Why I Risked Everything to Buy an Apartment in Florence

A personal essay 

Not long ago I woke up and was fifty years old, with more than half my life already lived. Divorced, and without kids, essentially alone, I decided to follow my lifelong dream of living in Italy, but to do so, I had to “dare greatly” as Dr. Brené Brown calls it.

I’d been in love with the city of Florence since age nineteen when I backpacked around Europe on a budget of ten dollars a day in the 1980s with a friend. We’d taken a night train from Switzerland and arrived in Florence in the morning. Bewildered from sitting in a train compartment all night and unsure of our steps in this new country, we wandered toward the Arno River. From the Ponte Santa Trinita, I viewed the Ponte Vecchio, with what appeared to be a jumble of tiny houses projecting from the bridge on wooden braces. Their melon and mango colors charmed me, as did the proud palazzi hugging the green river. Then my ears tuned in to the Italian language that floated toward me as if sprinkled over the river by Chloris, the nymph who flies in the sky of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. It was the most beautiful language I’d ever heard. 

Although my home town of Santa Cruz, California, is replete with stunning nature, what captivated me in Italy was the way Florence, and then Rome, were laced with the ancient world— the way they were still so astonishingly breathing through all those centuries. Suddenly, I was enthralled by history.

Twenty years later I got a master’s degree in Florentine Renaissance history, and began work as an adjunct instructor at community colleges in Colorado (which offered no health care and below-the-poverty line wages), at the same time, I went through a divorce and a traumatic illness. I then moved to New Mexico, where I moved four times in less than two years, struggling to find places that would accept my cat and that I could afford. My next iteration had me teaching in the Middle East for three years, where I experienced, and then lost, the great love of my life. Returning to my home town, I took care of my father in his last year of his life, holding up the emotional sky as best I could during his dying process, while I was reeling from loss.

I admired Santa Cruz like never before and yet I couldn’t afford housing there, where suddenly nothing was under a million. And so I was exiled from my gorgeous hometown. Something I have in common I suppose, with Dante Alighieri.

There was only one thing left to do. Get myself a visa and move to Italy. Florence was the love I had left. 

When I arrived in Italy with my four suitcases and my faithful cat Simon, it was my eleventh move in the past seven years, and what I needed more than anything was to feel nurtured. I had gone running to Italy with an improbable hope that despite a tiny budget and no job, I’d land in a house that soothed me, that wrapped me in a cocoon of peace.

Part of what was going to soothe me was having Simon with me. But Simon had never been cooped up in an apartment. He’d always been able to go outside—and he lived for it. I chose a rental outside of Lucca that had a garden. Dingy fox holes in Florence were beyond my budget, never mind a comforting place with a yard.

I rented the cabin in Lucca sight-unseen, as a rental contract was a requirement for the visa from the San Francisco Consulate. The landlords were lovely but once the autumn chill came, I realized the drafty cabin had no heat. I tried to last through the winter because I couldn’t face moving again. I endured until January when the bitter cold had my back going out, my fingers too numb to type, and my resolve crumbling. 

A Canadian couple who had just arrived in Lucca invited me to live with them. Their sight-unseen rental was as dark as a tomb, with gold textured bedroom walls that smacked of a raunchy brothel, and no garden for Simon. But we had heat. 

A month later my roommates found a more preferable rental, and I moved with them, but then her parents said they were arriving for six weeks, and thus I had to exit for that period. 

I found one shared apartment for three weeks and another for three more. Each time I moved, it took me six hours to schlep my belongings on foot through the streets of Lucca, and exhaustion began to wrap itself around my psyche like a Strangler Fig that sucks the life out of its host tree. 

In each place, Simon hid under the bed, which broke my heart. I felt like a failed mother who couldn’t provide for her child. I recalled how much he loved racing up the large, moss-covered Walnut tree on my parents’ California property—how he would pause on a particular mottled-grey branch, his green eyes glinting and limbs alert as if something exciting was about to happen.

After those six weeks, Simon and I were back in the apartment with the Canadians. By then it was June and the merciless heat was upon us. The only coolness came in at night through the immense screen-less windows in the ground floor apartment. Simon could have easily escaped, so I tried to sleep with the windows closed. After two sweltering sleepless nights, I devised a cat barrier on the window sill. I piled books enough to cover the bottom third of the open window, and given that the sill was at the height of my head, I didn’t think Simon would understand that the window was open. 

