When we sold our house in Colorado Springs, the real estate agent said to us, "I'm not going to tell them that you're moving to Italy, because then they'll think you're rich and they won't want to pay what the house is worth."

The question of social class has come up again recently, but it has been around since the beginning of this adventure. So I thought it might be time again to talk about that most taboo of subjects: money.

There are many ways in which I am incredibly rich: I love my husband and he loves me, I love my children and they love me back. I can read -- something that has given me uncountable hours of deepest joy during my life and that so many monsters in the world try to take away from oppressed people, especially women and girls. Tonight I will sit down to a homecooked dinner that is both healthy and delicious. I have clean water -- both hot and cold, as much as I want. When I am sick, I can go to the doctor. When I am lonely, I can go to the pub. The sunset last night was another breathtaking sky. I am rich beyond riches.

But as far as actual money goes -- well, that's a different story.

Q: So how do we live like we are rich?

A: Social democracy.

Here is a cost-of-living breakdown for our life here. It is probably TMI, but what the hell.

TAXES

We pay about the same amount here as we did in the US. The Italian government just spends it differently. For example:

OUR MEDICAL EXPENDITURES

Health insurance: $0

Doctor visits: $0

Medicine: $0

Hospital stays: $0

The quality of care is as high or higher than in the US. Wait times are shorter. There are also private providers if you want to go that way, but because they are in competition with the free system, prices are very low. There are no health insurance companies around to deny you any care that your doctor says you need. This is socialized medicine.

FOOD

Above is a picture of the things we bought at the greengrocer on Thursday. Total cost about 12 dollars. All fresh, local, and seasonal. The eggs are organic and free range. If you want out-of-season produce, it can be hard to find. But we like eating seasonally -- the arrival of the first artichokes, the first figs, the first asparagus, whatever the season is offering up, is always exciting.

Jonathan bakes most of our bread. We get our flour from the local mill where it is stone-ground by our friends. It costs the equivalent of 71 cents a pound for the flour. Jonathan's going rate for consulting is around $150 dollars a hour, so this is either the most expensive bread in the world or the cheapest, depending on how you look at it.

For lunch at the pub, you get a first course, a second course, bread, water, a quarter litre of wine (about two glasses), and coffee for 15 euros. This is because the Italian government subsidizes these institutions because they are important gathering places for the community. That keeps the costs down.

It's more expensive for dinner. Here is a random dinner menu (it changes every day) and the drinks menu further below. Please note the 3 euro glass of wine and the espresso for 1.20 euro. Also take a look at Daniele's award-winning tordelli al ragu for 12 euros a plate. The most expensive thing is the homemade seafood sausage at 18 euros a plate.

TRANSPORTATION

Jonathan takes the train back and forth to Pisa for school. His monthly pass costs 77 euros for unlimited rides. A regular one-way ticket costs 5 euros.

We do walk a lot because everything is so walkable. But when we drive, the parking lot in Pietrasanta costs 1 euro for an hour. We have a used 2022 Fiat Panda that we bought for about 8000 euros. It uses GPL gas. Below is a picture of the pump when we filled up the tank yesterday. You have to convert litres to gallons and euros to dollars, but it comes out to about $3.65/gallon. And this is yesterday, after Trump stupidly made gas prices go up all over the world.

HOUSING

We rent this house for 1250 euros a month. It has seven rooms, plus two bathrooms, a terrace, an enclosed garden, a wood-burning fireplace, all mod cons (except no A/C and no dryer), and an incredible sea view. We have free parking on the street. The internet costs 80 euros a year. A. Year. We don't have cable or a TV or any streaming services. No landline -- our cell phones cost about 10 dollars a month. Our utilities are about the same as they were in the US when we left four years ago. Trash pick-up is a city service that is included in our taxes.

OTHER

What else do we spend money on? Jonathan's law school tuition is about 750 euros a semester. It is tax deductible. My weekly Italian lessons (private, one-on-one) are 30 euros an hour. Also tax deductible because the Italian government thinks that having an educated populace is a good thing and worth supporting. Books cost the same as anywhere else, but textbooks are much, much cheaper. A ticket to the opera during the Puccini Festival runs about 40 bucks -- we go once or twice a summer. The choral concerts up here in the hills are always free. Our biggest expense is probably our membership to our beach club which costs us 350 euros for June and 600 euros for July. It would be more in August, but we don't go then.

It cost us about $30,000 to move all of our household possessions -- books, clothes, furniture, rugs, dishes, wall art, sheets and towels, children's toys, cookware, art supplies, old photos, tchotchkes, rakes and shovels, boxes of random useless computer cables, etc. etc. -- from Colorado to here. As a consequence, we haven't bought many of those things.

