Buon Anno

Fiasco dell'appartamento

Happy New Year!

Today I’m going to jump forward from the holiday portion of our adventures and give a little context as to where we are at present.

Since the end of September, we’ve been staying in the Tuscan countryside with friends of friends. We’ve been here long enough now, though, that they’ve become our friends, too.

Located near the town of Pontedera, their lovely property is surrounded by village-topped hills and olive groves. This family has generously housed us for the last three months, as we’ve navigated the Italian bureaucratic system at a glacial pace (more on that later).

It’s always an interesting experience to be brought into a home; to be integrated into the working mechanisms that make a family tick. We’ve been truely lucky to be here, as without them, we’ve no idea if we’d still be in Italy. They’ve helped with translating, navigating the system and knowing who to contact for what.

We arrived here straight from Naples. I still have family down there, so Joshua and I were staying with some of my second cousins, in a failed attempt to start the document process. Before we arrived, we’d obviously done our best to research what was needed before our arrival. We’d googled like fanatics (my grade 5 computer teacher would have been proud), finding every blog, random Reddit post and government website we could, that might give us an idea as to what we needed. I also contacted the Italian embassy in Melbourne, where I was helpfully informed that I’d “just have to wait until I arrived in Italy to know exactly what I needed”. What was it that I was saying about foreshadowing in that original post…

Anyway, the time in Naples was rather fruitless, so we headed up north. We’ve made headway here, all of which I’ll cover another time. The important thing is - we have an apartment!
And by ‘have’, I mean secured because we’ve still not moved in. And by secured, I mean we’ve signed a piece of paper but have yet to pay a deposit. It’s all on Italian time, amici.

We looked at this apartment in November. We’d been looking since we arrived in Tuscany and this was our very first viewing. Italy has recently had a change to tax laws, so much like everywhere else, there’s a rental shortage. This means that unless you’re coming over with a trust fund-sized monthly budget, you’re options are slightly limited and you have to fight tooth and nail to get anything. Most places are leased for a minimum of 3-4 years, so our one-year timeline didn’t suit them. Additionally, quite a few properties are leased as Airbnbs in the summer months and short-leased for the winter, which wasn’t going to work for us either.
We originally wanted to live in Lucca (deep down, we still do) however, finding a place to rent there was basically impossible. We’d already joined a Lucca facebook group, visited all the local real estate agents and stayed there for about a week in the hope of finding something or someone, but it came to naught. Whilst it’s a city full of English and American expats, we just don’t seem to have the contacts necessary to snatch up a property before it’s gone. Most of the apartments we showed interest in on the popular property website, Immobiliare, seem to have been leased as soon as they were posted.

There was also the Catch-22 of not having jobs. We needed jobs to be seen as better tenants, but needed a house in order to get a job. We also needed an address to get a bank account, but we needed a bank account to pay for rent…

Eventually we started looking elsewhere, desperate to find whatever we could but still with access to public transport, as we don’t yet have a car. Finally, on the 26th November, we received a call from a real estate agent in response to one of my enquiries. We went by their office, located in Pontedera, for a chat. The owner of the company is a gentleman named Francesco. Imagine a softer, Italian version of the food critic from Ratatouille, and that visually sums up Francesco. Tall, dressed in a suit and possessing a deep, velvety voice, he sits behind his glass desk, like a king in his castle. He’s framed by a gallery of images on the wall behind him; pictures of houses, religious icons and random paraphernalia. On the desk is a picture of his late wife. His daughter, Francesca, who works with him, runs about fulfilling his every command, whilst her baby sleeps in a pram next door. It’s a family affair, and we instantly liked them. They offered to show us an apartment the very next day. It wasn’t the one we’d enquired about, but was larger and cheaper, and in their opinion, “un apartamento bello”. They were a breath of fresh air, after having previously had our hopes dashed by many an agent who promised to call us back but never did.

We viewed the apartment and decided fairly quickly that we liked it, regardless of the fact that the previous occupant had recently died here. No-one currently lived there, as all the shutters were closed, but there were walking frames cluttering the spare room, rosary beads still by the bed, the dishwasher still contained dishes and shaving foam was still sat on the bathroom sink.

Francesco was confident we would be accepted, with the 2nd of January thrown about as a potential move-in date. We asked if he could push for a pre-Christmas settlement, which he said he’d try.

Anyway, it’s the 5th of January, so that didn’t work out. Neither did the 2nd of January, obviously. The family that own the place run a business downstairs, so were extremely busy over Christmas and then they all apparently had influenza over the break.

We went to visit Francesco on Tuesday (the 2nd), and he informed us that the apartment would finally be ready… on the the 1st of February.

As much as we like and appreciate the family we’re with, we’re chomping at the bit to get back into our own space and routine. It’s a disappointing start to the year, as we never thought we’d still be waiting, but alas, we’ve now signed the papers and the 1st of February is a definite.

We’re sure that in a year’s time, we’ll laugh when telling this story.

Needless to say, Christmas and New Years were thus spent here, which was really rather fun, as there’s nothing quite like a Christmas spent surrounded by excited children. The chatter, company and copious amounts of Pandoro and Panettone also helped distract us from our homesickness.