting, possibly irreversible harm.

So apologies, and please join me in patiently waiting for a few more i's to be dotted. Then I can share our news without fearing the wrath of the gods.

So, finally, the apartments

Undaunted by jet lag and pouring rain, on our first full day in Italy Danny and I set off with Pam and Romano to look at six apartments that Pam had lined up appointments for.

(If real-estate shopping bores you, please feel free to skip ahead...once I write the next installment.)

The six included all four of our top on-line picks from the month previous. There was the modern loft-like space on Via Ponte Romano that was up just one flights of stairs, and a cute two-and-a-half bedroom apartment, offered fully furnished, on Via Petrarca. The Via Cavour place was still available, so that made the list, and so did a three-bedroom on Via Minzoni with a full kitchen and a view of the back side of Fidenza's 11th-century Duomo.

All four were in the center of town, a short walk from the train station and an array of stores, bars, and other amenities. And all four looked to date from the 1950s or 1960s, when the town was being rebuilt after the American forces had bombed much of it to rubble during the war. (It was a rail hub then, too.)

Pam also arranged for us two see two newer listings, side by side in a building a little to the south but still close to the train station. This place was a bit newer, probably dating from the 1970s, which is why it was several stories taller than the older apartment buildings and had an elevator. The apartments had only two bedrooms each, but they had full kitchens and the asking price for each was only 75,000 euros. Why not take a look?

The Ponte Romano loft had been thoroughly updated, with new wiring, electrical outlets everywhere, and the core of a modern kitchen in place. Here are Romano, Pam, and Danny inspecting the latter.

It didn't have an elevator, but it was up just one shallow flight of stairs and it came with a garage, which we could rent out if we held to our plan not to have a car.




Plus it had two bathrooms and not one but two balconies, so plenty of light. I thought the view was cute, although Danny said, "Who wants to look into an alley?" Me, I guess.

The modernists who'd renovated the place had made it into one big room, and even if we threw up walls here and there we couldn't see how we'd get more than two bedrooms out of the space. But it did have two baths and two balconies...

The space where a kitchen ought to be

Our next stop was the apartment on Via Cavour. I half expected that Massimo wouldn't bother to show up, but there he was, looking stereotypically Italian in a purple sweater and a rakish scarf. (Why didn't I think to take his picture??) In person the apartment was as light and well laid out as Pam and Romano had told us. But the empty room that had once been a kitchen and the completely incomplete second bath promised all kinds of home-improvement misery.

We pressed on, heartened by the fact that most of the other apartments on our list had full, working kitchens.


At the other extreme, in terms of being occupation-ready, was the sweet little place on Via Petrarca. It had a balcony, too, and two bedrooms plus a third roomlet that could fit a single bed, or maybe bunk beds.

Best of all, it came completely furnished, including a set of dining-room chairs that we liked so much we were tempted to buy the place just to obtain them.

The kitchen even came with an industrial-strength cheese grater on the counter

And who wouldn't love to have this kitchen, fully equipped and ready to go? The storage room downstairs had stacks of pots and pans that were also included, plus numerous boxes containing who knows what treasures. No elevator, but up only one flight of stairs.

Next was Pam's favorite, on Via Minzoni. It had two balconies, from one of which you could see the back of the Duomo. (Pam assures us the scaffolding is going to come off one of these years.)

It also had a very nice kitchen, sleek and matching in the Italian style.

There were three bedrooms, two quite large and one a bit small, and though it only had one bath, Pam thought we could add one by carving space out of one of the bigger bedrooms. It was full of light, and it was well priced. There was no elevator, though, and it was up three flights of stairs. We had to ponder whether the kitchen, the savings, and the Duomo view were worth the possible sacrifice of our knees.

Exhausted, we went back to our friends' place for lunch. First we stopped off at the latteria for stracchino cheese, prosciutto, mortadella, and cicciolata, a local variety of head cheese that looks like chocolate halva and tastes like heaven, if heaven were made out of pigs. Some vegetable soup Pam had whipped up, a salad, and the latteria's excellent bread rounded out the meal.

We decided that whatever apartment we ended up choosing, we were definitely in the right part of the world.

We had two more places to look at, and luckily we weren't crazy about either of them. Elevator, yes; but only two bedrooms and one bath each.

The decor reeked of the '70s, Italian version. I particularly admired the groovy wallpaper in this bedroom...

..and the bold pattern choices in this bathroom.

All highly amusing, but I suspected these features wouldn't wear well as time went on.








I was grateful that we were able to write off these last two possibilities as no-goes. The other four offered us so many different things to choose from, and I already found myself struggling to remember which apartment had the red tile kitchen floor and which one had the funny communal attic with clotheslines running across the room. Danny and I decided it was time to head back to the Albergo San Donnino for a nap and then some serious discussion. Were we ready to make a decision, or did we need to find some more apartments to look at?

Dashed hopes

The four things we wanted in an apartment were: a lot of light; three bedrooms (we want to have room for guests, especially our two children and their partners); two baths (for the same reason); and, because of our advanced age, an elevator. One listing seemed to have almost everything we wanted. The apartment was on the south side of Fidenza's Via Cavour, the wide main street that's a pedestrian mall most of the time.