So that's what it costs us to live here. We walk places, eat seasonally, entertain ourselves with reading or baking bread or looking at the sea. It's a very quiet life, but like I said at first, I am rich beyond riches.

 

And so the seasons have begun to change again and, with them, the offerings in the markets. The first porcini are here, but the apricots are on their last legs.

Jonathan is back in school and three days a week he leaves before I am awake in the morning and doesn't get back home until almost 9 p.m. But he loves being a student again and became quite giddy over all the options when putting together his class schedule for this semester. It was adorable.

There was a Bike To Work event last week at the University of Pisa and, being a die-hard cyclist all these years, Jonathan went, even though it wasn't one of his regular class days. They all got t-shirts and then peddled around the streets of Pisa together ringing their bicycles bells. I wasn't there for this, but I'm sure it was, again, adorable.

I mostly stay home and fart around while he is away. I write some on my new novel. I do laundry. I overwater the houseplants. I am trying to read an Agatha Christie book ("L'assassino di Roger Ackroyd") in Italian so that I can join the reading group down at the bookstore in town. Just this morning, someone on the internet said, "To learn another language, you have to be willing to be an idiot." True.

 

No one ever finds this house the first time they look for it. There is a little set of stairs on Via Capriglia between the wall of one house and the garden fence of another. There is a gate at the bottom of the stairs so that it looks like you shouldn't go down there.

But the gate, which is not locked, opens up into a green courtyard garden and that's where our house is. One side of the grassy, flower-filled courtyard opens out to a view of the sea, but the other three sides hold four houses. Ours is the one closest to the sea and with the best view of it.

The neighbors are all very friendly and kind, which is good because we are very much aware of each other during the day -- when and what we are cooking for our meals, who has gone out to the beach or the market, when the children are getting ready for a bike ride. Yesterday, while I was making lunch, someone had their radio on and Edith Piaf was singing "La Vie En Rose."

I like having people around and think of it as "Catfish Row" from Porgy and Bess, only Italian. It's nice to feel everyone going about their business here. Somehow, it makes things seems more tranquil than even if we were all alone.

I have been working this week on the final edits from the publisher for Armadillo Massacre Number Three. They are very light (thank god), but they are not non-existent, so I put aside the new novel that I've just started in order to work on them.

I hope the new novel will be funny. I'm turning all my friends down at the pub into a gang of assassins. They are all very much on board with this idea and read each section as I finish it (I run it through Google translate for them) and make suggestions for what happens next. Whether it will ever actually turn into a book or not, I have no idea. But I am having fun playing with it.

Jonathan is back in school at Pisa now and has very long days there on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, so I plan to use the time and the solitude to get my life in order and start exercising and organize my paperwork and read improving books and start publicizing Armadillo and finish all the art projects I have in mind and just in general become a complete saint. Wish me luck!

 

View from my window right now.

 

Sometimes I talk with a friend far away and they say, "Has the heat broken there yet?" and I say, "Nope. But the forecast is for cooler days soon." This has been true for many weeks now, but the promised cooler weather has never come.

I am a person who generally loves the warmth and even though I lived in Colorado for decades, I never liked skiing because of the cold. (And the terror.) And shoveling icy sidewalks is an enormous drag. And if I never have to drive anywhere in a blizzard ever again, it will still be too soon.

But I miss snow.

I found myself last week gently sweating while sitting still, lost in a lovely daydream -- a warm log fire, hot chocolate, a big old armchair with a fluffy blanket, a good book, and outside the twilight windows, snow.

So Jonathan and I are planning a trip to Vienna when his school lets out for winter break. The Magic Flute will be playing at the Vienna Opera House, where it premiered with Mozart himself conducting it. The Christmas Market will be happening. You can take organized coffee and pastry tours of the city, going from cafe to cafe to cafe. I have found us a quaint little hotel. There might be snow.

 I started working on a new novel on Sunday. Just now, I came across this story in today's Guardian.

This is a picture of my spice cabinet's current state. I feel that the gods have spoken.

(p.s. When I showed Jonathan the headline, he laughed and laughed. "Well," he said, "they've got you pegged.")

 

The light in my eyes woke me up an hour or so before dawn on Friday morning. It was the full moon shining through our bedroom window, but it looked strange somehow and it took me a minute or two to figure out that a lunar eclipse was happening. So I woke Jonathan up and we stood together at the window and watched the moon get thinner and thinner until, not long before dawn, it winked out entirely.

We were sluggish and, frankly, kind of cranky the rest of the day because of not getting enough sleep and also because of the heat and the humidity that made the air feel like a heavy wool blanket. But it was worth it to stand close to Jonathan at the window in the dark and watch the moon.

