This Ferragosto, we’re releasing here the corresponding chapter of our memoir, “I Can’ t Believe We Live Here: The Wild But True Story of How We Dropped Everything in the States and Moved to Italy, Right Before the End of the World”.

Chapter 5, “Mission Impossible: The stufa and the nulla osta - August 2019”, recounts our challenges and misadventures in navigating the Italian government systems, while a the same time setting up our little apartment to be livable in advance of our move here. It’s laid out here almost day by day, over a two week period in August, starting on Ferragosto, when much of Italy closes down.

This is the longest chapter in our book, as it recounts the most complex stage of our whole process. It’s also the chapter with the most cursing – including a special term that we coined ourselves.

CHAPTER 5

Mission Impossible: The stufa and the nulla osta

AUGUST 2019

FILING FOR THE WORK VISA, as our avvocato had urged, took on a “Mission: Impossible” heist-movie kind of feel. Each task had strict time parameters and logistical restrictions that would have confounded Steven Hawking. Getting them all accomplished in tandem was like putting together a royal wedding with a week’s notice.

First: the work visa. Work visa applications must be delivered in person — in our case, to the Italian Consulate in Detroit. Appointments were scarce and difficult to get, but we managed to schedule one for July, when the symphony would be on hiatus. But when our appointment rolled around, we lacked a key document, the nulla osta. That translates very roughly to “no problems,” an indication that we had no criminal history or other problematic past, and that our application could proceed uninhibited. So we had to postpone and reschedule the Consulate appointment for September 17. This was nerve-wracking: the symphony would be in season at that time, and it was likely they would deny us the time off, and this September date was the only appointment available until November!

November was a no-go. We had been talking with a pet shipper, who informed us that only one cat could go onboard with us on the plane. The other three would have to fly in the cargo hold. Pets were not allowed in cargo below a certain temperature, so we would have to fly by mid-November at the latest. That meant we had to make the September date work. If they granted us a work visa, we had to use it within three months, or lose it — forever. So everything rode on us getting that nulla osta document so we could apply for the work visa. Then, if we were successful, we would have to uproot everything and move to Italy by mid-November.

It will come as no surprise that getting the nulla osta required us to pick it up in person, at a government office, in Italy. We also had to get our apartment, which was currently stuffed to the gills with the previous owner’s stuff, into suitable condition, so we could move in in November — with four cats! — in hopes the whole enterprise was successful. Oh, did I mention that there was no heat in the house? So we had to figure that out, as well.

We already had tickets to Italy for August that we’d bought on sale back in 2018, intending to do research for our travel business. We scrapped that idea, and focused all our energy on accomplishing the tasks at hand, to give ourselves a chance at our dream of moving to Italy.

Banking on the hope that our scheme would work, we took a week off in early August for what we privately called a “Farewell Tour” — traversing multiple states to visit family and friends. We weren’t sure if some of them could or would visit us in Italy, and we wanted to eat and drink and laugh together one more time. We didn’t have much time to get emotional about it, since it was such an insane, whirlwind tour, and The Big Heist was just around the corner.

When we returned to Nashville from our family visits, we pulled ourselves together and got ready to head to Italy, to give it our best shot.

Of course, like all good heist flicks, the plan was not without the occasional stumbling block.

AUGUST 14 — NO, MAKE THAT AUGUST 15

Usually we pack very light when we travel. This time, we took as many things over as we could, to get some personal items into our new place. I brought my guitar, which was quite a gamble for me. I wanted that guitar if we moved to Italy, of course, but if we didn’t get the work visa, I sure would miss it in Nashville.

Ferragosto, August 15, is one of Italy’s biggest holidays, and nearly every store is closed. We had planned to arrive in Italy the day before, the 14th, so we could do our shopping for the week. But weather delays forced us to stay overnight in Nashville in a dumpy airport hotel.

“Um, are you sure?” our cabbie asked us apprehensively, when we rolled up to the place. But we were more preoccupied with the tasks that laid ahead, so we tipped him and checked in. While Zen made about 30 calls to supermarkets in Italy before she identified one that would be open the next day (all while not touching the bedspread, or the carpet, or the floor), I dashed across the highway to a gas station to pick up some sandwiches and a six-pack of Dos Equis and a bottle of red wine. Zen eyed my over-purchase of booze with a mixture of disbelief and thankfulness. I sat and played guitar on the bed while we hoped not to get murdered in our shitty motor lodge.

The next day’s flights worked as planned, and we arrived in Rome early on Ferragosto. We headed to the one open supermarket to get food, TP and other necessities — and ended up also buying a television. (Yes, we bought a TV at a grocery store.)

Arriving at our little apartment in Soriano, we found it stuffed with 21 boxes from IKEA. This was stuff we had ordered: a bed, patio chairs, and a chaise lounge for the “living room.” But we also found that the previous owner’s stuff was STILL THERE, mostly jammed into the upstairs space. Job One became figuring out how to get someone to remove all of the old, large furniture items that we wouldn’t be needing. Zen suggested throwing it all over the balcony, but that might have been the jet lag talking. And everything was covered in a thin layer of dust and filth, remnants of the work the muratore crew had done.

