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.

Nonno's birthday was at the end of July. We had a big lunch that lasted many hours at a long table behind the pub. There was seafood risotto and acciughe e gamberi fritti and lots of wine and singing. Late in the afternoon, I wandered inside and found Elena singing to Nonno.

But Daniele and Alice weren't there because they were at the hospital where Alice was in active labor. About five o'clock, the word came that the baby was born. Irene and Lucia Mora sprang into action putting up a giant pink bow and teddy bear on the front of the pub to announce the good news to all of Capriglia. Or, actually, they sprang into action directing Valerio -- "Up, higher, a little to the left, no, to the right, lower" -- who was perched up in the big sycamore tree actually hanging the bow and displaying superhuman levels of patience. 

"A pretty good birthday present for you," I said to Nonno.

"My birthday wish for the baby," he said, "is that she has a life as long and healthy and happy as mine has been."

Other updates:

Wheels: Now that Jonathan has a valid Italian driver's license, we have finally bought a car -- it is tiny and red and gently pre-owned. The people we bought it from also live here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, renting a house from our friends Fabio and Luciana. We still don't actually have possession of the car yet, of course. That will come eventually. I hope it doesn't take two years to get, like the driver's license did. (There is a part of the movie of Under the Tuscan Sun where the heroine impulsively buys a house in Tuscany in only one day. Whenever I think about that, I laugh and laugh.)

Flora and Fauna: In the past week, overcome by the gorgeous abundance of the summer produce, I have made apricot jam, fig jam, cherry preserves, and zucchini relish. It's a sickness. And Milo went on a family trip to the mountains and brought us back some of the trout he caught. We cooked them with fresh ginger and garam masala and they were lovely.

 

We are still wrestling with the Arkansas state bureaucracy, trying to get my non-existent criminal record and the ever-elusive apostille. Who knew that petty government officials in Arkansas (ground zero for denigrating all education except Bible study) would have so much difficulty handling official documents?

Meanwhile, Jonathan is scheduled to take his on-road driving test in his now years-long quest for an Italian driver's license. Whenever we go anywhere, he practices driving according to the official regulations as mandated by law. This gets us honked at a lot and overtaken by cars behind us who figure it's probably worth risking death by passing us on a dangerously narrow and winding cliffside road rather than continuing to drive behind an obvious madman.

So to cheer ourselves up, we have made another trip to the flour mill and also one to the cannoli shop by the beach in Viareggio, where everything is beautiful.

And we went to meet the owners and see the house with the view of the church belfry that we hope to be able to rent. It is a gorgeous little house with starlings fluttering around it and a dazzling view of the sea from almost every window. From the top bedroom, you can, indeed, look directly over at the bell hanging in the bell tower. We are anxiously waiting now to see if they are willing to rent it to us and if we will be able to afford it. I am trying not to get my hopes too high. But, honestly, both of us were smitten and we may, once again, act rashly in pursuit of beauty.

 

Yesterday, we went to Milan to return one rental car and pick up another. Because we are foreigners, the longest amount of time we can rent a car for is six months -- and that only at one place in Milan. So by now we have had many cars of varying sizes and personalities. Our third car was a four-door Renault station wagon -- far too large to really be driving around the roads up here, which were all laid out by wandering goats two thousand years ago -- with French license plates and a fortunately calm demeanor. Because it was French and as big as a cow, we named it Albert Carmus and called it Bertie Car-moo. When we were cleaning it out before we dropped it off after six months, we found a 50 euro note in the little compartment between the seats. We assume it was a tip or a parting gift from Bertie in fond remembrance of our times together. When we later rented a second one of the same make, we called it Bertie Car-two.

There was also a German car called Horst that we had only a short time last spring. It became quite hysterical whenever the driver got (what it considered to be) too close to any outside objects, such as low stone walls, for instance, or other cars. In Capriglia, we are always too close to outside objects -- the roads having been laid out by goats, etc. -- so we drove around with Horst in a pretty much constant state of frenzied alarm bells beeping and screeching at us. This is not particularly soothing for a driver trying to negotiate the hairpin turns of the Via Cappezano Monte, which make the charming Via Capriglia looks like the Champs Elysée. Horst also actually fought us whenever we tried to change lanes without using the turn signal, yanking the steering wheel back into line. So despite his obvious overwhelming care for our well-being, we were relieved -- for Horst's sake -- to return him. We can only hope that he went on to live somewhere with fewer narrow lanes edged by low stone walls, someplace we he could get some peace of mind.

Our new car is tiny and black, like a bat. Naturally, we call it the Batmobile. But "bat" in Italian is "pipistrello" -- one of my favorite Italian words. So the car is actually the PipiMobile. As Jonathan and I continue to age -- and to laugh uproariously -- this name becomes increasingly accurate for all of our cars.

In Milan, taking a taxi from the place we dropped off the old car to the place we picked up the new one (the same rule that limits us to six-month leases also prohibits us from just renewing the current lease of even just getting another car from the same place), the cab driver was surprised (as people often are) that we speak Italian. Most foreigners visiting in Italy apparently just don't bother to learn even the basics. 

"Yes," Jonathan said. "During the Covid lockdown, I made myself a project of trying to memorize as much of Dante's Divine Comedy as I could."

"Ah," the cab driver said, picking up the book that he had next to him on the front seat. "That is what I am reading now." And he showed us his copy of The Divine Comedy. We all laughed. He told us that he had not been able to complete his secondary education until he was in his 30s. He is now in his 50s and says that he is not a "cultured" man, but that he tries to improve his mind. On the back of the seat in front of Jonathan was a quote (in Italian) from Hamlet. The cab driver is not big on religion, he said, but The Divine Comedy, for him, is all about the interior journey. He told us that he was very pleased to meet us. I left his cab feeling that I had been lucky.

I am especially aware of my American-ness today -- because today we have finally acquired our car and this gives me more joy than it is seemly to admit.

True, it is a tiny Fiat500 and I feel that there should be circus music playing in the background whenever we drive it. But it is wheels. And as much as I would like to gently turn up my nose at American car culture, the truth is that I love it.

My favorite place to drive is the Texas panhandle, leaving Amarillo and angling up through all that emptiness towards New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristos towards home. And my favorite time to drive is night when the highway is empty and the little radio stations fade out until another one takes its place so that you never know what you are going to get and you can hit a hundred miles an hour on the straightaways easy and the stars revolve across the sky and up ahead you see the faint glow of an all-night last-chance gas station when you are running on fumes just thinking that you weren't going to make it. I love the way the headlights hit the roadside signs and they light up like jewels. I love gas station candy bars. I love hanging my hand out the window to feel the wind pressing against it. I love driving when someone I love is asleep riding shotgun beside me. It is desolate out there with only the dashboard lights and the ache in your bones from sitting so long to keep you awake. But it is also beautiful.

And so, of all the ways in which I am so very much aware of my own American-ness these days, it is my fervent and abiding love of cars that is the most telling.

We are, in spite of our American-ness, becoming accepted more as regulars at the pub. It is called, officially, the Society for Mutual Aid and when we sauntered down there last night for a glass of wine at 6:30, the staff were still sitting on the terrace finishing their lunch. They shared their cake with us. It was very delicious cake. But what was even more lovely was the sign that we are, at least in the opinion of the waitstaff, OK.