In January 2013, when we arrived back from our Christmas holiday in Florence, Jon and I soon started to get restless as the first couple of weeks of the year dragged on. I'm not a Winter person and hate the cold weather and particularly the short days. Here in Rutland it gets dark at 3.30pm at that time of year. We started to talk about spending some of the money we'd realised from the sale of our holiday cottage in Norfolk the previous year on a holiday home abroad. This would not be the first time we'd owned a property in Europe as we'd had a small villa on the coast of Mediterranean Spain between 2003 and 2007 and enjoyed that very much; we were lucky to sell it just before the property crash in Spain.
France and Italy were obvious choices so we both started trawling the internet to see what might be possible. I'd had a couple of summer holidays in the Dordogne region of southern France some years before and loved it, so we looked there and found the prices quite reasonable. Tuscany was another good choice and we looked there as well, but that seemed a bit less promising and more expensive.To cut a long story short we contacted a couple of agents in the Dordogne and one advertising Italian property and booked two sets of Ryanair flights for the latter part of January - a return trip to Bergerac in the Dordogne and a return trip to Perugia in Umbria.
The first trip took us from Stansted to Bergerac and we'd booked a hire car and a cheap hotel in the little Dordogne market town of Riberac - close to the pretty area I'd stayed in back in the early 90's.We spent two days with two different French agents and looked at ten modestly priced properties of different sorts - some in villages, some with land, some requiring a lot of work and even one or two which were immediately habitable. Though the weather was wintery the area proved to be just as I'd remembered it - rolling hills, lots of trees and patches of woodland and scattered with pretty little villages. The weather was kind too - after an initial snow storm the heavens cleared and it was beautiful clear blue skies giving the landscape a wonderful crispness that made everything stand out and seem finely detailed. The first couple of properties we looked at proved disappointing and for various reasons we dismissed them straight away. However, at the end of the first day we both liked a small farmhouse with a barn and a couple of acres of land which seemed reasonably priced for the modicum of work it required to make it habitable. It was on the edge of a small pretty village called St Severin which had a couple of restaurants and a hotel and was well connected with the local small market town of Verteillac. The following day was similar to the first - our search yielding just one property which we liked, but it needed quite a lot of work to complete the project that already been undertaken and then abandoned. It was a village house and it appeared a considerable amount of money had been spent on it - all the receipts and bills for the work undertaken were left in a plastic file on a table. It seemed odd that the British people whose project it was had abandoned it and I couldn't help thinking there was a sad story here - it put us off considering the house as our possible holiday home.
By the time we got back to Bergerac airport we thought we'd made up our mind about what we wanted to do - we were going to put in an offer on the farmhouse.
On arrival back in the UK we took a couple of days to seriously mull over our probable decision, crunch some figures and came to the conclusion there was no point going to Italy so we were on the point of cancelling the flights to Perugia when an email came through from the Cambridge based Tuscany internet agent telling us she'd managed to fix up viewings for a selection of properties we'd asked to see in the vicinity of Lake Trasimeno on the border between Tuscany and Umbria; she'd booked these for the following Saturday arranging for us to meet with a representative of a local estate agency. Knowing the market was quiet in France and recognizing that on the face of it, it would do no harm to have another weekend away from wintery Britain, at the last minute, we decided to make the trip. It turned out to a fateful decision!
I had never been to Perugia before and its little airport turned out to be a gem - largely because it has only been modified to take civil aircraft (evidently it was a military airfield) in recent times. It has a small modern terminal and the walk from disembarking the plane to customs and luggage retrieval takes only a few minutes. We picked up our hire car and set out for the hotel we'd booked on the western side of Lake Trasimeno. Two things immediately struck me as significant as we joined the dual carriageway to head west.
Firstly, on a Friday afternoon, it seemed as if the entire city was disgorging its population by car to the countryside. The two lanes were packed with vehicles heading west and most of them at considerable speed. Jon did a sterling job handling our hire car and adapted well to driving on the right hand side of the road. I considered the fact that drivers in all European countries seem to want to drive like maniacs these days, but the Italians seem to take the concept of grand prix machismo to a whole new level. This was a matter I would comment on several times during our stay. Secondly, I was appalled at the condition of the roads. Our carriageways are bad enough in Britain, but here in Italy they are almost universally covered in "bucas" (pot holes) of varying diameters. This proved to be the case all the way to our destination - Castiglione del Lago - and the final stretch seemed to have more holes in it than an Italian chef's parmesan grater. I wondered if this was due to the dire state of Italy's economy with the government thus cutting back on any spending on the road infrastructure? Was it even sensible to be contemplating the purchase of a house in this troubled land? - I was beginning to think we were just a couple of crazy property junkies and that this time we'd lost it for good.
