Inside Outside

When I was younger, spending the summers with my Grandma Rita in her tiny stone shack (from which I am writing) actually meant spending a lot of time outdoors. When it was raining, I would stay on an open window, or on the door, and look outside waiting for the rain to pass. These bucolic scenes were spritheaded by the fact that the home is tiny even for one Grandma and one Granddaughter, and we had only a tiny black and white TV that was broadcasting only three channels, and that wouldn’t work when the sky was cloudy or rainy. My sister would also be with us very often, making the home even busier. Making the best of the situation was a necessity, but I never consider a rainy day to be a day of missed opportunities. We were doing simple things indoors, like making a fire, and I always enjoyed watching - or playing with - the flames and the sticks which would burn differently according to their size and type of wood. Moreover, as the saying goes, we knew that “there is always sun after a rainstorm”.

For my sister and I, being connected with the outside environment regardless of the weather has always been a way to increase things to do. 

Because my Grandma couldn’t walk much, and because we didn’t have a car, we were staying mainly in our tiny hamlet of Almanno, using our garden as a living room. My Grandma always got a kick when I told people that our home had five rooms: the dining room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom… AND the living room. For “living room”, I meant our garden, which is a small patch of green leaves, mostly classifiable as “crazy salad”, or dandelions to be precise.

Modern homes are often inward-focused. They are also victims of the centripetal force of the stuff we own that keeps us inside.

Italian small homes like ours provide basic shelter, a place to cook, and a way to connect with other people. Modern Italian homes are still smaller than American homes, but the larger context is quite denser, and big homes are still rare just because there isn’t much urban space available. 

Moreover, even those beautiful villas in Tuscany, surrounded by vineyards, depended on the activities of the nearby civic centers and could never be truly isolated. Even if they were producing their own goods, they had to go somewhere to sell them. Interactions with the rest of society were very important and Italy is all about interactions between people and places.

For the people planning to move to Italy, it is very likely that you will end up renovating an existing home, and that you will fall in love with the place as a whole. You cannot buy an Italian home without considering the landscape around it, the neighboring structures, the piazze and narrow vicoli leading to it. In the US, the ZIP code and the School district guide the home purchasing choices of many people. In Italy, when buying a home, we can focus on other metrics that have inspired generations of Italians, of any age. I am grateful for this flexibility - which I didn’t appreciate after moving to the US.

Eric and I are making the most of this opportunity to be here and, in good old fashion, we are spending a lot of time outdoors. We don’t have air conditioning, and the windows and doors are always open, creating a perfect breeze even on the hottest days. The thick walls of the house provide a great thermal mass that keeps us comfortable day and night.

However, we have noticed that if we spend a weekend out of the house and come back after two days of keeping everything closed, the house accumulates too much heat (which is a new problem, courtesy of the climate change we are experiencing worldwide). Ventilation is very important in summer. Old homes force you to become “sailors of your own home”: You will soon learn all of the winds and currents, and how to make the most of them. If we had air conditioning like in modern homes, the temperature would be consistent day and night, summer and winter. We would miss the connections with the world outside - including neighbors saying hi, strangers getting lost (and rescued), or just nature sounds that beat any Spotify playlist.

This Summer, because we are having good weather, we have been eating outside twice a day, under big umbrellas that protect us from the sun. Even simple umbrellas, or a gazebo, can define the space around you, and give you a sense of belonging to a place. 

Defining a space doesn’t have to be overly complicated or expensive - although it can be, and very quickly so. Our table is welcoming thanks to the simplicity of a tablecloth, silverware, and food ready to be eaten. The Valle d’Intelvi is surrounding us, and the place is so quiet that one hour of looking at the mountains is comparable to a serious meditation session. 

One of the things that I have enjoyed the most in the past four years of coming to this place is that, with Eric, we have been hiking all of the surrounding mountains we can see from our garden. It has been a wonderful experience to point to a mountain, and Komoot our way there the following weekend. So far, we have conquered all of the Italian peaks and ridges that we can see, and are thinking of one last mountain, located in Switzerland. 

When we eat outside, we comment on how the Valley has been changing over the centuries, based on what people tell us, and how the environment has been evolving. Next week, I will talk about that, explaining the geography and how satisfying it is to connect with the region beyond our tiny stone shack.