I MOVED TO ITALY FOR A BETTER LIFE. SIX MONTHS ON, HERE’S WHY I’M GIVING UP
Three years ago I left Britain with my growing family in search of a better life.
We’ve zig-zagged more than 15,000 miles across the globe, via Iceland and Mauritius, and thought our latest move – to Italy – would be where we’d find it.
I’m writing this from Umbria, a beautiful, undulating stretch of central Italy with much going for it. More than six million Britons visit this nation every year to be captivated by its sun-baked hills, quaint medieval villages, buxom tomatoes and cobalt coastline.
Many don’t want to leave. As a result, it has long had a healthy British expat community – though since Brexit online forums are full of frustrated UK citizens struggling to find ways to get a visa. Many, it seems, want a slice of la dolce vita.
I’m able to work remotely, and am married to a German, whose job as a helicopter pilot means he can work from anywhere, so we had our pick of Europe.
Our time in Iceland, which was beautiful but had a climate too extreme and a language too tricky (I can still barely pronounce “Hafravatnsvegur”, the name of the road on which we lived), told us we needed warmth.
We considered Portugal, France and Spain, but ultimately opted for Italy, swayed by its unbeatable food and culture.
So off we went – renting a small farmhouse with a few acres on the outskirts of a tiny Umbrian village bordering Tuscany. It was a bargain, costing just €750 (£660) a month.
My husband, me (pregnant with our second child), our son (aged three) and our gaggle of animals (a dog, two cats and ten chickens) have now been here for nearly six months, and in many ways it has been idyllic.
Every local I’ve encountered has been charming, spirited and welcoming. The local nursery is an eight-minute amble down the hill and costs nothing. The food is fresh and reliably divine.
The weather has been perfect – hot but never humid in the summer, mild in the spring and autumn.
The country’s leader, Giorgia Meloni, has injected Italy with a shot of optimism and national pride. Most of the locals appear to approve of her – I’ve only heard hysterical American expats wail about her being a “fascist”.
In short, Italy feels like the polar opposite of the UK, which was recently ranked – in the Global Mind Project’s annual Mental State of the World report – as the most “stressed” country in the world and the second most “miserable” (ahead of only Uzbekistan). I say this with sadness, because I’m proud to be British and I miss what it used to be.
The property market in the UK is just as depressing. I own a studio in London, on which my mortgage repayments doubled earlier this year.
It’s taken me eight months of enormous strain to evict my tenant whose contract had expired and had stopped paying their rent in full, but until recently refused to move out regardless (on the advice of the council, no less, owing to rules that are only getting worse for landlords under Starmer). I’m now having to sell it for significantly less than I bought it for five years ago.
In Italy, while the “buy a cottage for €1” scheme is largely a farce, it is possible to purchase a fixer-upper with an acre of land for less than €80,000.
As I’ve already mentioned, nurseries are free, and people are generally cheerful. So why are we packing up and leaving?
The bureaucracy, for a start, would test the patience of a saint. One day, when it’s a distant memory, I will laugh about how complicated it is in Italy to post a letter or book a doctor’s appointment, but the rage we wrangle with on a daily basis is currently still too hot.
I could also do without the devout Catholicism (our son was subject to two hours of religious indoctrination every Wednesday at nursery, which felt a bit overzealous for a toddler).
And, as child-friendly as this nation is, there are not many opportunities for young people coming out of secondary school.
The last reason is my fault, not Italy’s: the language barrier has done for me. I’ve done an intensive Italian course, which certainly helped me get by, but the truth is, I am simply bad at foreign languages. I am shy and awkward enough around strangers in English. So trying to talk to Italians? I find it difficult, embarrassing, isolating and demoralising, and I don’t think that even after years of immersion I would ever reach a level of fluency that would make me feel like I truly belonged.
This has led me to conclude that no matter how beautiful the scenery or welcoming the society, I will never flourish anywhere in Europe, and is why we’re headed next (and hopefully, for good) to the US.
It has everything from desert dunes and ski slopes to boiling beaches and giant lakes, but whichever corner we end up in, I can remove “learn an entirely new language from scratch” from my integration to-do list.
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2025-11-05T11:05:48Z