A Blog about our Life in Italy

My name is Maria; my family is from Vicenza, near Venice, and together with my husband Andrew I am the owner of this site. That's me in the photo with my son.

This may not be the fanciest site on earth, as it is just the two of us doing it all. I hope, though, that you will find it packed with genuine and useful information. It took me years and years to discover the "real" Italy, and that is what I want my site to be about.

Although I cover the main tourist spots, I will always have a lot to share with you about the hidden corners where tourists seldom venture.

I never feature lots of hotels and things like that either; only a few places I know personally and can recommend with confidence. Of course, I do hope you'll book through the hotel links on the site. They help us to keep going :-)

Fed Up!

Our first home together in Italy was in Turin, a beautiful city in Italy’s northwest. My husband worked for a multinational corporation, and I taught at a language school. Just after our son William was born, my husband got quite ill. Although it turned out to be nothing serious, it gave us a huge fright.

We were fed up with the rat race, but neither of us had any clue as to what else we could do.

A Crazy Choice?

Whatever we did, it had to be something we loved doing. But what did we love doing? After many sleepless nights, it dawned on us that we loved the place we lived—Italy.

Everything about the country is incredible: the people, the food, and the places, and we had lived here for so many years and discovered so much in that time. Couldn't we share that with the rest of the world... or were we insane? 

Hopeless Beginnings

The internet was the obvious way to share our knowledge, but both Andrew and I knew little about the internet.

We tried to write a blog about our life in Italy, but it just didn’t work out. We had so much to share about so many places that the blog format was all wrong. Then we built a "free" Wix site, but no visitors came.

At this point, Andrew was all set to resign himself to another thirty years of corporate life until we stumbled on Solo Build It! and finally, we were able to share our passion and love for Italy with the world.

Our Vision

From the beginning, both of us swore we would be honest with our principles, even if it meant making less money. We do need to earn a living, but we have consistently refused to feature something if we didn’t like it.

I cannot count the times we have been approached by hotels, restaurants, and other businesses to write about them, and yet I doubt if more than ten percent have been good enough to be included on the site.

It has cost us a lot of money, but I feel better about myself, and I believe that this is the only way that you, the visitor, can trust me.

Ciao

Maria