The Dolce Vita Diaries. Cathy Rogers
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much into two were frankly frightening. Prices varied enormously; the range we were shown started at 45,000 euros and went up to about 200,000 euros. Estimates for restoration at least doubled the price.
We saw about 20 houses that first day, fanatically photographing and documenting each one. Sandro turfed us out about 6 p.m., telling us to have a think and that he’d see us in the morning. He left us at a place called Hotel Ristorante Giardino in San Lorenzo in Campo, where he said the food was ‘rather good’.
Sandro is master of understatement. The food was exceptional. We ate one of the most fantastic meals we have ever had. When the waiter brought the menu, outlining delicious morsels of every kind of flesh, our hearts sank a little. Jason is a vegetarian and asked his daily question about the possibility of non-carnal options and the waiter looked slightly surprised. Oh no, we thought; please have something Jason can eat. But no, he was surprised because we hadn’t seen the vegetarian tasting menu at the back! A vegetarian tasting menu—with five courses of it—in the middle of Le Marche. We had to live here.
Sandro appeared at a leisurely nine-thirtyish the next morning as we muddled our way into the day through our food-and-wine hangovers. There followed many more houses and much more indecision. But today there was one house which lingered with us: Upupa, owned by a little bent lady called Pepita. It seemed to be the biggest house in the world, made up of at least four different chunks, each of which would probably have sufficed alone. It was half ‘done up’ in a deplorable style, which would have to be swiftly and expensively undone. It had a garden full of olive trees, a vegetable plot and 360 degree views, being perched on top of a hillock. The communal olive press was within walking distance and two minutes away was a sweet little town where we watched buxom Italian grandmothers cooing over a tiny baby that for some reason was in a box. But above all this, it felt like it could become our family home.
The sums, of course, didn’t quite add up. We spent the evening moving numbers around, increasing the hypothetical amount we’d sell our London flat for and decreasing the estimated restoration costs of our new house until it sort of worked. As to the restoration, we reckoned that in any case we could do it in different chunks as and when we had the money. Gradually, over the years, the house would become one unified whole. As we looked at the numbers and the estate agent handout of the house, our hearts raced with excitement and terror at the realization that we might really do this.
Another day brought two new estate agents. The first was a slightly shady seeming Englishman who’d lived in Le Marche for years and had a sort of freelance estate agent business. He had no office and we met him in a bar where he was sitting smoking a cigarette and wearing a cream-coloured linen jacket that made him look like he thought he was in the Raj. We didn’t feel enormous confidence but nonetheless our hearts bounced as we drove up to the first house he took us to. It was beautiful, with flowers growing all round it. Built of pale bricks, it looked to be in good condition, it had plenty of the little add-on bits giving interesting angles (J can’t stand big blocky square lumps of houses) and it came with a four-hectare chunk of land right by the house that looked perfect for growing olive trees. The house had fifteen bedrooms and two little outhouses. Better still, the price was a suspiciously reasonable 125,000 euros.
The catch, when it came, was an extraordinary one. It wasn’t that there was an abattoir next door or that they were about to build a new shoe factory at the bottom of the garden or anything so mundane. No, the catch was that if we bought it, we’d have to share the house with someone else.
Italian property law is, to our eyes at least, rather eccentric. When someone dies, a Napoleonic decree that still stands says that their property be left in proportion to their relatedness to any living relatives—so if you have three sons they get a third each; if you have one daughter she gets the lot. And if you have three sons, two cousins, five nephews, a niece and an ever-increasing count of grandchildren, you get a lawyer.
The effect of this is that there are lots and lots of farmhouses which lie abandoned because each has a family that never agrees what to do with it—one party wanting to sell up, another saying that selling would be a family betrayal, etc.—so the end effect is that nothing happens.
In the case of this lovely house, most of the owners had reached agreement but there was a sticky uncle who owned effectively a single room in the house which he under no circumstances wanted to sell. But he had been persuaded to let the rest of the sale go ahead.
‘But what would that mean?’ we asked. ‘Could he just come round any time and spend the day sitting in his room?’
‘He almost certainly won’t.’
‘Well, does he have his own key? To get to his bit, he’d need to use our front door, isn’t that a bit weird?’
‘Maybe you just need to adjust your thinking a bit,’ said Mr Linen. ‘Italy is a very relaxed place.’
It wasn’t hard to say goodbye to him.
Next up was the lovely Anna Paola in Serra de Conti, a pretty village slightly further north. Unlike Sandro and Mr Linen, her office was rather immaculate and she had a computer that did modern things like make projections of how houses would look once they were done up. After the essential coffees and perusal through her offerings on paper, we got in her car to start the day’s viewings. Her car had little stickers all over it in English saying things like ‘glove compartment’ and ‘vanity mirror’, apparently there to teach her as-yet pre-verbal child the importance of knowing English. Given that she didn’t speak much herself, this seemed a clear case of transference. She, too, showed us some lovely houses and our uncertainty grew. We saw one called Graziosa, which had such huge rosemary plants growing all around that the whole microclimate had the most delicious smell, evocative of Sunday roast. We tried to convince ourselves that it was big enough but knew in our hearts it wasn’t true.
We really wanted to buy a house from her! We trusted her, even if she told us things we didn’t want to hear about how restoration can cost twice as much as many people will tell you. It was probably because she told us things we didn’t want to hear that we trusted her. She also told us some interesting specific things, which was nice in a world of indecision and generalities; for example: the legal minimum ceiling height is 2 metres 70 centimetres; you can only extend existing windows vertically downwards and you can’t put any new windows in rural properties. She told us that the reason you see lots of houses with four odd pillars in a square or a beaten-up old metal framework in the garden is that they are marking the position of a former outhouse. Any outhouse can be automatically rebuilt without additional permission-seeking, to the same volume as the original—but if you take away the pillars you lose this right.
She showed us some lovely places but they were all just not quite right—a bit too small, a bit not in an olive-growing place, a bit too expensive. That evening, we hatched a plan to buy Graziosa, to do up the outbuilding first and then live in that as we set up our olive business and brought up (hopefully) a baby while we did the work to restore the main house. We went to sleep excited with this image—and with having a plan. But by morning the house had shrunk back to its true size, and there was no further mention of it.
One final day of house viewings; this time with Anna Paola’s sidekick Peter, a serious Swede with the longest fingers you’ve ever seen and that irritating Scandinavian habit of speaking five languages fluently. We saw a few more properties with him, had lunch in an honest workmen’s café where we were shocked to see that he drank wine at lunchtime, and went on to the two final places of the trip. One was just a bit bunkerish on the outside and a no-no, but as we drove to the last one we turned to each other to note a feeling we both had of familiarity. We wondered whether it was just that in seeing so many houses (about 40 by now) dotted all over the region we were actually getting to know the area quite well. But no, there was more to it than that. As we turned off the strada bianca and saw a familiar massive crack down the side of a pretty house next to a field of olive trees, we realized we had been shown this house before, by another estate agent! It was a disappointing way to end but also strangely reassuring in that things were coming full circle.
We said goodbye to all and prepared for our trip back to LA.
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