The Trofeo de Leone is going on this weekend in memory of our friend Leonardo, so we will go tonight and eat sausages and watch the soccer games and see our friends and think of him.

 

We are -- Jonathan and I -- now living in a world of pure enveloping heat. It is all day. It is all night.

Despite this, the summer social whirl is up and roaring -- albeit with some conversational limitations. Jonathan and I have had social engagements every day this past week and a little routine had emerged: I see someone I haven't seen in days/months/hours/ever and I say, "Oh, hello! How nice to see you! How are you?" and they say "I'm hot!" and I say "So am I" and then there is a little verbal lull because both of us are too hot, quite frankly, to think of anything entertaining to say. 

Not that I don't try. Just yesterday, I regaled some people from Dublin about my intense love of "Irish fucking butter." This was my conversational high point of the evening and it was all downhill from there, including a detailed discussion of the bike-shorts-to-heat-rash pipeline. Summer on the Riviera -- glamorous!

Also, we had a solar eclipse. And yet it brought no relief from the heat.

You would think that having the sun actually go out would perhaps drop the temp a degree of two. But no.

We are the damned.

 

Today is our last day at our beach club. We don't go in August when the price and the jellyfish are both at their biggest.

Instead, we stay up here in the hills where a secret summer life happens away from the notice of the tourists.

The joint birthday party for Nonno and Celeste lasted from noon to midnight last Sunday. We all got t-shirts and there was eating and drinking and singing al day long. It's cooler under the shade tree on the terrace of the pub and laughter drowns out the katydids screaming and the heat doesn't seem quite so post-apocalyptic when we are all together.

At the house, my tomatoes are flourishing in a way that has become oppressive -- an outcome to be expected as soon as we found out that Jonathan can no longer eat anything -- tomatoes especially -- with seeds. So I have been making sundried tomatoes to try to preserve part of our bounty for the seemingly mythical cold days of winter. We have plenty of tomatoes and, god knows, plenty of sun.

 

The heat continues to be post-apocalyptic. Right now, I am sitting still and gently sweating in the coolest place in the house that I can find. The only sounds are the katydids screaming and a distant ambulance coming closer and closer on its way up the hill to tiny Capriglia. Jonathan -- whose body heat radiates in a way that makes him the perfect husband in, say, February -- is too hot to touch.

And yet, the social life in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea is in full swing. Last night, we went to see Turnadot at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago. It was a lovely production and we were gifted tickets by our landlords, whose three children sang in the chorus. They were adorable.

But for all that, it is clear that anyone who complains about the immorality, etc., of rap/rock music has never been to the opera.

And then tonight is a big Capriglia community dinner in the tiny park next to our miniature soccer field up here. Jonathan has been accepted in amongst the group of ladies of a certain age who run everything in Capriglia (except for whatever happens at the pub). He is their mascot, the only man allowed in with the women. They have a WhatsApp groups chat called Capriglia Insieme ("Capriglia Together") but that we call Capriglia Unbound. He has been getting at least a hundred texts a day in the lead-up to tonight's big dinner. His phone is constantly buzzing so that if anyone else (like, for example, me) needs to get in touch with him, the message invariably gets lost in the shuffle. Since the beasts at the pub are mostly male, we had been wondering where all the women get together. Now we know.

Speaking of the pub, tomorrow is the big joint birthday party for Nonno (93) and Celeste (1). It will last all day and most of the night. We are busy hydrating today in preparation.

For my homework this week, my Italian teacher found this video for me to watch. It's very exciting because we see overhead shots of our house in it and also some of our friends -- Luana and Ilario. Not to mention some views of the pub. Now we are all famous!

One of the delightful features of our new house is that we have a very clear view of the church here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea and of the priest's house attached to the side of the church and, therefore, of the clothesline on the side of the priest's house where the washing is hung out to dry. Because of this, today I learned that the priest's beach towel is McDonald's themed.

I was surprised by this as, for some reason, I didn't expect the priest to go to the beach with such a pedestrian towel. I guess I was expecting something a bit more... I don't know... ecclesiastical.

But what?

"The Shroud of Turin," Jonathan says.

 

Nonno got to come to the pub for lunch on Sunday. Everyone pitched in to hire an ambulance to bring him from the rest home in Seravezza. Elena and her parents cooked a big feast of special food from Cape Verde for everyone sitting out under the shade tree on the terrace. There was much singing. Elena played the guitar and Elena's mother, Elida, danced around with baby Celeste. Nonno stayed until almost 5:00 in the afternoon. It was almost like the old days.