Introduction: This series is called "Ciao For Now" where I'm doing something a little unconventional- chatting with former expats who lived in Italy at some point in their life and ultimately left. We see so many blogs and stories about people who are currently living the fabled "dolce vita", but what about the ones who made the leap and then said "ciao for now", "arrivederci Roma", "alla prossima"? Being a naturally curious person, I see a ton of potential in making these stories known. Being an expat is not easy for anyone and sometimes I think Italy might be one of the hardest places to adjust to and I think that opening up this topic to discussion will hopefully help some of you who are maybe in a dilemma at the moment whether considering moving here or moving away from here. This is a series for all of us who have ever had a dream, lived it, and found a new one. It's a series for you, you with the little sing-song voice in your head saying- should I stay or should I go?
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What made you leave? 
We would have loved to stay, but we had finished the 21-month plan and needed to start making money again. Also, John decided to follow up with graduate school in Syracuse, New York, so we moved there for 14 months, and I went back to work. 

Where are you now? 
We live in San Antonio, Texas and have a 13-year-old son. Coincidentally, John works for a sister school of John Cabot University. I became a freelance writer while living in Rome, and recently published a book about our adventure titled, “Times New Roman: How We Quit Our Jobs, Gave Away Our Stuff & Moved to Italy.”

Any regrets? 
None! We would do it all over again tomorrow if we could. 

Do you think you'd ever return to Italy? 
Yes. We took our son to visit Italy this summer. He absolutely loved it and told us, “I could live in Italy forever!” We’re trying to figure out a way to give him that living-abroad experience before he gets too much older. 

What's the one thing you miss the most about Italy? 
Not what you’d probably guess. I had a level of independence in Italy that I miss. I could walk right out of our door and hit the cobblestone streets and be in the middle of a bustling neighborhood. I could walk everywhere! Rome is a very walkable city, a gorgeous city and public transit is also very convenient so we didn’t need a car. I also felt safe walking anywhere I wanted to go. Being a city girl at heart, it was my dream come true!

What would you say to someone thinking of moving to Italy?
Take me with you!!!!  Okay, seriously, I’d say go now and don’t overthink it. Our regrets in life will be about the things we could have done, but didn’t. When we were trying to decide if we should take the chance or not, I kept thinking, “Two years are going to go by anyway. How am I going to feel in two years if we don’t take this opportunity? What about in twenty years?” Happily, we will never have to ask ourselves these questions.

What would you say to someone leaving Italy?
You will probably think of Italy as home in many ways for the rest of your life. That’s not a bad thing, and it’s a great excuse to go back often to visit. I like to say we need to visit once a year to keep in touch with our adopted Italian heritage. While maybe not technically of Italian descent, shouldn’t 21 months count for something? Certo!

About the Writer:
Martha is the author of Times New Roman available at Amazon Barnes & Noble and many other bookstores. Book website: http://timesnewromanbook.com
You can learn more about her on her blog Martha Miller Writes: http://marthamillerwrites.com. 
Follow her on Twitter: @TimesNewRomanIT

Grazie mille Martha for being part of this series. Dear readers, keep an eye out for more additions to this series, and more importantly, if you would like to share your story, send me an e-mail! 
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​If you enjoyed this post, you may also like to "dare un'occhiata" at these ones or at the Expat Life
category on the sidebar. 

Past Ciao For Now posts:
Ciao For Now: Estrella of La Casabloga
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Popular Posts on Dating and Relationships in Italy:
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​Why We Love Italian Boys
​The Double Standard Between Italian Street Harassment and American
​Can Men and Women Be Friends? Here's How My Italian Colleagues Responded
Dating Diversity: Italy vs. Canada (and North America)
Cross-Cultural Dating: My First Jaw-Drop Moment with an Italian 
Italian Men: The Unofficial Guide for Wives and Girlfriends
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​Annoying Things Non-Canadians Say About Canada 
​Two Sides of the Italy Coin 
​Dating Diversity: Italy vs. Canada (and North America)
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The other day I was sifting through a billion photos (how I miss the days of taking a couple rolls on vacation and being limited to that number, back then you never had to scroll through fifty photos of a selfie your husband took with a fig…that’s another story) when I found one that stopped me in my tracks. It was one of those Pinterest graphics with fancy font for no reason. Upon further research, they are lines from a poem by Ijeoma Umebinyuo, part of her collection of poems Questions For Ada. They read as follows:

so, here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
never enough for both.

With my Instagram being made up of an eclectic mix of Italians abroad and foreigners in Italy, you can imagine the responses I received when I shared these words in my stories. Sometimes I wonder if there still exists a single person who feels like they are enough for the place they live this very moment. When you think about it, so many of us are already the product of a move. My grandparents from China to Canada, my husband’s aunts and uncles from Abruzzo to Canada, my little brother from Edmonton out East to Toronto, even my MIL (mother-in-law, suocera) from her small mountain town in Abruzzo to Bergamo…we have all in some way, moved. So if it’s any consolation, we are all too foreign for here and there.

