Dreaming in Italian

Although I had always dreamed of living abroad, until I moved to Italy that dream had faced northwards – toward the fjords, forests and lakes of Scandinavia, the cathedral cities of Germany or the studio flat in Ostend I had bought for peanuts and where I loved to spend weekends walking the deserted, gale-lashed beaches or cradling a specialist beer in a ‘brown pub’. Before I met my Italian wife, I had, in fact, only visited Italy once – a long, long weekend in Florence with a girlfriend, where we had bickered at the Duomo, we had bickered at the Ponte Vecchio, we had bickered in the gardens of the Medici Palace, and when we came home, I had struggled to find a photo in which she wasn’t glaring at the camera.

This all changed when I found love with an Italian, then my love found work in Italy. To be fair, I wasn’t the only one with reservations – my wife had spent a dozen years away from home and was wary of returning for reasons I would only in the city centre three times the size of our ex-local authority flat in London, with a view of ochre tiled rooftops punctuated by church domes and spires, commute I did – setting off at dawn on a Monday or Tuesday morning and returning at midnight on a Thursday or Friday night.