A Tale of Two Villages - Turning Tuscan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Going Native - page 17

A Tale of Two Villages
F or many years Pam and I were content to rent an apartment for our stays every summer in
our little village. There were several people in the village who had apartments to let during
the summer months. Rents were cheap—about $300 a month in those days—for furnished
apartments with bed linens and kitchen utensils and all the rest. Once in a while we fantas-
ized about buying a place for ourselves, but since we were there only for a month or two, it
really never made much sense.
One summer as we were getting ready for our annual Tuscany trip, I passed our next-door
neighbor, Lou, coming down his driveway as I was coming up mine. He slowed down and
rolled down his window, so I did the same.
“I hear you guys are getting ready to go back to Italy,” he shouted.
“Yeah, next week,” I shouted back.
“Hey, listen,” he said. “If you guys ever see anything there that you want to buy, we're in for
50%, sight unseen. Seriously, if you see something you like, we'll go in with you for half.”
I told him I would keep my eyes open, and I pretty much dismissed the offer as friendly
chit-chat. A couple days later, though, Lou's wife called to invite us over for coffee.
“We've got a third couple that wants to go in with us!” She shared the news joyously. “So
we'll be able to split things three ways, and that will make it even more affordable.”
Their friends were apparently as excited as she and her husband, and it gradually dawned on
me that they were quite serious about their proposition. So, the seed had been planted, and
we went off to Italy that summer with a mission to look at real estate for the first time.
***
The village where we first stayed when we came to Italy, Montesantini, had a population in
the early 90s of about one hundred inhabitants. In its glory days after World War II, its pop-
ulation was three or four times larger, and it served as the comune , the town charged with
administrative responsibility for the smaller, surrounding villages. During the 60s and 70s
as Italy began to industrialize, it suffered the same fate as thousands of other small Italian
villages. The younger generation left the countryside in search of steady jobs in the larger
cities. The seat of the district comune shifted to a bustling valley town, and our mountaintop
village became increasingly marginalized.