Our first course of action was to clean the kitchen and bathroom, which were in pretty rough condition. (Due to our missed flight, we had been wearing the same clothes for 48 hours, so we were pretty rough too.) We spent a little time putting together some patio chairs for the terrace, so we’d have a place to sit and rest occasionally between all the cleaning and assembling and rearranging. Then we hoped to have enough energy to put together the bed, which was somewhere among those 21 boxes.

A few weeks before, when we’d purchased the furniture, it all seemed so romantic. We imagined we would solve the puzzle of the bed assembly together, maybe bond over it while drinking some wine. Then we’d dress it in the nicest crisp clean linens and enjoy a well-earned rest.

Real life: We were both exhausted at this point, and the bed had approximately eleventy-jillion parts. And since we had been in the same clothes for well over 48 hours, we were each trying to pretend that the other one didn’t smell like hot melted gorgonzola on top of a rotting tuna carcass on the beach. The apartment had no air conditioning, so we kept all the windows open — which also invited mosquitoes to swarm us while we worked.

It was pretty late in the evening when we finally got the bed put together. We felt guilty about the construction noise as a way of introducing ourselves to our new neighbors, but we were desperate to have a place to sleep, so we hoped they didn’t notice.

AUGUST 16

We woke in the morning to the sound of the town’s 8am siren, followed by bells from the cathedral across the valley. In addition to furniture, the previous owner had left us a tremendous amount of random things. Some of it was really helpful — for example, four bottles of prosecco and a bottle of Aperol. Some of it was less than useful, such as a filthy toilet brush, a hair dryer you wear like a hat, and multiple jars of expired food. And all of it was dusty.

This day saw a major domestic breakthrough. The place had only a small dorm-sized fridge, and no range or washing machine. So we arranged for a stove, fridge, and washer to be delivered and hooked up. If you could see (and smell) what we looked (and smelled) like at this point, you would understand that the most important appliance was the washing machine.

I handled these transactions (in Italian) at a local shop. We thought about buying the appliances online and having them delivered, just to avoid having to stumble around in Italian, but ultimately we decided it was best to buy them in town. Everyone I spoke to was very patient and kind, despite the fact that we didn’t always understand details about an appliance’s safety/economy/features. Everything was delivered and installed that same afternoon, and I even got them to haul the old fridge away. These were significant expenses, among many that had us occasionally fretting about the overall cost of this endeavor. We alternated between reminding each other that this spending was an expected part of the “price of admission,” and just submerging the topic in the previous owner’s prosecco.

All of this cleaning and other work was exhausting in the heat, as we battled flies and mosquitoes. When Zen gets extremely tired, she sometimes also gets emotional about little things. That afternoon, she absolutely lost it when she couldn’t get the plastic off of a hook she was trying to attach to the wall. That stupid sticky plastic was “trying to give her a stroke,” she said, and she started crying over it.

While she was doing this, I had just been unpacking a suitcase, and I came across our pewter goblet. We are not religious, so when we got married in our backyard, we designed our own ceremony. Fourteen years earlier, we drank wine out of this goblet to complete our wedding ceremony.

To ease her stress, I put a little wine in the goblet and took her by the hand. We weaved our way through the maze of boxes and junk to the terrace, and we had a little drink together while looking at the sunset, as I held her in my arms. To mitigate the sappiness of the moment, I reminded her that at our wedding, a bug had landed in our wine cup, which I fished out with my finger before I drank it. Her tears turned to laughter and we ended the day on a high note.

AUGUST 17

At last, Marco had arranged for his cousin to load up and haul away a ton of stuff from our apartment. Three beds, including mattresses, a door and disassembled door frame, a giant window, a large porcelain pedestal sink, a large lamp, a huge plastic we-don’t-even-know-what-the-hell kind of box, and a couple of large paintings and posters, as well as several boxes full of smaller items. (Did I mention that this apartment is only around 500 square feet?!) This was an insane amount of stuff to have in there, even before we had added our own bed and several other pieces of furniture.

Marco’s cousin was none too happy with the amount of stuff, but he planned to either use it all himself, or give it to people who could use it. He expertly stuffed, tied, and wedged everything on top of his work truck. As he drove off, it looked like the Beverly Hillbillies were moving out. We breathed a huge sigh of relief — but not too deeply, because of all the dust that remained in the house. I do have a touch of asthma, after all.

Being professional cheapskates, we had found ways to refresh and reuse much of what remained. Everything that was unusable, we stuffed in our rental car — jam-packed with clothing, old magazines, makeup and hairspray, long-expired food from the previous owner, and a lot of the packaging material that came from the furniture we bought. (We had to drive all of this stuff around for several days before we were able to gain legal access to the dump.) Having so much stuff cleared out meant we could finally sweep and mop, and get some of the dirt and dust out of the place.

Then we resumed assembling our furniture. I usually love putting together IKEA furniture — I enjoy the puzzle aspect of it. I also like to take my time to do things properly and thoroughly, and then stand back and admire a job well done. But this night, as we were approaching sundown, I ended up in a pitched battle with an IKEA shelf. It shouldn’t have been that difficult, but my state of mind was fragile, and I was arguing with the shelf as if it were sentient — and recalcitrant. “Quit f***ing doing that, asshole shelf!”

