My visit to Fossacesia this fall was full of wonderful surprises. The surprise of having friends here who only months ago were strangers ...

Well, I’m just back from 12 days in Fossacesia and recovered from a 24-hour post-flight bug. (Thanks again, bacterial convention that is ...

On Wednesday morning, I had a tea date at my home with Angela, a Manchester native who now lives in nearby Torino di Sangro. She arrived w...

Usually, you can count on July in Italy to bring 31 days of sun. Not this year. On July 10th, I took a pullman from Rome to Pescara, wher...

Wrought-iron bed that three people can fit in, Sketches of horses where artist has written… Since I left off talking about the artisanal ...

Meanwhile, my niece Victoria visited for a few days from Dublin, where she’s spending the year. It was lovely to bond with her outside th...

My road to a home in Italy, and then to a habitable one, and then to one in which I feel at home has been and continues to be a tortuous ...

The more time I spend in Italy, the more I’m aware of what a stranger I am, culturally. It’s funny to say that because I think of Italian...

I got home from Italy last Tuesday night, 15 days earlier than I’d planned. There were so many things I’d hoped to do during this last st...

Every once in a while, I see in the corner of my eye something dark and darting, usually high on the wall. It gives me a real start until...

As I begin sketching out posts for this blog, I notice that I’m not consistent in my first-person pronoun. Sometimes it’s “I,” other time...

The words are magic. The reality is, too. It’s also terrifying, comical, humbling, and stressful. The magic lies in turning the key and o...

People who’ve visited Italy often rhapsodize about how warm and welcoming are the Italian people. I’ve had that experience, too, but not ...

Like so many others who visit Italy, I fell in love with the sound of the language, the landscape, the cobblestones, the moons, the melod...

I bought the house from an older man named Nick, who’d been born there. He and his wife had emigrated to Canada and remained there for ye...

When I closed on the house, I, like Frances in Under the Tuscan Sun, had only the dimmest idea what to do next. The similarity in our sit...

As it turned out, the GC wasn’t good enough. Expenses were piling up and work was moving glacially. When my father, a builder and land de...

This is the little house as it stands now. There’s still a lot of work to be done, partly to reinforce it structurally because the roof l...

Perhaps only in a second home in Italy can you have a shrine to yourself at the top of the stairs. Yep, that’s me, sort of — if I were 30...

The significant work I’d still like to do would be twofold: tame and landscape the outdoor area and extend the house into part of it. Ant...