Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Life as a foreigner and single woman in Italy is not all “la dolce vita”

Some years ago, I wrote a couple of blog entries (see links below) about what it was like to be a female foreigner in Italy, with knowledge gained through observations, interviews with the women in my family, and books and articles. I believe this is vital information for women when considering the important decision to change countries, even for short stays, but much more so for those who are considering completely uprooting and buying or renting long term in Italy.

But it’s clearly obvious that I don’t qualify as any kind of expert on the topic, so I’d like to refer you to the observations of fellow blogger and author Chandi Wyant, a single woman who moved from California to Tuscany around the same time that Lucy and I started living in Montecarlo part time.

In her recent Substack, titled Chiming in on the Move to Italy Discourse, Chandi writes: “Americans become obsessed after vacationing in Italy and via hyper idealized Hollywood movies. I totally get the vacation thing. But vacationing and living in Italy are two very different things.”

Chandi Wyant
Chandi goes on to explain some of the not-so-sweet things about living la dolce vita as a foreigner, most particularly as a foreign woman. One of her first observations—something Lucy and I have seen as well—is that though Italians are very friendly with foreigners, it can be difficult to break into Italian social circles in more than a superficial way. Many of their friendships date back to childhood, and Italians can see us stranieri as very temporary, which in truth is pretty accurate. It’s also true that our developing language skills don’t allow us to have deep conversations anyway, and that’s another factor. It’s worth it to note that many of our best Italian friends here also speak English.

I’ve been told more than once that the best way for me to integrate into Italian society and learn the language more quickly would be to get an Italian girlfriend. For some reason, Lucy is not a big fan of that idea! Nor am I, for that matter. I’m okay with knowing I’ll never truly have close Italian friends or speak the language flawlessly, largely because I have such a great partner with whom I can share everything—and who also laughs at my sometimes pitiful attempts at humor (in fact, I showed her this paragraph and she chuckled).

My and my "girlfriend," doing our best to
blend into the Italian scene.
But all joking aside, I’m sure my life in Montecarlo would be somewhat lonely if I were single. And my difficulties would be multiplied many times, from what I’ve heard, if I were single and a woman. Chandi writes that she has given up dating, because most of the men who asked her out were seeking a relationship only for—to be blunt—sexual reasons. She’s also had difficulties with contractors who have tried to take advantage of her financially. While unscrupulous contractors may try to hoodwink men as well, experience shows that they see a single woman as an easier target. Not only that, Chandi even had to fight off two contractors who tried to assault her physically.

Chandi and I are not saying don’t move to Italy—there are many, many beautiful things about living here—but be aware that you will also be changing one set of problems for a host of new ones. Yes, the food here is great, and the cost of living is lower (outside of the large cities, at least), but so are the salaries. I could go on and on about the differences, but I digress. I want to focus more on the social aspects of life in Italy as a single woman.

Regarding her home remodeling, Chandi noted that hiring and managing male workers as a foreigner and single woman proved to be extremely frustrating and difficult. “Almost every worker was stupefied not to find a man in charge,” she wrote. “One of their first sentences was, ‘Sei sposata?’ After a year and a half of this, I was ready to scream and throw a hammer at a wall if I had to hear the question again about my marital status. Of course, it was none of their business, but they very much thought it was their business.”

I recommend reading Chandi’s eye-opening account, and while you’re there, you can sign up for her Substack and get her insider information on Florence—including fascinating art and history insights. She’s a historian of the Renaissance and a licensed guide.

My advice to any single woman—or couple, for that matter—considering moving to Italy is to do something that Lucy and I did. We came for three months at a time, always to the same place. We rented an apartment in an agriturismo, took language lessons, met our neighbors, and learned as much as we could about how to live as Italians. After our five-year trial period, we decided to buy our own home. By this time, we had looked at many houses and locations, and we knew exactly where we wanted to live. We had friends who helped us inspect the house, set up a bank account, select a geometra and notaio, and accompany us at the closing meeting. Had we purchased one of the other homes we had looked at over the years, it would have been a mistake. Without trusted friends to help with the purchase, we could have wasted thousands of euros. Making a major life change on a whim may work out in the movies, but it rarely does in real life.

Footnotes: Chandi has also written a book, Return to Glow: A Pilgrimage of Transformation in Italy.

My earlier blog entries about how women are treated in Italy are

Is Italy a safe and healthy place for young women (and men)?

Do Italian males live up to reputation for persistent and flirtatious behavior?