”You have to do it like my family always used to do jigsaw puzzles,” Zen offered helpfully. “If the piece doesn’t fit, use a box cutter to cut it to the right shape. It’s an old family trick.”

Then she pranced off happily to sweep the terrace and enjoy the view.

One of the funnier items we inherited from the previous owner was a bright yellow teddy bear candle. We spend every night by candlelight, preferring low light after years spent on concert stages, but this creepy bear was ... different. “Seeing his head on fire reminds me that I have a headache,” Zen said when we first lit it up, “and the color reminds me that I have to pee.” Nevertheless, when it started to get dark, it illuminated the house with a warm and beautiful light, making everything look cheery and homey. Until its face melted off and it collapsed on itself, that is.

Since the thing came with the house, we chose to chalk it up as an asset against the purchase price. This Italian custom of a house coming with many of the items of the previous owner (“Tutto incluso!”) took some getting used to, as it’s not generally done in the US. But we were grateful for many of the things: They saved us a lot of money in furniture and housewares that we didn’t have to purchase, which helped take the edge off of financial stress, and it made us feel more connected to the house, as if we had always been a part of its story.

AUGUST 18

This whole project worked in part because of Zen’s ability to plan for months in advance, working out every detail with lists and diagrams and charts. “You’re like the heist ringleader,” I observed at one point.

“Yeah,” she quipped, “but instead of some cool Clooney type, the ringleader wears yoga pants, uses curse words that would shame a sailor, and gets the plans stained with Cheeto dust.”

But she made it all happen. One of the things she had anticipated was that without Wi-Fi or TV service, we’d want a way to watch movies to relax. So she packed our little DVD player and my Lord of the Rings discs. It was a treat, after a long day of cleaning and schlepping and cursing and sweating, to relax with a glass of wine and watch one of my favorite movies.

This apartment had no air conditioning, which is pretty typical throughout Europe, as it’s extremely costly to run. “I’m a terrible, horrible, no-good person in the heat,” Zen said (and who was I to argue?). It’s especially vexing when we’re hot and filthy and we have to do a lot of heavy lifting — when we’re moving into an apartment, for example. But we were happy to discover that the summer in Soriano, especially after Ferragosto, is quite comfortable. It’s warm in the day, maybe getting up to 90°F, but it cools off nicely in the evenings. And the humidity level is a tolerable level for human beings — unlike in Nashville, where it’s like standing in front of a humidifier that is filled with human sweat all day long.

AUGUST 19

In the morning Zen got up early and made a very un-Italian breakfast, but one dear (and potentially damaging) to my heart: an assortment of cheesy eggs, sausage, and garlicky, peppery home fries. This was something she had made often when we were dating. “This breakfast is like 95 percent of why you married me in the first place, isn’t it?” (I cannot confirm that percentage.)

After breakfast, we headed to the Questura, the police headquarters, which also handles immigration. Our lawyer had arranged an appointment for us to pick up a key element of our application for the work visa: that elusive nulla osta. We had a very narrow window in which to get this and everything else sorted; our lawyer had made it clear that this was our best and perhaps only chance to get this type of visa. Though the attorney had put the wheels in motion months earlier, the nulla osta had stalled over the summer. The guy who generates those at the Questura had not been at work for a month. But now “the guy” had returned, and the documents were ready.

Entering the Questura complex, we were baffled as to where to go. Every building was kind of gray and squat, and none of the doors were very clearly marked. We went through door after door, explaining in Italian what we were looking for. Each official we encountered gave us a different set of directions. At one point we ended up behind a gated police barrier (which was surely off-limits to civilians), and a few moments later we got hopelessly lost in a medical clinic.

Finally we found the immigration office. We entered a waiting room tightly packed with dozens of people in no discernable line. A digital board on the wall read “47.” Zen took a number from the ticket dispenser — and pulled out “98.” D’oh!

The office doors were propped open, letting the hot, humid air roll in. The in-wall air conditioner was hopelessly outgunned in this office full of hot, sweaty, annoyed people. A gaggle of workers, trying not to make eye contact with any of us, sorted papers behind what looked like bulletproof glass. Tons of grimy handprints and faceprints covered the glass, left by applicants like ourselves leaning against it in an effort to understand instructions from the officials.

We put our best smiles on and tried to look like we were having a great time — like we were not annoyed or sweaty or stressed AT ALL. Luckily, we have a ton of experience doing this, having sat under a variety of conductors of various skill levels over our careers.

The number on the digital reader never changed.

But our strategy of looking unbothered and eager actually worked! We got called up after I “accidentally” made eye contact with a worker. (Who? Me? Us? Oh, could we come up there? Oh, okay, we’d love to — sure!) At the same time we saw a different applicant in the corner with another officer, literally yelling at them for being stupid. We preferred our strategy.

