Apartment hunting, 2005

An aerial view of the main piazza, Piazza Bra, and the Arena.

The view from our balcony.
Looking up towards our balcony and, to the right, our living room windows.
The neighborhood. The bridge is out of the picture to the left. Our building is on the far right. The two white awnings are at the best pizzeria in the city, Salvatore.
Angel in the door of our building.

Angel and I never had the same idea about what we were doing. I thought I was escaping suburban conformist life in America and going to a better more authentic life in Italy, hopefully for a very very long time. Angel believed, essentially, that he had been 'perfectly happy in my rut', and that he was going to give this a try for a year or two. Yet he agreed to fund this whole project, and agreed to take all our 'stuff'. I told him I wanted to plunge into the icy water of culture shock all the way, and make a new home, not a pied a terre.

We went to Verona in late March, very early April to look for an apartment to fulfill our last requirement to obtain from the Italian Consulate in NYC our Elective Residence visa...a one year official contract for a place to live. We both agreed that the apartment had to have 'the Wow! factor', or else why uproot our lives? We have a beautiful home in New Jersey, it isn't as if someone was holding guns to our heads.

Angel had contacted Weichert Realtors in New Jersey who referred us to COFIM agency in Verona. The first day, the very first day, we saw the apartment in which we now live. As it was when we found our house in New Jersey, and each other, it was love at first sight. The rest of the first week we went through the motions of looking at eleven other apartments, but nothing compared.

The remainder of the month...which we spent in a little hotel (the apartment we had rented for one month having turned out to be a disaster, so we had to live in a hotel)...was all spent with negotiations.

Many times, Angel said, I just can't do this. We would walk past a small park with freshly mown grass, and he would start to say, I'll never smell fresh cut grass again. I began to call his anxiety-driven moods his self-directed black holes. He said I was like the Queen Mary...having set a course, nothing could stop me.

In retrospect, there was really absolutely no way we could have known that we were walking into such a terrible situation. The previous tenant, with whom we met several times, voluntarily described the neighbors as being buon educati...well behaved. Not. The problematic neighbor told us how happy she was to have Americans for neighbors, and an older couple without children so there would be no noise problems. Not.

So, with his hand shaking, Angel signed the contract. We celebrated that evening at our favorite restaurant. And already the next day, Angel was saying, What have I done! I put this down to expected nerves over the enormity of the commitment. Now, the ball was in our court, and we were due in Verona on August 2 to take up our new lives.