Women Who Travel Podcast: A Life-Changing Move to Italy

So the weather’s getting worse and worse. We’re driving finally up the hill to Montfort, to Alba, to this hotel I had seen online. And as we’re going, following the GPS up this tiny little hill on a winding cobblestone road, I kept thinking, “Oh my gosh, where are we? We’re lost.” I thought we might slide down the hill at any time. But by the time we got to the top, suddenly right before me is this just beautiful, charming hotel, like an old house, clearly a restaurant off to the side and the most lovely woman greeting us. So we go up these beautiful old stairs and check into this just charming room with velvet curtains and high ceilings with frescoes and a big comfortable bed, old furniture, a bottle of wine waiting for us and three little candies. And I just said, “Okay, if we never leave the hotel room for the next week, it’ll still be a good honeymoon. I’m okay with this.”

So we rested a bit and went downstairs to check in with Monica and said, “Okay, we’re feeling a bit better. Would it be okay if we just eat dinner in the hotel?” And she says, “Oh, we serve breakfast and lunch, but unfortunately not dinner. But there is one restaurant, it’s not far, less than a kilometer, right down the hill.” Well down the hill, were nothing but icy sleety, snowy cobblestones. I’m in my slippery leather shoes thinking, trying to picture me walking down there, and I thought, “Well, this might not work. Is there a taxi?” And she says, “Yes, but he’s in Milan.” And then she says, “But that’s okay. I’ll take you.” So she locks up the hotel. We get in the back of her little Fiat, we have this amazing dinner, and there was one other table of people in the whole restaurant.

And as dinner’s winding down, we had a couple glasses of wine and just a delicious meal, felt very nourished. I started worrying about how we were going to get back up the hill, when the chef/owner came to us and said, “Okay, I’ll take you home. I promised Monica that I would.” So he drives us back up to our hotel, just that kind of welcome warmth, a sense of family from the get go. So we just knew we had found something really special. We were there five days and when we left, we said, “We really need to come back.” When we went back to San Francisco, it just kept calling to us. It was really love at first sight, but you don’t know if it’s just a crush or is it true love.

Lale Arikoglu: How Barbara and her husband put down roots in Piedmont After this short break. You’re back with Women Who Travel and this dispatch from Northern Italy.

Barbara Boyle: So after we left, after our first visit, you get back into your world, your life, and we’re going about newly married, figuring out our very nice life in San Francisco. But we kept wanting to go back and wanting to go back. So 18 months later, we went back, we looked at a couple other regions in the same general area, but just there was something about this town. We had a realtor taking us around for a couple of days, but everything we saw was too far out or just not quite right. And the day before we were going to leave, he says, “You know what? There’s this other house you might like.” He says, “Are you okay about a fixer upper?” We said, “Sure.” I had been in advertising for all those years. So I have a pretty good imagination. And my husband was a real estate developer, so he is okay with taking something old and fixing it up.