We got up to the window, behind which the clerk had spread out our documents, including the prized nulla osta. Right away, Zen noticed, reading upside-down, that they had spelled her name wrong — ZANeba instead of ZENeba. She turned her head my direction and anxiously whispered, “My name is wrong.”

My breakfast threatened to make a reappearance. I had that feeling you get when falling off a cliff in a dream — that the center of your body is suddenly empty, that sickening feeling of fast, unstoppable descent. Zen floated the idea that maybe it would be easier if she just legally changed her name to match the new document. The two of us began one of our whose-flop-sweat-stinks-more competitions. I tried talking as slowly as I could to the official to buy time. We did not want to step away from the desk and lose our place in line, because the office might close before we got called again. Zen frantically dialed our lawyer as I flailed and tried to be charming.

After the second attempt, our lawyer answered, despite the fact that he was on the beach in his Speedo. I handed over the phone to the official, apologizing again for the wait. After a few moments, they determined that we need to get the Camera di Commercio (Chamber of Commerce) to fix the typo, then return to the Questura with the corrected document.

“Va bene, ora andiamo lì?” I asked — Okay, we go there now?

Purtroppo no. Unfortunately not — the Camera di Commercio is only open on Wednesday.

All right, so we go there tomorrow, then come back here?

Again: No. The immigration office isn’t open tomorrow; you need to come back here on Thursday once the form is fixed tomorrow.

So back to Soriano we drove, where we spent the next 18 hours uselessly chatting about whether or not the other office would be able to fix it. Will they really be open? Will the Questura accept a corrected document? Did the chicken really come before the egg? Who put that chocolate in my peanut butter? Each rhetorical question sparked long discussions amounting to nothing other than keeping us both from having a panic attack.

We tried to distract ourselves with the continuing task of setting things up in the apartment. There was plenty to do, at least. Years ago we stopped giving each other holiday and birthday gifts, opting instead to choose crafts by local artists we discovered on our travels. To make this place feel more homey, we had shipped ourselves a big box of such things: a blown glass plate from Venice, a ceramic hand-painted ceramic tile that says “bagno” for our bathroom door, a pair of pottery coffee mugs from Ireland, and an English stained glass window in a wooden frame. Zen had the idea to mount this with some metal chains onto a wood beam the muratore had installed — the glass became a stand-in for a wall between the bed and the living room space. At dawn on clear days, the sun beams through the stained glass to awaken us.

While I worked on hanging the window, Zen tried to spruce up a few of the old items that had been left to us. She spent a good bit of time on the terrace painting the metal frame of an old table. “It’s so nice to paint when cats aren’t around,” she remarked. “Nobody’s sticking their tail in the paint tray!” (Yes, that has happened to us before. Thanks, Mr. Weasely!)

It was a funny comment, but it was also a reminder: In the event we were successful in getting our work visas, we would have just under another week to get the place fit to live in. If we were lucky, the next time we walked into this house in November, we would be living here. Everything needed to be ready — not just adequate for the two of us, but also meeting the exacting living standards of our four fussy feline overlords.

AUGUST 20

We had some time before we needed to head to the Camera di Commercio to fix our documents, so in the morning we did a sweep and a mop — each day this became easier as we unpacked and assembled and sorted and discarded more items in the house. We mounted a few more tiles on the wall: some of our prized ceramic pieces from Tuscany that had been mounted in our kitchen in Nashville, that we had removed to bring them back to their “home” in Italy. We also hung our framed CDs, the discs we produced with ALIAS Chamber Ensemble — Zen was the artistic director for 16 years, and these CDs were the hard-won products of our labors. Bit by bit, it was beginning to feel like we belonged here.

But did we belong here, really? That remained to be determined. We drove back to Viterbo to the Chamber of Commerce, a beautiful stone building in the town center. Inside, the atmosphere was officious but clearly historic, with that old-books smell you find in the most magnificent libraries.

We first encountered Italian Wilford Brimley, the security guard, who heard our story and directed us to an office down a hall. There, several men heatedly discussed the issue; Zaneba — I mean, Zeneba — calmly and meekly assured them that she was pretty sure her name had two Es in it. “Meek” is not usually her thing exactly, so I admired her Oscar-worthy performance, especially knowing how stressed she was. I knew that in her mind she was screaming, “Goddammit, I KNOW how to spell my NAME!”

After about 10 minutes, it was determined that another official needed to correct the mistake, so Wilford Brimley led us down another corridor. He waited patiently with us in the hallway for about 20 minutes while the relevant official finished up her previous meeting. We passed the time by chatting with the guy about the town he lives in, the festivals there, great food in the area, music, politics, history... all things we can discuss in Italian with relative ease. It was a great relief to have a conversation in Italian that we could manage, rather than the ones we had been struggling with for the past week: gas lines, legal documents, electric service bills, roofing tiles — those conversations really took us to the end of our language ability.

When we sat down with the official, our strategy of patience, gratitude, and lighthearted banter paid off, and several bumps were ironed out. Though multiple times she seemed to hit a roadblock, our method of looking at her like a dog begging for bacon seemed to motivate her to take care of us.

