Our next direction was Abruzzo. Why? Another magazine article about the New Tuscany!!! so we decided to have a reconnaissance visit between Abruzzo and Marche

We flew over and stayed in a great B&B Colle Moro near Città Sant'Angelo Abruzzo. Colle Moro is a farm with two large modern house which make great accommodation. Andrea the owner is very helpful and we had a great stay.

Città Sant'Angelo is near Pescara which is a fairly large not too charming town. We drove around quite extensively and found a few nice possible areas.

We then drove up to Atri and absolutely loved it. This is a spectacular little town that has such historical significance it is shown on the maps in the Doge's Palace in Venice. It has a lovely feel to it and we could very easily picture ourselves living near to here.

On the outskirts of Atri My wife found a dream home.


The views toward the sea are lovely




On the tree outside




As we were running on a pretty tight schedule we had to go on to Marche. We were booked into
Locanda I Piceni in Ortezzano. This is a very nice small hotel run by a very handsome chef (who my wife did her best to flirt with). The food is excellent and it has a lovely view from the balcony.



We had a bit of a look around this area but were not too impressed. Little did we know how big this area would feature in our lives two years later.

From here we went on to Fano. We both really liked this city. It has a gorgeous piazza and passagiata is a real event


From here we traveled to Cartocetto and stayed with Axel and Judith at the very nice B&B Villa Cartoceto.

Axel and Judith also have an excellent restaurant Osteria del Cardinale. They are charming hosts and it was a pleasure staying with them. Cartocetto it is a wealthy little village with tremendous charm and apparently produces some of the highest quality olive oil in the world.

The "dream" house that we had seen kept bugging us and eventually we decided to drive all the way back and see it. This was an epic 4 hour journey along the autostrada held up by an accident. Eventually we got there only to find that the house was not for sale and the For Sale sign actually related to a concrete monstrosity further down the road.


Oh well, only a day wasted so on we went.


The whole journey was a success as it gave us good ideas as to where to concentrate our search

In the beginning

My wife and I met five years ago. Soon after that we went to Rome together which was my wife's first visit to Italy. My wife loved Italy and from this a small seed started to grow about eventually retiring there.

On our return I found the magazine Italia in a deli in Pimlico. I the first issue which I picked up they had an article about Puglia being the new Tuscany. ( ho Ho Ho ho laughs anyone who knows either province.) We also read an article

Seduced by Sicily

in one of the papers about the town of Noto in Sicily which sounded lovely.

This lead us to plan half our honeymoon in Puglia and the other half in Sicily. in Puglia we stayed at the spectacular

Masseria San Domenico

The hotel is really lovely with a huge salt water swimming pool and lots of beautiful Italians coming and going in Ferraris and helicopters. (I am not joking)

We explored Puglia quite a bit but were not very impressed. A lot of Puglia is very flat and arid with none of the greenness you normally associate with Italy. So that pretty much wrote Puglia off for us.

In Sicily we stayed at the lovely Hotel Villabelvedere to look out at views like this every morning.

We hired a car and drove down to see Noto.

Although Noto is a very special little town that is being beautifully renovated thanks to EU money, we felt that it was not for us; it seemed to be too far inland and too quiet and the closest beaches were dire.

We spent a fair amount of time driving around Sicily and although some areas are beautiful, it is not the right place for us.It has areas of outstanding beauty but it has a too many areas of outstanding concrete and crap as well. I personally was very put off by the lawless property development. Some areas look worse than the Spanish Costas.

This article describes the "development" situation in Palermo very well.

The Sack of Palermo and the Concrete Business of the Sicilian Mafia

So that was the end of Puglia and Sicily for us. Great places to visit but not for us to live.

The Long Search

This blog is an attempt to document our long search for a house in Italy. We were bitten by the Italy bug about 5 years ago and a while later decided to buy a property in Italy. I have started this blog as a method of charting our progress especially as this last weekend we had the option to buy our dream property fall through due to the ridiculous Italian inheritance laws.

I will try to list our good bad and indifferent experiences mainly for ourselves but you never know; if anyone else finds themselves in our position perhaps we could save them a bit of time.

Obviously it will not be in a chronological order but I will try to remeber all our experiences and post them as time allows.

Onward and upward!