After the white knuckle ride on the dual carriageway things improved a bit after we'd left the Perugia suburbs and found our way on to the road which skirts the northern shores of Italy's fourth largest lake. It was exciting to get a first glimpses of this huge expanse of water and as the light began to fade the lake, with some its islands visible, looked very attractive as we sped along its northern shores. Over to the right we could also catch a view of the Tuscan medieval hill top town of Cortona. I began to feel we really had arrived in Italy.
A few more kilometres down the road we arrived in the lakeside town of Castiglione del Lago and by now it was dark so we couldn't see much of our surroundings. Our hotel was on the main road out of town and faced the lake. It was typically 1970's and built to accommodate summer tourists to the area, so if I tell you it was all plate glass windows, polished composite marble floors and teak doors I think you may have a feel for the atmosphere of the place. The welcome was warm however and using our ever so basic Italian we managed to make ourselves understood. Dinner in the straightforward hotel dining room, with only a few other guests, was an interesting experience with no menu and a help yourself antipasto salad followed by a spaghetti pasta with a ragu sauce. During the eating of this stage of the meal I was fascinated to watch a larger than life middle aged lady come in to the room and roll up her sleeves so she could start and then stoke up the open wood burning fire on which the main course meat would be grilled. We were a bit outfaced by the quantities of good food being served up for us and were relieved when it was time to retire and get a good night's sleep. We had a lot to look forward to the following day!
The first trip took us from Stansted to Bergerac and we'd booked a hire car and a cheap hotel in the little Dordogne market town of Riberac - close to the pretty area I'd stayed in back in the early 90's.We spent two days with two different French agents and looked at ten modestly priced properties of different sorts - some in villages, some with land, some requiring a lot of work and even one or two which were immediately habitable. Though the weather was wintery the area proved to be just as I'd remembered it - rolling hills, lots of trees and patches of woodland and scattered with pretty little villages. The weather was kind too - after an initial snow storm the heavens cleared and it was beautiful clear blue skies giving the landscape a wonderful crispness that made everything stand out and seem finely detailed. The first couple of properties we looked at proved disappointing and for various reasons we dismissed them straight away. However, at the end of the first day we both liked a small farmhouse with a barn and a couple of acres of land which seemed reasonably priced for the modicum of work it required to make it habitable. It was on the edge of a small pretty village called St Severin which had a couple of restaurants and a hotel and was well connected with the local small market town of Verteillac. The following day was similar to the first - our search yielding just one property which we liked, but it needed quite a lot of work to complete the project that already been undertaken and then abandoned. It was a village house and it appeared a considerable amount of money had been spent on it - all the receipts and bills for the work undertaken were left in a plastic file on a table. It seemed odd that the British people whose project it was had abandoned it and I couldn't help thinking there was a sad story here - it put us off considering the house as our possible holiday home.
By the time we got back to Bergerac airport we thought we'd made up our mind about what we wanted to do - we were going to put in an offer on the farmhouse.
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| The small farmhouse and land we nearly bought in the Dordogne, France |
I had never been to Perugia before and its little airport turned out to be a gem - largely because it has only been modified to take civil aircraft (evidently it was a military airfield) in recent times. It has a small modern terminal and the walk from disembarking the plane to customs and luggage retrieval takes only a few minutes. We picked up our hire car and set out for the hotel we'd booked on the western side of Lake Trasimeno. Two things immediately struck me as significant as we joined the dual carriageway to head west.
Firstly, on a Friday afternoon, it seemed as if the entire city was disgorging its population by car to the countryside. The two lanes were packed with vehicles heading west and most of them at considerable speed. Jon did a sterling job handling our hire car and adapted well to driving on the right hand side of the road. I considered the fact that drivers in all European countries seem to want to drive like maniacs these days, but the Italians seem to take the concept of grand prix machismo to a whole new level. This was a matter I would comment on several times during our stay. Secondly, I was appalled at the condition of the roads. Our carriageways are bad enough in Britain, but here in Italy they are almost universally covered in "bucas" (pot holes) of varying diameters. This proved to be the case all the way to our destination - Castiglione del Lago - and the final stretch seemed to have more holes in it than an Italian chef's parmesan grater. I wondered if this was due to the dire state of Italy's economy with the government thus cutting back on any spending on the road infrastructure? Was it even sensible to be contemplating the purchase of a house in this troubled land? - I was beginning to think we were just a couple of crazy property junkies and that this time we'd lost it for good.
After the white knuckle ride on the dual carriageway things improved a bit after we'd left the Perugia suburbs and found our way on to the road which skirts the northern shores of Italy's fourth largest lake. It was exciting to get a first glimpses of this huge expanse of water and as the light began to fade the lake, with some its islands visible, looked very attractive as we sped along its northern shores. Over to the right we could also catch a view of the Tuscan medieval hill top town of Cortona. I began to feel we really had arrived in Italy.
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| Lake Trasimeno at dusk |
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