Ultimately we walked out of there with our paperwork corrected and stamped. We considered it a qualified success — we still had to return to the Questura the next day, but for now, we thanked everyone profusely and returned yet again to Soriano to resume our furniture assembly, and our unpacking and cleaning.

Later that afternoon, we were startled by a piercing BUZZZZ! It was the doorbell, and it scared the bejeezus out of us. This was the first time we had heard it — we hadn’t been aware until that moment that we had one. Was this a delivery? Were we expecting other packages? We didn’t even know anymore.

But it was our next-door neighbor Giuseppina, dropping off a huge string of tomatoes from her garden. She knew we had been scrambling with our home project, and she wanted to make sure we at least had something to eat. These acts of generosity and kindness from our neighbors truly overwhelmed us, again and again.

AUGUST 21

We showed up bright and early to the immigration office. We were the first ones in line, they immediately stamped our papers and... then I woke up out of a fitful sleep, because nothing ever works like that, does it?

We woke to another random food delivery from one of our neighbors. Pietro, Giuseppina’s babbo (dad) came to our door with a giant bucket full of ripe figs that he had just picked at his country farm. He asked if we would like some. We tried to take three, but he insisted that we take nine. (He was pretty disappointed that we settled for only nine.)

We asked him if there’s a recipe that he prefers for these. He just shrugged and took a fig out of his bucket and popped it in his mouth. “Màgnali!” he said, which in the Sorianese dialect means “Eat them!” We didn’t know that at the time, but the general meaning was obvious.

One of Zen’s projects that morning was attaching a magnet under a shelf to hold her chef’s knife. She superglued a few magnets together, then glued them to the underside of the cabinet. It took her a while to figure out how many magnets would be required to keep the knives secured. Meanwhile, the knife kept falling from its suspended position onto the counter. Her tendency to superglue her fingers alternately to the glue container and to each other added to the difficulty. Much cursing ensued, continuing the lesson in American profanities that our neighbors had been receiving this past week or so.

When Zen finally managed to get the magnet (and, more importantly, the knife) to stay put, she tried to take a picture to document the process. She had been posting a lot of the little details of our “housewarming” on our social media as it progressed. But she had to get me to open her phone, since it no longer recognized her fingerprint through the glue.

After our coffee, we headed back to Viterbo for the third time. We’d memorized the route by then, and the trip was a breeze.

We walked into the Questura office — more crowded than it was the last time, and hotter, too. Despite having had an appointment for this return trip, we waited for an hour or more — always with our best non-stressed smiles plastered to our faces, even though our clothes gradually became plastered to our bodies from the heat. Finally an official behind the window recognized us, and beckoned for us to approach the window and hand over our paperwork.

She scanned it all, then called one of her colleagues over. A quiet but rapid-fire discussion ensued. Then they called over yet another colleague to join in the talks. The three of them held their summit for what seemed like an eternity — in reality it was 15 minutes — before breaking up. Our official came back to the window with our papers. “A posto.”

We got wide-eyed. “A posto?”

She smiled back at our dumb, eager faces. “A posto!” The documents were all in order!

She filed their copies and handed us our nulla osta papers, signed and sealed. A wave of relief washed over us — we still had a chance at the work visa! We determined not to let these papers out of our sight until we got to the Consulate in Detroit the following month.

As we walked out, Zen muttered under her breath, “You can have my nulla osta when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

AUGUST 22

The next few days were a flurry of activity, as we scrambled to tie up loose ends with the apartment. The next part of our “heist movie” was to get a heater installed. If our application for a work visa went as we hoped, we’d be coming back in November, at which point it would be quite cold.

We had ordered a wood-burning stufa (stove heater) from a big-box online company — fire-engine red, with a little bread oven on top. It was another of these romantic ideas: We’d heat our house with wood, maybe even with logs we gathered our-selves in the beechwood forest on the mountain! And we’d bake our own Italian bread in the oven compartment — energy-efficient and adorable!

The company had given us a four-day window in which they might deliver it, and no other tracking information, so we had to be home for a solid 96 hours. I made a mental note never again to complain about Comcast customer service. While we awaited the stufa delivery, we continued organizing the place. Storage space was at a minimum — there was no closet, for example — so we had to be mindful of how things were set up. There was not an inch — or, rather, a centimeter — to spare!

When we had first seen our tiny apartment, it had a few interior walls, which made it really boxy, dark, and stuffy. One of the things we had asked the muratore to do, in between April and August, was to knock down two of the walls, leaving one as a sort of partition between bed and foyer.

In May, Gabriele texted us a picture of the work in progress. Looking at it, we couldn’t even tell what we were seeing until we realized... he had taken down all the walls! We had obviously failed to communicate — and we had no doubt the fault was ours.

That’s how we ended up with the “open plan” layout we were now working with. When we first decided to undertake the project of this apartment, the two of us agreed that we’d have to let go of a lot of control, and to extend a ton of trust. This project would have been impossible if we insisted on asserting a single “perfect” vision that could not be deviated from, and this wall was a perfect example of that.

