3 Somewhere to call home

      This time we were taking no chances—we were going to come back with our future home. We had arranged three separate days with three different estate agents and had told them to fit in as many houses as it was feasible to see in a day. By the end of this trip we’d have seen about seventy houses in all.

      This time around, we had hooked up, for no particular reason, with property places further south in Le Marche. It’s funny how quickly one develops fixed ideas. We had one that leaving Ancona airport, we had to go north. We were smitten with Urbino and San Leo and Serra de Conti and the valleys around Corinaldo—and all of these were to the northwest. But now we found ourselves heading south to poorer (or so we thought, Italy tending to get more so as you go south) and uncharted lands.

      First stop was Gualdo, located in a place we have since discovered is nicknamed ‘Gualdoshire’ for its prevalence of English expats. It certainly seemed tuned in to the desires of the English, with arrangements where agent, lawyer and architect are often thick as thieves and will, if you wish and pay for it, oversee everything from the purchase of your property until moving in, making all decisions about light switches and toilet positioning along the way. The agent drove us first to show us some of the properties his company had already done up—to help us visualize how these dilapidated wrecks could be turned into perfect homes.

      Except we weren’t sure we liked these perfect homes. They were so of a type, they screamed out ‘ENGLISH INHABITANTS’ for miles around. For a start, all the pretty brickwork was always sandblasted to within an inch of its life, which meant that the houses looked new. How ridiculous. They were pale and gleaming and, like a Hollywood star with too much botox, unconvincingly hid their life and experience with bland smoothness. Inside, the walls were all plastered, so again the joy of the bricks was lost—except they didn’t want to lose it altogether, so at random intervals there would be an amorphous blob of plaster missing so that the bricks could show through. It was like a wedding cake that had rubbed up against the roof of a tin and taken off a big chunk of icing, leaving the cake nakedly showing below. There was always a swimming pool—a boon for the owners but a vile lurid blot in the view for everybody else. And they were always down miles of windy rocky track in the middle of nowhere, as if people moved here not to move to Italy but to move away from the rest of the world.

      It didn’t quite feel like us.

      So we schlepped around lots of nonetheless very pretty wrecks with very pretty views and were sort of tempted but not quite enough. We had a feeling that there was something we were missing, but we’d seen so many places and with so many different agents that we couldn’t really convince ourselves we weren’t being thorough enough.

      We sat in the office of the trim and efficient Monica, purveyor of houses to nearly all the English in an area covering a good 100 square miles (well, you would look trim on that wouldn’t you?). She thumbed through her files, throwing out the odd place here and there. Then she paused and looked at us sidelong and said, ‘You mentioned olive trees, didn’t you?’

      We replied it was very important we were in an olive-growing region, and ideally we’d get some olive trees with the house, too.

      ‘There is this one house,’ she started, without conviction, ’but I don’t think it’s what you want. It’s quite a modern house.’

      We gave her a look to say tell us more.

      ‘It does have a lot of olive trees.’

      ‘How many?’ we asked.

      ‘Well, the last owner had registered…let me see…about 900.’

      ‘Take us there,’ we said.

      The journey there was so wiggly and windy that you’d never remember it again even if your life depended upon it. Monica, clearly accustomed enough to Italian entranceways to know not to risk them, parked the car at the top, barely off the road on what seemed a pretty deadly bend. We walked down the short driveway to a big square red-brick modern house.

      ‘Horrible roof,’ Jason said.

      I could see he was right, though I think I could have gone there a hundred times before I’d have really noticed by myself. I was looking the other way, at the breathtaking view that stretched on and on and on. In Le Marche the views are often quite closed in because the hills have so many little tucks and folds, but here there were two quite separately beautiful views. One which was tucked in: the hill opposite, with a pretty painted campanile tower and a cluster of houses rising out of a picturesquely farmed hillside. The other was one that never appeared to end. It stretched down along the line of a valley seemingly all the way to the sea, which you could imagine there at the end even if you couldn’t really quite in all honesty see it. And peeping up every couple of miles along the valley was a little village, always perched on top of a pointy hill and every time with a turret or a tower poking up from the other buildings. It was gorgeous. It was the sort of view you wanted to soak yourself in. I did reverse blinking to try and make it stick.

      Estate agents being estate agents, we didn’t get too long to stand being whimsical before keys were whisked out for our appointment with the house.

      It wasn’t the sort of house you would fall in love with. At least, if I imagine the kind of person who might fall in love with this sort of a house it makes me like it less, so I prefer not to. It’s not that there was anything wrong with it, but neither was there anything particularly right—it was just sort of a blob of house, just sort of there. Jason likes houses with tacked-on bits and a little ramshackle and he was right and there was none of that. It was quadratic. It was made of functional bricks, not the pretty old Italian ones that the English fall in love with. The roof did not have an aesthetic dimension; its job was to keep out the rain and that was what it did.

      Nonetheless, as soon as we saw the house, we knew that it was going to be ours. We even decided that we quite liked that it wasn’t the sort of house that English people who move to Italy fall in love with. It made us feel that we were different and that we were coming here for sensible reasons, not for some daft and naïve dream. We liked the fact that it was functional and wouldn’t mean sinking all our savings and more into rebuilding magnificent archways or restoring frescos buried under years of plaster and wallpaper. But, of course, in thinking that we were beginning to start our own little dream, to create our own world of expectation and our own sense of place.

      I’m omitting, of course, the most crucial element. The house, as Monica had promised, had a very, very large garden—about eight hectares or 20 acres—most of which was planted with olive trees. It had 881 or 977 trees depending on whether you believed the document that went with the house or the form that goes to the local board to claim subsidy on olive trees, which Monica had unearthed and which was, strangely, higher. One day soon, we thought, we’ll count those trees ourselves and know for sure. More than that, we will give each one a name or at least a number, and register it on a map with GPS coordinates and write down every detail about it, from how many olives it produces annually, to how much manure we put on it, to the date we prune it each year.

      But before that, there was a lot of work to do.