Even on a rainy day, Via Cavour has plenty of charm, and light

The photos in the listing were dark and out of focus, but so were most of the apartment photos we were looking at. We knew if it faced Via Cavour it would get southern light all day long. How dark could it be?

Moreover, it had three bedrooms and an elevator, and while there wasn't a second bath, it did have a sort of powder room with plumbing for a toilet and sink, which could potentially be turned into a full bath. And it was just barely in our price range.

Pam and Romano went to see the place with the real estate agent, a dapper fellow named Massimo, and sent back slightly better pictures and enthusiastic reports. They looked at several other apartments on our behalf as well, and there were three others that we all liked. But the place on Via Cavour intrigued us the most.

Here's a shot Pam took of the kitchen, or what was left of it. (Italians often take everything with them, even the cabinets, when they move.)

And here to the right is the living room. With a balcony!





I think we may have been in a bit of a shopping frenzy. So much so that we decided to make an offer, even though we'd only seen the place virtually.

On our instructions, Pam called Massimo and left him a message saying that we wanted to buy the apartment, naming a price below asking but not, we thought, insultingly far below.

He never called her back. Either we'd badly misjudged Italian price sensitivities, or someone else had snapped the place up. We were very disappointed.

A week and a half later Pam happened to be walking by Massimo's office and stopped in. Whatever happened to the apartment on Via Cavour, she asked him.

"Oh," he said. "I've been meaning to get back to you on that. Yeah, the sellers are interested."

This was carrying Italian insouciance a bit far, we thought. And from there things kept going downhill. As negotiations proceeded Massimo couldn't seem to tell us what the monthly condo fee was, or how many square meters the apartment was, even after we'd all seemingly agreed on a price. The seller half of this deal showed no interest in selling. Finally we  withdrew the offer and gave up on trying to buy long distance.

That was in September. We decided to come over in November and do our house-hunting in person. The digital alternative had proved to be just too frustrating. We figured we'd look at Via Cavour, if it were still on the market. But there were several other apartments that looked possible--some with full working kitchens and motivated sellers--and we wanted to see them all.

Real estate, Italian style

I imagine that if you're shopping for a penthouse in Rome or a villa in Tuscany, priced in the high six figures or beyond, the on-line ads look pretty inviting. But in a small town like Fidenza, and at the bottom of the price scale, many sellers either don't seem to know the modern protocol for real estate advertising, or just can't be bothered.

When we started looking at apartments on line, we not only enjoyed the thrill of the hunt but the sheer amusement value of the photos we were looking at. For while even modest homes in Northern California are gussied up like an Architectural Digest spread when they go on the market, the photos for lower-cost Fidenza apartments tend to be charmingly, or even alarmingly, candid.

Take the notice that showed a bathroom featuring not only a hoarders' trove of hygiene products but an enema bag and what appears to be a skinned lizard.

Danny copied this photo and sent it out to his friends in real estate with the subject line, "A real estate photo designed to SELL."








For the listing above, the sellers appear to have been told not to put things away before the photos were taken, but rather to get every knick-knack they had out on display. I like the casual way the decorator/seller sneaks into this shot.

And I love how this apartment's interiors marry a glittery design sensibility that's molto italiano with college-dorm nonchalance.

You can see the whole listing here.








Some of the listings are sad, though. A lot of these apartments seem to have gone on sale after their occupants died; in this one, even the furniture looks morbidly ghostly.












In fact, several of the places we looked at are offered fully furnished. And since most of these residences sit on the market for months, the images of closed-up apartments and all the unwanted pictures and chairs and chandeliers add up to a potent memento mori. I found this bed covered with pots and pans particularly poignant.

I was also intrigued by this listing because the place is huge (four bedrooms, two baths, 1,700 square feet), cheap (75,000 euros, or about $87,000), and kind of gorgeous (although I don't think the furniture or the batterie de cuisine are included). Unfortunately, it's on the third floor by Italian reckoning, with no elevator, which means it's a fourth-floor walk-up. Hard as I tried to convince myself that this would be great exercise, I knew that at our age it would be folly to gamble on too many years of four-flights-of-stairs mobility.

There was one apartment we were really taken with, however. But let's save that for the next post.

Where we're at

We arrived in Fidenza on Monday evening and are staying in the Albergo San Donnino, which is on the town's main drag, Via Cavour, at the other end of the little downtown from the apartment of our friends, Pam and Romano.

The San Donnino is a funny little place that is both inexpensive and shabby, in a way that I mostly find endearing except when I'm waiting for some bit of data to make its way through the sludge-like wifi connection. The staff is friendly, the sheets are clean, and the room and bathroom are spacious, but the hotel's aspirations are a bit comical.

For example, I see on Wikipedia that one requirement for a two-star hotel (which Albergo San Donnino claims to be) is "a reading light next to the bed." The San Donnino seems to have scrounged around in someone's attic to meet this requirement.

 It's got a frayed cloth cord and you turn it on by plugging it in. It's also broken so that the light can't possibly point at anything you might read unless you were on the ceiling. And there's only one of them. But since Danny and I are both using Kindles, it hardly matters.