Some of the Hallmark lines I hate the most are when people say “home is where the heart is” and “it doesn’t matter where in the world you are as long as you’re with the people you love”. I’m going to tell you something- the people that say that have never lived abroad. Because you see, what if the heart is in multiple different places? The concept of home breaks my heart because mine is in the house I grew up in, in a cemetery under a bright Alberta sky where we buried my grandpa and where my dad’s ashes hang out in the shade of an oak, mine is with my mother, brother, and all my living family members scattered throughout Canada and the United States, it’s here in this kitchen in Italy and hard at work somewhere in Milan with my husband; so once again, if home is where the heart is, it’s everywhere and nowhere. It has no GPS coordinates and you can't "go to it" and that, that is saddest sacrifice you will ever make as an expat, whether you realize it now or not.

The other thing about being with the people you love and the rest of it not mattering, that’s an idealist’s view of the world and this is coming from a romantic who would love to believe the romantic ideal. It’s just not true. I have seen too many people come and go from Italy to know that you can be with the perfect person and it won’t be enough. You can have your person and Tuscany and gelato anytime you want and it won’t be enough. And you know what? That’s completely fine, in fact, it’s completely how it should be. Because we need more from life than just what people can give us and if your life’s every happiness weighs on people, there’s something intrinsically wrong with that. YOU have to be enough for yourself and in order to do that, we require certain things and love is certainly ONE of those things (so is gelato), but so are a sense of community, a feeling of belonging, the opportunity to fulfill a purpose. Living abroad has made me realize that and that’s why it’s fucked me over for life because until that happened, I believed the romantic notions, I believed that home was a person, that home was love yet I was wrong and Thomas Wolfe, the novelist, was right.

He said you can’t go home again. I remember that this line opens up the coming-of-age movie, “Now and Then”, and I used to think it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard and that the whole point of the movie was to show that it wasn’t true (in fact, it’s the opposite). With the passage of time, we change, the people around us change, as does the place. For someone that has never moved, those are just three factors and the blow might be softened in that the changes are harder to perceive when you live them on a daily basis (like how it seems like your parents aren’t aging because wrinkles don’t just appear overnight). So this is where living abroad fucks you over again – it adds two more factors to the fun fix: THE PEOPLE AND THE PLACES YOU LEFT BEHIND. And how much do you think someone who lives abroad perceives the changes in those people and places when they come back “home”?

Well that depends on the person. Some expats I know say they go home and it’s like “nothing has changed” and they feel like only they themselves have changed. That’s how I used to feel but I think that’s the honeymoon phase of it all, in the first year or two. I wish for you, if you’re an expat, that this feeling of nothing having changed stays that way because that means you have not yet lost anyone you left behind, forever. Unfortunately I experienced two in the span of these four years and I can guarantee you that the moment that happens, everything changes and you will never go home again. At the risk of sounding overly depressing, there is a way to go home and it applies to all of us, whether you live abroad, are thinking about living abroad, or have vowed to build a house next to your childhood school:

We’ll all just have to carry Home, The Actuality, around with us, until our own blood stops pumping. And then Home, The Actuality, will have some new and just as unrecoverable shape: whatever Home is, it’s not something “out there” to return to. It’s something inside, to which we can all return (or not) as we want, as often as we want.

- quote from John E. Simpson, in his answer on Quora

I moved to Italy four years ago and whenever I board a plane going to Canada, I feel like I’m going home yet the same thing happens when I board the return flight back to Italy. It’s like a mind-fuck of the ultimate proportions. Maybe that’s why I love flying so much, I relish in those hours spent on the plane, suspended in the clouds above a blur of land and sea - perhaps that’s where I feel most comfortable, in the middle ground, neither here nor there, just physically and metaphorically floating in the in-between, carrying home with me.

Popular Posts about Living Abroad:
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I know it's late but better late than never right? First off, wishing all of you a wonderful start to this new year and hoping it'll be overfilling with love and happiness. If you need a few extra drops of those, you've certainly stumbled on the right place today. Let me just assure you, this one has all our favorite classics including an American abroad, a hot TUSCAN summer night, a crowded piazza, and a winking Italian. IT ALSO INCLUDES talking all night until the wee hours and the most awww-worthy wake-up call. Faith is a Maryland-native that stumbled upon the world's sweetest Italian in Arezzo, Italy while attending graduate school in the Tuscan city. Clichés fell into the place as they always do and Valerio stole her heart by being a normal Italian boy (read: handsome, charming, stylish, romantic, affectionate, and the list goes on!). Read on lovers. 