That night I awoke at three a.m. with an uncanny intuition. I had heard no sound but I found myself leaping out of bed saying out loud, “Where’s Simon?” Scooting the books aside and looking over the sill, I saw Simon in the piazza, sitting on the roof of a car. 

I went racing into the moonlit piazza in my underwear to scoop up my cat. 

It was an unbearable but true realization: it didn’t work to have Simon with me. By cultivating all the stoicism in the world, I managed to take him to my mother in California and return to Italy without him, this time to Florence. I signed up for the 10-month guide course to get a tour guide license. Not working was, well, not working. If I could get a tour-guide license, I’d be able to use my degree and share my passion and expertise about Florence’s art and history. 

It was my sixteenth move in eight years.

In Florence, to my shock, my landlady was verbally abusive to me. I never knew what would set her off— her face turning violet and her head swiveling on her neck, raging at me so harshly that I felt shattered and emotionally unsafe for the duration of the five months I lived there.  

The need for secure housing gripped me daily, and my belief that I could achieve my best life was frayed to a breaking point. Were the housing ordeals, and my separation from my cat, just “tests”, making me fight hard for my goal?

I began a laser-focused search for an apartment to buy, but my nest-egg wasn’t enough. The apartments I could afford were in Medieval buildings with stairs so steep it was hard to imagine coming home with grocery bags or a suitcase, and they rarely had light coming in. The bathrooms were often so narrow I almost had to enter sideways, and they never had counter space. Instead of a kitchen, these apartments had an angolo cottura—akin to a makeshift kitchenette in hippie bus from the 1970s. 

Then I walked into an apartment on the top floor of a palazzo from the 1800s. It was at the edge of a good area, and not in the suburbs where I feared I’d have to go. The stairs were wide and each landing had pretty plants and attractive windows. Through a hefty door, the color of a Ponderosa Pine, I entered a spacious room with a cotto brick floor, and if I looked straight out (and not down where the traffic was) I viewed a nearby hill where yellow villas perched above olive trees.

The kitchen needed work, but it was vast by Italian standards. The bathroom had a broken box shower, and a toilet that I swear was hundreds of years old, but there was space. Each room had light coming in, and the bedroom had a real closet. I wouldn’t have to feel like a miniature person in a doll’s house, and I’d even have space for a guest. 

My heart said, Do it! My head said, It is over your budget.

While I went back to looking at places in my budget, my heart kept pulling me to the one with the yellow villa view. 

I began to explore the idea of borrowing money. Borrow money? I was already in debt, the guide course was like boot camp and I didn’t know if I’d pass it, and I’d not yet been able to get a visa that would allow me to work.

“That’s not exactly how you’re supposed to do it,” said my financial planner over Skype. “You’re supposed to spend only half of your savings on a house and keep the other half in investments.”

“In a perfect world,” I replied, “but world isn’t perfect—and neither are the choices we make along the way.”

Why not spend every cent and then some, on a home in Florence? I have less than half my life left, the seas are rising, and I don’t know anyone who’s moved as often as I have in the past eight years. 

So I did it. After innumerable times of leaping into the void, I guess I have developed a strange comfort with it. 

The apartment remains almost empty because I have no funds left for furniture, but I passed the tour-guide course, and I’m patching together a way to make this improbable leap work. The sense of loss has lightened and challenges are easier to confront when I have a home— that essential foundation that shifts me out of survival mode and gives me a springboard to offer my best self to the world. 

It was when I went caroling at Christmas with Saint Mark’s English Church that I knew my efforts had been worth it. About twenty of us gathered in the church’s shadowy nave, and as the minister in a long wool cape handed out candles and sheet music I felt I was back in the Florence of E. M. Forster. Our lead singer, a young British guy with a stunning counter tenor voice, struck up “Good King Wenselas” as we followed him into the stately Via Maggio.

We sang on the steps of the venerable church of Santo Spirito accompanied by the glow our candles and of the nearby decorated fir tree. In the triangular Piazza della Passera, we stood in a circle under strings of lights descending from a central point like a tent overhead. We sang “Oh Come Let us Adore Him” and waiters emerged from the trattoria to listen. The gelateria, caffe, and trattoria facing the piazza twinkled with abundant drapes of greenery filled with tiny white lights.

In front of the church of San Felice, with a looping garland decked with fruit over its carved wooden door, we lifted our voices to “Ding! Dong! Merrily on High” and it was palpable that we all felt truly merrily on high.

In the end, I learned that a radical external investment can be necessary for a radical inner investment, and that the ability to dare greatly is something I will always have. 

Go here to read what you need to know about looking for and buying, property in Italy