And how can I not like a hotel that still offers linen towels and room keys that look like they're from a magic castle?













On Tuesday, our first full day here, we rose early (for us),  gulped down some (excellent) coffee, snagged a couple of things from the San Donnino's rather dreary breakfast buffet of plastic-wrapped pastries, and hurtled off into the pouring rain to look at a series of six apartments with three different realtors. But that story must wait till tomorrow's entry because it's already well past midnight and I haven't done my DuoLingo exercises yet today--currently my only, increasingly tenuous link to some hope of Italian fluency.

A domani!

Update on my Italian dual citizenship

It occurs to me that since this blog was originally launched to share my efforts to become recognized as an Italian citizen (thanks, Poppop, my late lamented Italian-born grandfather!), I should probably mention where that process is at. Which is: stalled.

Before I can be recognized as Italian, various Italian consulates in the United States must officially certify that neither I, nor my children (who are applying with me), nor my father (through whom I claim Italian-ness deriving from his father), ever renounced our right to Italian citizenship. Apparently they would somehow know if we had, but since none of us had any idea we theoretically qualified for this honor until we began the current application process, I am pretty certain that no such renunciation will turn up.

However, the Italian consulate in New York is reportedly sitting on everyone's paperwork, for some unknown reason, and so we much wait patiently until they get around to doing whatever it is they do, at which point our applications will proceed. Eventually all the requisite forms will get back to Montagano, the little town in Molise where we applied for recognition this summer, and will be officially transcribed into the town records. At that point we can return there and get our official Italian identification cards. We'd hoped that might happen as early as next month, but now it looks like it will be sometime in 2018. Pazienza!

Really, though, it's just as well. During the winter Montagano is often covered in several feet of snow, a bit daunting in a mountain town full of winding roads and steep staircases. I'd just as soon go in the spring, when the wildflowers are blooming and hopefully all the paperwork will be fully ripe.

In the meantime, citizenship is not a requirement for purchasing Italian property, so we can proceed with our real-estate fantasy even before the citizenship comes through. Non-citizens do pay higher real estate taxes, but apparently we can get a rebate on the tax payment once I am able to prove that I truly am una cittadina italiana. 

The adventure resumes

I'm firing up this blog again because we are heading back to Italy tomorrow with plans to buy an apartment. Since I've talked of little else but this Italian business for the past many months I thought I'd use "Quanto? Tanto!" as a way of keeping interested friends and relations informed as to this next phase of our Italian adventure.

Readers who still possess some synaptic shreds of memory will recall earlier posts here detailing Danny's fantasy of buying a little villa on the Adriatic coast. They may also remember how said fantasy collapsed once we got there this past July and confronted the reality of the place--the garbage, the beaches studded with construction waste, and, not least, its wildly inconvenient distance from our home base in California. I thought the kibosh had been firmly put on Italian home ownership, but I'd forgotten what an unstoppable force my dear husband can be once he decides he really, really wants something.

As soon as we got home from our Italian sojourn, he began looking on line for Italian properties within our modest price range that would meet my requirements--the things I'd decided a place had to offer before I'd even consider letting him buy us a house there.

First, it had to be easily accessible to a major airport--no flying for 12 or 18 hours and then driving over mountains for 6 hours more. Second, it had to be an urban enough environment that we could meet our basic needs for food and other necessities without having to drive. (We are both poor drivers and age is not improving our reflexes, our vision, or our judgment.) We agreed it should probably be an apartment, rather than a house, since we wouldn't be there more than a few months a year and already have one garden we can't keep up with. Finally, it had to be someplace I'd actually want to spend time in. I remained skeptical that anyplace we could afford would meet these requirements.

After several rather grim weeks during which I rejected all the hill towns and Roman suburbs Danny proposed, he surprised me by saying, "Well, what about an apartment in Fidenza?" And I surprised myself by realizing I found that idea extremely appealing.

Fidenza's central piazza 

Now Fidenza is the place where we started our Italian trip this summer---you can read all about it in the early posts. It's a Northern Italian town of 24,000 or so where our old friends live, a town we've visited many times and thoroughly enjoyed. Suddenly this madcap scheme didn't seem quite so crazy. If we bought something in Fidenza, we'd know someone there; we'd know the town, at least a little; if we got into any kind of trouble, there were people--wonderful people--we could turn to for help and counsel.

Moreover, Fidenza is a rail hub that's an hour by train from Milan, and where you can catch a train to Bologna (75 minutes), Parma (10 minutes), Rome (3.5 hours), Orvieto (5 hours), or just about anyplace else you'd like to go. And the part of Fidenza we're interested in is a short walk from the railway station, and from some of our favorite gelaterias, butchers, and cheesemongers in town. Before I knew it, I was crowding in next to Danny at the computer looking at photos of apartments for sale.

More, much more, about that in coming posts. For now I am going to cut this short because Danny and I are flying to Milan tomorrow morning, and then taking the train to Fidenza, and will commence looking at apartments in person as soon as we arrive. Stay tuned and wish us luck!