This past weekend, I went “home” to visit my family as my older sister gave birth to my (first) little niece on the Monday prior to my trip.
She was way past her due date — and multiple in vain trips to the hospital — when Muriel, her newborn daughter, decided it was finally time to pop out of her womb.
Unanimously, my parents, her in laws and her husband decided it was best for my sister to spend the first week post-partum at our house so that she could rest and get the help needed to recover from the beautiful yet traumatic event.
Despite her hyper activity and strong sense of independence, she pleasantly welcomed the suggestion and settled in our childhood bedroom with her small infant.
My mother, eager to host her niece under the same roof, had carefully outfitted the quarter with all the essential equipment needed to offer the best possible experience to both guests.
The twin beds that used to carry us in slumber were brought together to make a full size bed, while the same baby crib that once cuddled my sister and I sat — immaculately kept — on the left side of the hay.
The serene setting provided an excellent atmosphere; silent, rural, mundane. The sort of vibe needed to properly bounce back from a burnout or an excessively tiring effort.
My family’s villa is located in a tiny town — if so we may even call it — in the North of Italy.
A tranquil countryside destination where everybody knows everybody, the butcher is well aware of where its merchandise is slaughtered; the kind of place that forces you to community daily to reach your high school because the local education infrastructure stops at middle school.
Earlier, I put home in quotations because it has increasingly become harder for me to name the one place that properly qualifies for the title as I have grown up a bit all over the country and even moved to Indonesia as a child.
Additionally, after leaving the above mentioned village around twelve years ago, I changed place of residence at least six times, most recently settling in Milan, where I purchased my first apartment back in 2018.
Growing up, I despised the provincial boundary of the village where my mother decided to set the foundation for our family.
It felt constricting for my big city dreams, my plans to become “somebody”.
I never looked at it as a place where my creativity could thrive, nor I appreciated the safety that came with living in a location where the whole city is your neighbor.
My mother trusted the local population so much that she allowed me to bike to school and to my friends’ houses on my own since elementary.
The spacious configuration of the area also allowed us to build our home - a two story family house - on a vast lot which my parents acquired from a distant relative.
Its agrarian essence offered cheap renovations without the lack of high quality artisanal skills. Still, the facade of our estate was left raw and unpainted well into my adolescence.
When school was out, our manicured backyard often turned into a kids’ summer retreat. The vast gated garden afforded us the luxury to play outside unsupervised until the sun set; we were able to create our own made up virtual worlds without the threats hidden in the crevices of urban life.
When I became a teenager, and my craving for independence kicked in, I started to feel too big for the small minds of my peers. Attending high school forty minutes away in a city that had clubs and shops surely felt like a big step up but not enough to satiate my hunger for eminence.
Hence, at the end of my freshman year, I convinced my parents to put me in one of those cultural exchange programs designed to improve your knowledge of a specific language, and that very summer I landed in Orange County.
My host family — fourth generation Italians from the East Coast — greeted me in as their own daughter, providing an exquisite parallel to my uninteresting pastoral Italian lifestyle.
Driven by my passion for MTV and American pop culture — which I had been vicariously living through for years — I felt I had found the perfect spot to manifest my wildest dreams.
I repeated the trip for the next four years until, just before graduation, I applied for college in Los Angeles and got accepted.
Finally, my time had come! I was moving to a huge city, on the other side of the world, all on my own.
It was my chance to fulfill what I had been plotting on for so long: emancipation!
On the contrary, my sister — somebody definitely less confused than me when it comes to choosing a life path — found her peace in that same village we had been brought up.
She studied to become a veterinarian, found her husband at a pub ten minutes away from our town, opened her medical practice in the town adjacent to my family’s and recently purchased a huge countryside villa with enough space to host a barn for their four horses plus an open air paddock. Her two Australian shepherds can run around freely.
Even if the establishment needs thorough renovation and currently lacks functioning gas piping, the spacious floor plan and luxuriant surrounding greenery provides prominent peace of mind.
On Sunday morning, as I gathered my tooth brush and skincare items from the shelf I used to fill with useless make up products as a teenager, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought to myself “I can’t believe I tried so hard to run away from this chillness”.
After more than a decade on the move, hustling and bustling to find the things I actually love to do (and myself), spending less and less time with my aging parents and grandmother, I am now finding solace in that very place I tried so hard to get away from.
Obviously, as one does in these type of moments, I started questioning my whole existence. My reality as a woman in a big city, my life as a tax payer and home owner. Is living in a city worth it? The high price of produce, the hectic lifestyle, the high pollution rates and lack of green spaces frequently raise concern.
In my tiny hometown there’s no walking home without earphones at night, with keys in my hand; nor there is telling my girlfriends to text me when they get home no matter how close to their domicile we parted ways.
How long could I still endure this lifestyle as somebody who thrives off spending the weekend at the farmers market and sipping a good glass of wine under the warm sun?
I never expected to crave a rural lifestyle, to cook with the produce I grow in my backyard, nor to miss the mundane dynamics of places where farming is the predominant source of income. Yet, the more I age the more I dream of this lifestyle, filled with luxurious silence, relaxed timelines and lengthy thinking intervals.
I got lost a bit but I've managed to catch up on the entries. Wow given that I'm not that present on social media I didn't know you were "Dalla provincia" too! Sounds amazing to me, figli della corriera e dei pellegrinaggi in "centro" (meaning mid-sized boring Italian town). I thought I was dealing with a Milanese socialite who was born into the "it" crowd, that's so cool! Shoutout for the mortgage as well, prima o poi ci arrivo anch'io, verosimilmente tra 187 anni. Gotta keep them assets on lock.Enough with the rambling, grazie e ciao
One of my best friends lives and works on a farm with her bf and they’re currently expecting their first child. I don’t think I know anyone who enjoys their life as much as they do- so genuinely happy and content and I think that’s what life should be at the end of the day <3
When I go to visit, I feel a little silly talking about my ‘life stresses’ because it just seems so frivolous sometimes. A small town close enough to a beach may have to be my calling later in life.