Finding a rental, residency and the search for our dream house
Waking up to a new life in Italy during the pandemic was surreal, exciting and a little bit scary. We had to get Covid tests and quarantine for the first week before we could start to get out and make future plans. Our initial rental was just for 2 weeks, so we needed to secure something longer-term to allow us to apply for residency.
We managed to find our longer-term rental property relatively quickly. It was a spacious apartment at the top of a beautiful Florentine country palazzo with views across the mountainside’s olive groves. We quickly made friends with our neighbour below, another fellow Brit who had also taken the chance to live and work out of Italy with her 2 dogs. Our landlords (an Italian/British husband and wife) couldn’t have been more supportive and we were able to give us a transitory rental agreement for 1 year. They then helped us with the residency process, allowing us to get our ID cards just before the Christmas holidays and Brexit deadline, meaning that we could relax and enjoy our first Christmas in Italy, albeit in another strict covid lockdown. From first being our landlords, we’ve became firm friends since and they have helped us no end in settling into Italian life. Rule number 1 into settling in to a new country - find yourself some trusted friends!
As I got used to working remotely from Italy, Fran got to searching for new properties for us to view. We viewed a number of properties, all of which fell short of our requirements, until after just a month of fresh searching we found the one.
In the end, our chosen house was in a corner of Tuscany that we’d never seen or heard of before. Not far from the medieval hilltop town of Lari, it was a pretty pink farmhouse with a fair bit of land. The online details all seemed encouraging and we were excited to arrange a viewing as quickly as possible.
On a grey, late November morning, we met the estate agent in a local village car park, then followed her down a winding dirt track until we finally came up to the gated entrance. One of the owners was waiting for us there and we introduced ourselves, all behind our face masks, while we took in the house tour. The immediate thing that struck us was the view looking out from the house - perched on a hill, directly opposite a beautiful winery and its vineyards, and alongside another pretty pink Leopoldian villa. The house itself was not in bad condition for its age and was last modernised in the 90s (not bad for a farmhouse!), so we could move in straight away. It offered us the accommodation we were looking for, around 270 sqm - not too big, or too small - and somewhere we could host our families and friends comfortably, and as it was classed as a multi-unit house it also had the added opportunity of holiday lets. It all seemed perfect and both of us got ‘that feeling’ when you know you’ve found the one.
As we drove away, we took time to take in the local area more, driving through the winding roads through Cevoli and onto Lari. The scenery around us was stunning, made up of gently rolling hills with olive groves and cherry orchards - what Lari is famous for. Being not too far from many of Tuscany’s famous cities, towns and villages - Pisa (20mins), Florence (1h 15mins), Lucca (40mins), Volterra (40mins), the Tuscan coast (30mins) and close to shops and local services, we were certain that we’d found our new home.
The view looking out from the farmhouse
During our research on buying in Italy, we’d read about the bidding process and how you could only move forward with a serious bid. We managed to secure our bid with the help of a lawyer (though you don’t necessarily need one, but we were overly cautious!) and made it subject to a survey. We secured the survey with the use of a geometra (a technical surveyor) in the following January 2021 and the findings were largely positive, however, it wasn’t until November of that year, a whole year later, that we could finally complete the purchase and move in.
Everyone’s buying process in Italy is different. For us, the ups and downs were really quite stressful, to say the least. Lawyers got involved at one stage and it became difficult to see a way through and conclude the sale. I won’t go into detail on this blog (to save yours and my sanity!), but in short, the house was not compliant in some areas (again, a very common buying issue), so these had to all be resolved before we could complete the sale. Trying to keep the lawyers out of it, we instead kept a dialogue with the sellers through the estate agent (who represented both the seller and us the buyer), and a buying specialist that we employed (who represented us only), who spoke both English and Italian; he helped smooth the waters through all the issues and was worth his weight in gold to get us through the process with everyone’s sanity still in place.
During this time, we gave notice on our apartment, thinking we were about to finalise the sale, but this got delayed and we ended up living in temporary Airbnb accommodation - in Italy as well as the UK. In the end, we counted 10 different places we stayed. The stress of temporary living and moving every month to six weeks was starting to take its toll, optimism was strained, and we began to think if we were making a terrible mistake, especially as winter loomed.
In the end, things finally fell into place in November 2021 and we picked up the keys to our new home, a whole year after our initial offer. All good things come to those who wait never felt truer!
Like lots of things in life, the stress and toll of it all were soon forgotten as we spent our first night in the house. As we woke the next morning and opened up the door to that special view, we knew we’d finally got the little piece of Tuscany that we always dreamed of.