Years earlier, we had coined a word to refer to this kind of experience:

“fuck•er•tu•ni•ty” / 'fuh-kr 'TOO-neh-tee/ (noun) [2015 - first known use]
- an event that at first seems terrible or disadvantageous, but makes things ultimately turn out better than they otherwise would have.

The unexpected wall removal turned out to be a benefit — we set up backless shelves that created a barrier without blocking light, which added some vital storage space. This turned out to be the first of many “fuckertunities” in this incredible adventure.

After we assembled the last of the shelves and stacked them up to build the “wall,” Zen sent me out to buy some prosciutto and mozzarella from the local alimentari (food shop). When I returned, she put together a little lunch on the terrace, using a cantaloupe, some tomatoes, and some local olive oil that a neighbor had dropped off the day before: Prosciutto e melone and an insalata caprese — perfect snacks for a warm summer day. We sat on the terrace, enjoying the break from the dust and clutter, and tried to imagine what actual life would be like here. It was starting to feel like home.

AUGUST 25

We received notice from the corrieri that, after a series of snafus that had delayed the shipment, they would be delivering our stufa the following day, which was welcome news. Not only would we get our pellet stove, but knowing that it wasn’t coming that day released us from the Great Stufa Vigil of 2019 and allowed us to leave the house. We had gotten a ton of work done over the past two days, but the constant cleaning, dusting, mopping, and unpacking, had all taken their toll, especially since we were doing it while being bombarded by mosquitoes. We also had a list of stuff we needed from the DIY home store: cleaners, nuts and bolts, sponges... and the big ticket item, a gas grill for the terrace.

We were sticking within our budget for new-house purchases, and yet the seemingly endless money-hemorrhaging made us wince and grit our teeth on a daily basis. But when we got in the car, Zen said: “I don’t care if mosquito screens are a million dollars. We are buying them for every fucking window.” Poor Zen was the primary magnet for the zanzare (mosquitoes), which skipped over me to cluster around her. The bites affected her differently from the way they did in the US, where they were a temporary annoyance. Here, each bite swelled into an itchy, hard, red welt that she would scratch open in her sleep. After a few days, she was covered in crusty, itchy scabs. It was all very romantic, we joked to each other, as we both worried about her ability to get past US Border Patrol covered in open festering wounds.

At the DIY store, we bought a dual gas grill, which could be converted to use metano from the city line instead of propano from a tank. We did our best to follow the Italian instructions to change out the hardware, hoping not to blow ourselves up while grilling our first steak. When we finished, there were several extra screws and random parts remaining that had not been mentioned in the instructions, which did not inspire confidence, but our idraulico (plumber) stopped by to check the work. “Sembra a posto, bravo,” he said after examining the gas fittings — It seems in place. Success! We could now cook outside without fear of explosions.

While we were doing all of this work on the place, the details of our lives were proceeding as ever in the US. Every day we took care of a dozen e-mails — booking recording sessions, organizing our schedules with the symphony calendar and ensemble rehearsals, and assorted other business. Despite what seemed like a dreamy (albeit dusty) experience in Italy, we never lost sight of the fact that we still had jobs, obligations, cats! And we knew that pulling off this Big Idea was still a long-shot.

Next, I set out to get some major “husband points” and installed all the mosquito screens. As I put up the last of the screens, we heard a voice at the door. “Matteo, Matteo...” It was our neighbor, stopping by with more garden bounty — this time, a humongous bucket of grape tomatoes.

We already had received a lot of tomatoes as gifts from other neighbors — everyone had huge surpluses at this time of year. So Zen decided to make a tomato sauce while I took a short walk to a local butcher to buy some of their house-made sausages. When I returned, the whole house was filled with delicious sauce aroma: garlic, onions, and fresh tomatoes, mixed together with a touch of red wine.

While the sauce percolated, I sat out on the balcony with my guitar, picking and singing a bit, as I kept an eye on the pork sausages on the grill. The sun was beginning to set, the sky turning a cotton candy color. I took a moment to appreciate the mountain peaks in the distance, far away, across Umbria, in Abruzzo. I heard Sante’s goats bleating below, in their pasture surrounded by olive groves.

“It sounds like they’re saying “Maaa-aaatt!” Zen called from inside. “Do they like the music, or are they asking you to stop?” she teased me.

AUGUST 26

The good news was, we finally knew when the stufa was coming. The bad news was, that day, we had to drive to Tuscany that day for a meeting with our immigration lawyer, to get the paperwork together to present to the Consulate in Detroit in September. This appointment was all part of the needle-threading process we had to do to apply for our work visas, and we could not reschedule it by an hour, let alone by a day or two. We had planned this trip as an overnight, in part to give ourselves a few hours break, and in part because we knew we wouldn’t be safe to do all that driving in one day.

We hired a friend — Dane, the brother of the aforementioned Hamish — to wait in our apartment for the delivery. He too is totally bilingual, having lived in Soriano since childhood, so he could handle things much more easily than we could. He’d be there to take delivery and then coordinate with Simone, our idraulico, who would install the stufa.

We were driving up the Autostrada when Dane called. “Hi guys. They delivered the stufa...”

“Great!” we said.

