I have been a blogger for the past 7 years.  During that time I created content on two websites but I came to a decision recently that I wanted to collate all my online content in one space.  Therefore I decided to start a new website and re-work some old posts.  To that end there will be some of the posts that I wrote while I was living in Italy and also the early days of living in England when we moved here in 2012.  In addition there will also be fresh content.

I discovered blogging in 2008, but I didn’t maintain the blog that I started then.  It was a friend of mine in Australia whose blog I discovered that gave me the idea that maybe I could share some of my experiences of living in a foreign country, hence why I started a blog in 2011 with posts about being an expat and also some featuring the local area where we were living.  We weren’t based in a large city like Rome, we were living in an area called the ‘Tuscia’ which is about 90 minutes north of Rome in northern Lazio.

For the majority of my life I have been naturally drawn to Italian things.  I can’t remember exactly when it started, but certainly by high school I was fairly obsessed.  I definitely found studying Roman and Greek history in Year 7 more interesting than in Year 9 when we focused on Australian history I am sad to say.  I still probably know more about Republican Rome than early Australian history.  However this post is dedicated to how being fond of Italy and eventually living there led to blogging.  I am pretty sure that my 13 year old self would have been amazed if I could have looked into the future and seen myself leaving Australia to live over the other side of the world.  In total I spent 7.5 years living in Italy and I certainly benefitted from the experience.

Although I first started to learn Italian whilst I was attending university in Australia, it wasn’t until I moved to the country and had to use it that my language skills improved.  This also took a while as I got rather self conscious at times.  But when I started to not worry about making mistakes and speaking ‘perfect’ Italian, I got better.

As I mentioned above it was from 2011 when I created my blog about life in Italy and then after I left I found that I could still write Italian themed posts.

Living in Italy is a challenging thing to do.  It certainly isn’t all plain sailing.  There is the bureaucracy to deal with.  Let me give you just one example. When we first moved back in 2006 it surprised my husband to learn that he couldn’t enrol our children with the town’s paediatrician as she was full.  There was an allowance for foreigners, but not for Italians.

However there were plenty of pleasant experiences too.  Such as making fresh pasta with my neighbour and spending time with friends and family.  My son learnt how to sail in Italy as we transported a Mirror dinghy when we made the move from Australia.

I lived in three different towns of varying sizes when I was based in Italy, these being Capodimonte, Montefiascone and Tuscania.