About us
In 2020, during the start of the first Covid lockdown and the countdown to Brexit, we decided to up sticks from the UK and make the leap to living and working in Italy. This blog is all about how we achieved it, how we found and purchased our new home, Casale Pioppo, and the life we are now building.
Nick (right in the below photo) is a data scientist, working remotely from our home here in Italy. Before moving to Italy, Fran worked in digital marketing, but has a passion for gardening and is now focussed full-time on taking care of the horticulture projects we are starting. We met each other at work in Edinburgh in 2008, and since honeymooning in Italy in 2011, we’ve dreamed of one day living here. Finally, in 2020, we made it happen.
We hope our adventures inspire all those who have a dream they want to fulfil, whether it be living in Italy, developing a plot of land, or creating a small business - it’s about taking a chance and not letting fear get in the way. We’d love to hear from you and have you follow us on social media.
About the house and land
Our farmhouse, that we named ‘Pioppo’ after the beautiful, old black poplar at the front of the house, was built approximately 220 years ago, circa. 1800 in a long-house Tuscan farmhouse style, as opposed to the earlier square-shaped Leopoldian Tuscan farmhouses. Designed for farm life and self-sufficiency, it housed the animals, farm machinery and tools on the ground floor, with the family living upstairs. The house has many of the original features often seen in Tuscan farmhouses, such as chestnut beamed ceilings with terracotta tiles, a barrelled terracotta ceiling on the ground floor, a large traditional kitchen fireplace, an attached barn for drying grain (granaio), and bread oven (forno) once used for baking bread, but now perfect for pizza nights! A short distance from the house set under the main house on the hillside is a separate cellar/cantina (to be restored), once used for storing wine and preserving food. To aid the store and supply of water, a cistern of around 15,000 litres collected rainwater from the roof, again to be restored back to working order!
The land covers approximately 4 hectares (10 acres), with 3 acres of direct hillside land surrounding the house and 7 acres of woodland behind the house and a short distance away. The area around the house is home to lots of wildlife, including wild boar, deer, porcupines, badgers, foxes, hares, bats, and a wide variety of birds, including hoopoes, cuckoos, jays, owls, kestrels, golden orioles, falcons and buzzards. We are situated in the province of Casciana Terme Lari in the province of Pisa, not far from the medieval hilltop town of Lari in Tuscany.
As novices to owning such a large plot of land, we are initially concentrating on the 3 acres around the house. We are inspired by resilient and sustainable gardening, permaculture practices, and using methods to conserve water which are in harmony with nature and the wildlife we share this land with.
We have big plans for the farmhouse, which include a respectful restoration, maintaining its original features, and upgrading its systems and insulation to be greener and more efficient, using solar panels for electricity. We’ll document our experiences - good and bad! - here and on social media. We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on what we’re doing.