“Ah, not really, it’s a pretty big mess,” he replied. Through the days of delayed delivery, it had been unsalvageably damaged. All the metal parts were dented, Dane told us. The glass window was broken, and some of the heating stones inside were in pieces.

The corrieri had already left. There was nothing else we could do at this point, so we thanked our friend and proceeded with our trip. That evening at the hotel we’d send messages to the company (to ask for a refund) and to the corrieri (to arrange for them to come and pick it up), but first we continued to Firenze. We resolved to go to the local stufa shop when we returned to Soriano and buy whatever model they could install by November, regardless of cost. Lesson learned: Always buy local.

We parked outside Firenze’s town walls and walked into the office of our avvocato. Our lawyer again reviewed the process for us, assuring us that we’d be successful if we did everything exactly as he said and exactly according to the schedule.

Back out on the street in Firenze, the moment felt surreal. The next step was the consulate in Detroit. And then everything would either fizzle out, or move very, very quickly.

Paperwork in hand, we got back to our car and drove up into the Casentino mountains in northeast Tuscany, where we would be staying at a little albergo in a small mountain town. We were there in particular to go to one of our favorite restaurants, a delicious diversion between our lawyer’s office and Soriano. We had only one more full day before returning to the US, and we had to resolve StufaGate. But for now, we ordered a nice bottle of Chianti, indulged in some paper-thin pappardelle with wild boar sauce, and topped it off with a creamy panna cotta drizzled with caramel, then rolled ourselves off to bed.

We awoke to the sound of birds and the smell of pine, reminding us we were in the mountains of the Casentino. A quick espresso, one last deep breath of mountain air, and then back to the grind, to finish our heist.

AUGUST 27

Upon returning to Soriano the next day, we discovered our driveway littered with little pieces of the stufa — a piece of glass here, a chunk of metal there.

We called, e-mailed, texted, Messenger-ed and WhatsApp-ed the delivery company to arrange them to pick up this now-very-expensive piece of garbage. This seemed like an incredibly complex operation to sort out, but eventually they arrived at the top of our street in a large delivery truck. I walked up to where they were parked. The driver explained the problem to me — shouted at me, really, in rapid Italian, the only part of which I understood clearly were the more colorful and less-than-friendly words he used.

The upshot, roughly translated: They couldn’t f***ing drive down our c***ing street, the truck was too g****mn big, and they’d only take it if we’d f***ing schlep the thing up to the top of the street.

I’m a quick learner. Copying his colorful verbiage, I agreed to f***ing schlep it up there, but it would take us a c***ing while. He said Okay, they’d maybe f***ing come back in the afternoon if they could, to pick it up. And then they f***ing drove off.

loading the broken stufa into oiur rental car

With great difficulty, and vastly exceeding our actual strength, Zen and I managed to hoist this bulky 250-pound piece of junk into our rental car — luckily, we happened to have a hatchback. We managed to do this without scratching the rental, but it did cost some blood and bruises on our part, and our neighbors learned a raft of new and filthy colorful verbiage in English. Because of all the one-way streets, we had to drive it all the way around and through town to come through to the right part of the street where the delivery guys could pick it up when they returned. We eased it out of the car and left it standing on the side of the street above our house.

We had asked Simone, our idraulico, to help us communicate with the corrieri. They kept changing their return time. We were extremely concerned: We didn’t know if we could be charged by the city for dumping garbage on a public street, but we were afraid to find out the hard way. This was not the way we envisioned introducing ourselves to the neighborhood. As the day approached sundown, though, we looked out the window — and the stufa was gone!

Simone called us a few minutes later and told us the corrieri would be there shortly. “Ummm... Già loro hanno venuti,” I said — They had already come and taken the stufa. He seemed confused, and told us to hang on; then he called back a few minutes later.

“Ciao, Matteo... Ascolta: La stufa era rubato.” Listen, Matt: It was stolen.

We sat silently for a moment — but then Zen started wildly clapping and gleefully exclaimed: “Great — it’s gone!” We sent a note to the company: We left it for pickup for the corrieri, and it’s now no longer our problem. No matter the arguing we might have to do with the company (or with our credit card), it was a great relief that we could scratch this off of our To Do list.

I was bitter about the day’s events and stressed about the possibility that we’d have to pay for the stufa anyway. Zen came over, rubbed my shoulders, and said “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” and poured me a big plastic cup full of red wine.

Ah, Italy.

AUGUST 28

This was our last full day in Italy on this trip. The “happy ending” of our appliance being destroyed and then stolen was darkened by the fact that we still needed to find a way to heat our house — in one day.

After visiting a couple of big-box stores in nearby Viterbo (of which we were wary, but at least we were on the ground instead of online), we became demoralized. Nothing even close to what we had been looking for existed in our price range and — at least as importantly — our size range.

In our local travels over the past week or so, we had noticed that there was indeed a local shop a five-minute drive away, out in the country between towns. It was late afternoon — in fact we had just heard Soriano’s siren very faintly in the distance — so it was really now or never. “Let’s check it out,” Zen said. “What do we have to lose?”