​Where are you from and where is your significant other from? 
I’m from Maryland in the United States and my boyfriend Valerio is from Arezzo, in Tuscany, Italy. I came to Italy about 2 years ago to go to graduate school in Arezzo, and met Valerio after I had been there for a year. 

Where and when did you meet your significant other? 
I met him in a crowded piazza on a hot summer night (classic). I was out with friends (also American students) and some of them had met Valerio already so they introduced us. He was asking what I was doing here in Italy, and I told him I was studying theatre. When he shook my hand he said to me in Italian, “I can tell that you’re an actress,” and then throughout the rest of the conversation he kept winking at me. What a flirt. By the end of just five minutes, I thought, “Okay, this is going to be something.” 

Curator's Note:  thank you so much for setting this scene, I think there's nothing I love more than a hot Italian pizza on a crowded summer's night. PIAZZA I MEAN. PIAZZA, not pizza. A CROWDED PIAZZA ON A HOT SUMMER'S NIGHT. But also pizza. 

Who made the first move? 
He did! As a group we walked from the piazza to a block party in celebration of the joust (I totally feel like I’m living in medieval times sometimes) and we hung back to walk together alone. I remember he stopped at a little prayer shrine to Mary and said, “Oh Santa Maria, please help me teach this girl Italian!” Then we walked to a little park and sat and talked for hours, and that was where he first kissed me! The next morning he texted me “Buongiorno!” and I saw him again that next night, and every single night after that. 

Curator's Note:  the best lines in this whole thing are clearly "we walked from the piazza to a block party in celebration of the joust".  I doubt I'll ever read anything more #LivingInItaly as long as I live. 

What was your first impression of him?
My first impression was that he was handsome and very charming, but I could also tell instantly that we had chemistry and that he was as drawn to me as I was to him. I also noticed what a good dresser he was, and in general really put together. Being an American I wasn’t so accustomed to men being better dressed than I am! Then, as the days progressed, I was pretty blown away by how affectionate and romantic he was, physically and verbally, and how forthcoming open he was with his romantic side. I remember the first night he spent the night at my apartment, his phone alarm went off in the morning, and it was “At Last” by Etta James, one of the most romantic songs of all time. I remember being so surprised and impressed by his emotional side and attentiveness to me! He was also just so fun – he’d show up and surprise me with random treats or to ask me to go on a walk with him. 

Curator's Note: my little 'ol heart just melted all over my kitchen table. Seriously, it's a huge mess and it's all your fault. In order to enhance this part of the story, I've included the song that was Valerio's phone alarm below so we can all just listen to it as we mop up our melted hearts and mould it back into place. 

​Dish on the first kiss!
We were sitting really close and talking about something, and he looked into my eyes and said, “sei molto sensibile” and then kissed me. Then he walked me home and we basically stopped and kissed every quarter mile. And that was just the first night we met!

Where do you live now? 
We live in Arezzo!

Curator's Note: I am coming to visit without a doubt. Thanks for the invite guys! 

Have you learned each other's languages?
Valerio’s English is so so good, and we mostly communicate in English. I am in the never-ending process of learning and improving my Italian, but we probably speak 70% English and 30% Italian. We try to speak it more, and get a little better every day! Sometimes he speaks in Italian and I answer in English, or I speak in Italian and he answers in English, or we just throw a random word in the other language in there every so often when we don’t know the translation. Our translator app is our best friend. Anytime we have a fight Valerio gets impatient with me because I talk a mile a minute in English and he’s trying to translate everything he wants to say but I talk too much to let him, haha.

Me not being so great at Italian is a big struggle for me mostly because I have a hard time participating in conversation when we’re with his friends or family, and I feel like it’s hard for Valerio’s loved ones to get to know me, because I can’t adequately express everything I want to. It can be embarrassing or isolating for me at times. That sucks, but I know the better I get at Italian the easier it will be. 

Curator's Note: we have ALL been there, every single one of us that has ever been featured on Love Story Lunedì. I think I've only ever featured one couple when the non-Italian half was already studying Italian in school prior to meeting her fellow. So just want to tell you that you're not alone and that this period won't last, it only goes up and sometimes it doesn't feel that way because it's hard to notice your own improvement in a language over time but trust me, you are improving. 

Any advice for mixed/long-distance couples?
I always say that being in a mixed culture couple is a blessing because you can never run out of things to talk about. We are always discovering new things about each other or about each other’s culture. Of course miscommunication and cultural differences occasionally create challenges that other couples don’t have, but I think we’ve both learned to be more flexible and understanding because of them. 

Curators note: this is so true, Massi and I are always having fun explaining new words in Italian or English to the other and just the other night, we got into a big discussion about something in English that he interpreted one way and that I interpreted in another. 

Submitted by Faith. 

Here's how you can connect with her:
Twitter: @thefsullivansho
Instagram: @faithsulli
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