 

Monday, April 14, 2025

Chestnuts, once essential for survival, now just a thorn in my life

Chestnut trees and their fruit have been a vital part of Tuscan culture probably since the dawn of humanity. Lucy and I learned about the importance of chestnuts years ago when we visited the Museo del Castagno in Colognora in the Garfagnana. People roasted and ate the nuts and also ground them into flour. They used fallen tree branches to heat their homes, and the trunks to build their houses and make all kinds of tools and furniture. In short, nobody could have made a living in the hilly areas of Italy without chestnut trees.

However, they have not been so friendly to me. I recently discovered that chestnuts are the reason I’ve had so many flat tires on my bike while riding on the country roads around Montecarlo. Andrea, the guy at the bike shop who fixes my tires, showed me that I had more than 10 chestnut spines in my tires. Most of them were too short to reach the inner tube, but it only takes one biggy to do the job. After Andrea patched the inner tube, he used a needle-nosed pliers to remove the other spines. Now that I’ve realized why Lucy and I keep getting flats, I’ve vowed to check our tires regularly and pull the spines out myself with tweezers before they can work their way into the inner tubes. Hopefully this realization will save us a few trips to the bike shop in the future.

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Our search for a physical therapist in Italy is a grand success

Lucy has her cast checked while in Gig Harbor
in February.
We are currently in the middle of our second encounter as official members of the Italian medical system. Last August on a trip in the Alps, Lucy tore her Achilles tendon before we came to our Montecarlo home in September. I went through a lengthy process to enroll us in the Italian health care system so that she could go to a doctor here in Tuscany (see One more small step). However, it was almost time to leave for Gig Harbor when we finally managed to see the doctor, so we decided to have the needed surgery in Tacoma in January.

Following the surgery, where they took a tendon from her big toe and grafted it onto her Achilles, Lucy spent five and half weeks in a cast and another two weeks in a walking boot. She started physical therapy in March, but now we’re back in Italy. Her therapist in Gig Harbor said it was essential for her to continue therapy so that she could gain the flexibility and strength she would need to walk normally.

On Tuesday, we went to the doctor’s office to make an appointment. We were asked if it was urgent and said no, so we were given an appointment date of about two weeks away. At that point, I explained to the secretary that we just needed a referral to a physical therapist, so she said we could come back that evening at 6 p.m. and wait for an opening in Dr. Fulceri’s schedule.

We came back a little before 6 p.m. and waited about an hour, while I mentally prepared to explain in Italian Lucy’s history and condition, but that was unnecessary. The doctor (he’s actually still in his final year of medical school) said he needed to work on his English for his coming exams, so my preparations were unneeded. Lucy explained her situation, and he told us that physical therapy would probably be covered under the system, but he needed to do a little research and get back to us the next day.

We received an email with a prescription the next morning, which we took to the pharmacy as instructed. By the way, the prescription was in the form of a pdf, with bar codes that the pharmacist was able to scan, giving all the needed information—a very efficient and modern system, it seems to me. However, after logging into her computer, she told us that there were absolutely no openings in all the province of Lucca within the next 10 days—and if I understood correctly, the prescription was only valid for that length of time. She said we could go to the regional health care office in Lucca to see if they could help us, but we got the feeling that we’d get the same answer there. Instead, since we live only five minutes from the border between the provinces of Lucca and Pistoia, we decided to drive to Pescia and try a pharmacy there—but with the same result. The pharmacist was apologetic and explained that this was a common issue in Italy. She said we could continue coming back to try again in a few days, but most people just made private appointments and paid for care instead of waiting.

So the next day, we decided to go directly to the fisioterapista in Altopascio that Dr. Fulceri had recommended, and fortunately we were seen immediately. Dr. Francesco Monachino gave Lucy a quick exam and noted that one of the reasons she was walking strangely is that her left leg was now a little shorter than her right leg. He recommended an insert of .5 centimeters, which we were able to purchase at the pharmacy. Lucy said she noted an immediate improvement in her gait and sensation of balance.

Dr. Monachino scheduled two appointments for us, one on Friday and the other on Monday. I’m writing this shortly after the first appointment, in which the doctor spent the majority of the session massaging and manipulating Lucy’s foot and ankle. He said that massaging the tendon was essential to break down and prevent the formation of scar tissue. He will do more massaging on the next appointment, he said, and also work on some exercises to improve strength and flexibility.

We were both very impressed with Dr. Monachino’s knowledge, professionalism and manner, and we’re also thrilled that we were able to so quickly find a physical therapist here. Yes, we weren’t able to get one that is paid by the state, but he actually costs less than we were paying for visits in the U.S.

