Living in Italy

To find the dream that is Italy the newcomer first has to survive the bureaucratic nightmare that awaits them on arrival. The truth is that leaving one country (your own) only to force yourself to fit into another (someone else's) doesn't really make any sense. Sure it succeeds on some levels, great restaurants and affordable wine for example, but on others it's bound to fail. There are just too many contrasts and complexities for it to work. That's the truth of the matter.

I have been living in Italy for 10 years and I have had ups and downs and each person has to decide for him/herself if he/she is ready to make such a move. I think it really depends on what you are looking for by moving to Italy. The first piece of advice would be to not even try to compare your home (no matter where you come from) with Italy. I can say that when I first moved to Milan as a single woman, Italy had a lot to offer me and I found it a very fun place to live with many opportunities. Now as a mom in a small town, my personal needs have changed. I am thinking more and more if I indeed want to raise my children in Italy or someday return to the USA, where I would hope there would be more opportunities for them. So whether or not Italy is the place to be is a complicated issue and a very personal choice.

As you say, as single adult people, there's a lot we'll put up with. But then, at the beginning particularly, it's all part of being somewhere different. After all we're the foreigners. Perhaps the crunch comes when we decide to change our position by investing in a property, getting married or having kids. At that point we're clearly no longer just passing through and oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the differences really begin to kick in.