The shop was a family-run place — an actual mom and pop greeted us when we entered their showroom. There were all manner of chimneys and fireplaces and stufe and barbecues and outdoor pizza ovens — it made us wish we had a few hundred square meters (and a couple hundred thousand bucks) to play with. As it was, we homed in on the smallest stufa they had, which was a pellet stove. Wood pellets are a common method of heating in Italy, and while it wasn’t the romantic wood-burner we had been thinking about, it seemed cute and extremely easy to operate and maintain, and to afford. (A bonus point: Due to one of our dear Mr. Weasely’s various medical conditions, we’d already been using pine pellets as cat litter for years. “As long as we don’t mix up the stuff we’re going to burn with the stuff that was already peed on,” Zen quipped.)

We discussed our needs and our situation with the proprietors, including the possibility that we might be moving there in the winter, so we needed to organize something to get set up in the next couple of months.

How long will you be living in this place? the woman asked us.

“Speriamo per sempre,” Zen answered. “Fino moriamo.” — Forever, we hope, until we die. The signora chuckled at this, but her husband shook his head and crossed himself with great seriousness.

We needed to talk about delivery and installation. The fact that we were already working with an idraulico was a big advantage — they could coordinate a delivery with him and he could install it any time in the near future. But they wanted to discuss it with him directly, so we gave Simone a call and handed our phone over to the couple.

They discussed in what seemed like great detail, until the signora handed my phone back. “Lui viene,” she said. He was coming to the shop! They also called their daughter, who spoke some English and lived nearby, to come in and translate. She arrived just a few minutes later.

Simone had been giving his twin 4-year-old girls a bath before putting them to bed, after which he’d come by to discuss stufa details. When he arrived, we did our best to follow their conversation, into which we only occasionally interjected ourselves. The coordination of delivery and installation was sorted out quickly and easily. The main question was whether or not the stufa we had picked out was going to be big enough. This involved extensive discussion from everyone: mother, father, daughter, Simone, and peripherally, us, discussing what we should end up with.

Simone assumed that since we were Americans, we’d want to crank the heat to an extreme degree. And the husband thought we’d need something bigger, with more bells and whistles, perhaps not grasping how small our place was (or, again, our cheapskate factor). We said we didn’t need it that warm, but no one seemed to believe us.

But soon the signora intervened and interrupted the two men. “They said their place is small, they don’t need it to be a very high temperature. Let them get the small one that they like!” There was no feeling of being “upsold.” It was clear that everyone was worried that we would freeze in our home if we didn’t get a big enough stufa. We knew from experience that most Italians seem to like their homes heated to the point where you could grow a palm tree in the bedroom, so we understood why they were concerned. But it was clear we were not getting anywhere in the discussion.

Finally I saw Zen get that gleam in her eye she gets when she has figured something out, and she said “Unfortunately, we can’t have it too hot in the house. It is bad for the violin and cello.” SOLD! The instruments became our scapegoats and the discussion was ended. As we started to sign the documents, Zen pointed to the fancy stufa that the father had been showing us. “Solo voglio quello se c’è anche un parte crematorio, se...” — I only want that one if it has a crematorium feature... You know, if... She left the thought hang in the air. The poor guy’s eyes nearly popped out of his head and he feverishly crossed himself again, while his wife winked at us and chuckled.

A Month later, our *idraulico* sent us this pic - he had installed the stufa! We wouldn’t see it in person for another two months, though, until we uprooted our lives and made our final move to italy.

“A posto,” she said. “Facciamo tutto facilmente.” We paid for the stufa and discussed annual maintenance, which would be done by their son, just a personal phone call away — another benefit to buying local. Simone discussed contact and delivery information with the couple, everyone shook hands, and we left the shop. There in the parking lot, we talked with Simone about how much we’d pay him to do the installation, and gave him a copy of our key. We’d leave him the cash on the table inside the door, and he could get the work done at his leisure. It was another instance of placing trust in people, and another instance where we were richly rewarded for doing so.

“Va bene, d’accordo,” he said — Okay, agreed. As we parted, thanking Simone profusely, he added, “Speriamo di vederci a novembre... buona fortuna!” — We hope we’ll see you in November! We did too.

On our way back to the apartment we stopped at a little gift shop in Soriano, where we bought two plush teddy bears. When we got back to the house, we put an envelope full of cash in a little basket by the door, along with these two bears — gifts for Simone’s daughters, whose bedtime we had interrupted.

In retrospect, the switch from the “romantic” wood stove to the pellet type was better for us in the long run. As we’ve subsequently been told countless times by neighbors, gathering and storing wood is no small task, nor is running a wood stove for the purpose of heating. If we were to grow old in this place, the pellets would be much easier to manage. The broken and stolen stufa turned out to be yet another fuckertunity.

And thus our “heist” was pulled off. All our documents were in order, the apartment equipped and cleaned and organized, heating apparatus bought and installation arranged. We headed back to the US... Roll the credits!

Now we just had to jump through a thousand more hoops to see if we’d ever get to actually live there.

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Memoir Chapter 5: Mission Impossible

CHAPTER 5

Mission Impossible: The stufa and the nulla osta

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