It turns out that Lucy's physical therapist, shown
here, is actually semi-famous for being the PT
of world-renowned race car driver Robert Kubica.
In fact, the cost is one of the most astounding parts of the comparison between Italian and American health care. Dr. Monachino charged 35 euros for a half hour session, and he said that Monday he will charge the same for a full hour. In America, with insurance, we had a co-pay fee of $50 per visit. But the real shock came from looking at one of the EOBs, (explanation of benefits) from our insurance company. It seems that for each visit, the physical therapy clinic sent a bill that ranged from $200-300. The insurance company, of course, did not allow the full amount, instead paying around $80-110. Adding in the $50 we paid, that means the clinic was receiving about $130-160 for each visit, which lasted 40 minutes.

Lucy said that sometimes each therapist was dealing with two patients at the same time. The therapist would give Lucy some exercises to do, and then go and work with the other patient, returning to Lucy after giving the other patient some attention and then an exercise to work on—so essentially a 40-minute session only required about 20 minutes of the therapist’s time.

It’s not the intention of my blog to make value judgments on the differences between countries. We’re just relating our experiences as they occur and leaving it up to our readers to draw whatever conclusions. It’s also important to remember that experiences in Italy vary widely, so what happens to us may be vastly different than what happens to someone else. However, even with this disclaimer, I can’t resist noting that our American health care system is seriously wacked. If we had no insurance, would that physical therapy clinic in Gig Harbor really bill us $200-300 for 40 minutes of treatment?

On the other side of the coin, I noted that Dr. Monachino has an undergraduate degree in fisioterapia from the University of Pisa, and a masters degree in sports fisioterapia from the University of Siena. He has a 4.9 out of 5 rating in his Google reviews. Doesn’t that seem to merit fees of more than 35 euros per session? This could be why in the 10 years between 2005 and 2015, more than 10,000 doctors left Italy and moved abroad, according to The Italian Insider magazine. The article, published Feb. 4, 2019, went on the say: “Their departure is a damaging problem that is increasingly being felt as the National Health Service continues to lose even more professionals . . . Italy is committed to the training of excellent health professionals, spending large sums of money and then gives this heritage to others.”

Having the opportunity to observe the interesting differences between Italian and American societies is one of the pleasures of our divided existence. It would be easy to judge or complain that one country should emulate the other, but I try to avoid doing this. These countries have developed their societal systems over many years, and making sweeping changes would be like trying to change the tire on a car while it’s still moving. I prefer to observe, learn and do my best to adapt to the requirements of living in each separate world.

Thursday, April 3, 2025

Driving in Italian cities without GPS not recommended!

We're home! Enjoying our other life
again in Montecarlo, Toscana.
Dang, how did anyone get anywhere in Italy before GPS? We arrived in Firenze Saturday evening, and though I had activated my Italian phone during our layover in Germany, for some reason I had only phone service, with no data. Therefore, after I got in my rental car and tried to drive back to the airport to pick up Lucy and our luggage, I almost immediately got lost. I had walked about 15 minutes to the rental car agency, but the routes for a walker and a driver are very, very different. Italian cities are full of one-way streets that are almost never straight for very long. When I took that first wrong turn, the street quickly looped in the opposite direction of the airport.

Most Italian cities do not have streets set up in a grid format, and many streets are one-way only.

I didn’t realize how much in the opposite direction I was going. I was looking for signs to take me back to the airport, but apparently, they don’t put these signs up for people going in the exact wrong direction, which makes sense. Gas stations in the city are almost all self-serve, with no attendant on duty, and most streets had no other places to pull over and ask for directions. Every once in a while, I’d see an airport sign and follow it, but at the next intersection, there would be no sign. Or there would be 15 signs, and I would frantically try to scan them all while the drivers behind me honked impatiently.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me at least 50 minutes to get back to the airport. I had no way to contact Lucy during this time, so she was wondering and worrying. Then we faced a second problem: Finding our bed and breakfast without working GPS. We made a brief effort, but after realizing again that we’d taken a wrong turn and now had no idea which direction to go, I decided to give up and just drive to our home in Montecarlo. Ahead of me was the familiar onramp for the A11 autostrada, and I knew I could find my way home from there, so I pulled over, called the Airbnb proprietor and said we weren’t coming after all. We only live an hour from the airport, so it really wasn’t that hard to stay awake. I’m not really sure why I had planned to stay the night in Firenze anyway.

Afterword: The next week, I went to the phone store we frequent in Altopascio, and the clerk there showed me that I need to sign up for a specific data plan with my provider. Hopefully, I’ll be able to figure this out on my own next time. It’s hard to believe that anyone ever survived in Italy without GPS. However, I should add that driving in the countryside in Italy is not at all difficult, nor is driving on an autostrada. Don't take my story as advice to avoid renting a car. I would say to make sure you have access to GPS, and avoid driving in large cities if at all possible. The biggest risk about driving in cities is not actually getting lost but getting ticketed for accidentally driving in a limited traffic zone (ZTL).