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.