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Capitolo Uno: We Bought a Villa in Italy…Um, Now What?
In May, we embarked upon a challenging journey to buy property in Italy, settling on an area in the deep south (Puglia) close to the ocean. I’ve dreamed about owning a property in Italy since first setting foot in this beautiful country over two decades ago. Solidifying my resolve to own a piece of la dolce vita were the book and (much more glamorous) movie Under the Tuscan Sun.
For me, an Italian villa means owning a peaceful retreat in the land of incredible food and wine, access to the ocean and a gateway to the rest of Europe. In fact, our place is 12 minutes to the Adriatic sea, and 15 minutes from an airport and the ferry to Greece.
My wife and I love Italy, we’ve travelled here separately and together more times than anywhere else in the world. Although there are gems everywhere in the country, we love the south where the food is a lighter, mediterranean-style, there is lots of seafood, plentiful picturesque seaside towns and beautiful beaches dotting the coast. It’s also less inhabited by tourists than the more popular hot spots up north.
We saw about a dozen properties before landing on a small two-bedroom house in the countryside in the Itria Valley, a region in Puglia on the east coast. We are officially in Salento which is the southernmost tip of Puglia. The charm of our house, used as a family cottage, was its two interior fireplaces, a large living space, an outdoor oven (as a pizza connoisseur, this is critical) and small parcel of land with 17 olive trees and 3 fig trees and 1 miscellaneous fruit tree. 
I’ll share the woes of actually finalizing an Italian property purchase in another post and skip ahead to the best part. In July, we moved into our villa (or “villetta” given its size) in the Italian countryside. We knew there was work to do, it hadn’t been inhabited on a regular basis in some time, but over the coming days, we started to add to our ever-growing list of items to fix and items to buy.
Under the Tuscan Sun definitely cast a glamorous light on renovating a villa. In the movie version (which certainly glazes over the millions of challenges of home ownership faced by the real author), Frances galivants around Cortona looking for love, and enjoying local life, while a crew of Polish renovators make her villa a functional and pristine place to live. Sure, the lovely Diane Lane is pictured doing some light vacuuming, brushing off plaster dust and dealing with her empty wine bottle inheritance. Our Under the Puglian Sun version is considerably less fab. In fact, in my paint-stained t-shirt, men’s bathing suit bottoms and ball cap, I find myself resembling my late-father more than I expected as I occasionally sop up sweat trickling down my brow – an unavoidable outcome of working on a house in 40+ Celsius (104+ Fahrenheit) weather.
We own property in Canada and are no strangers to home repair and renovation, but renovating an Italian house, whilst living in it, with our limited language skills, is definitely a new challenge. One-month into our adventure I can honestly say it’s much harder than it looks to do things yourself, and everything in Italy takes longer…much longer than our North American impatience can tolerate.
Owning a home in Italy, like living in Italy, is a lesson in patience. Business hours of operation and language barriers aside, it’s just more difficult to get motivated to do hard labour in the baking sun (from 10:00 – 7:00 daily in the summer). There’s an occasional reprieve to the heat when the temperature drops below 30 Celsius or when we take a break and lay on a local beach. The sea has a way of making everything cooler and better.
What To Tackle First?
For a self-proclaimed DIY enthusiast, it was difficult to stop my planful brain and focus on the mission critical things that needed doing. So where did we start? Our electricity was transferred over, so with that settled, we focused on water and waste. I told you, not exactly movie-worthy glamour. 
Our water is held in an underground tank called a cisterna. The house was collecting rain water from the roof and sending it directly into the cisterna adding to the clean water delivered by a truck. As a result, a stream of insects, dead lizards, dirt, etc made its way into our water tank leaving our water yellow and smelling of sulphur. Hence, our first priority was draining the cisterna, cleaning the tank and bringing in two gigantic trucks of fresh water. Then diverting the rain water so the dead lizards and dirt don’t make it into the taps. Problem solved, we could at least shower and flush toilets. Huzzah!
Second issue, country-style waste removal. We own a septic tank. I never envisioned owning a septic tank but alas, this is where we find ourselves. As city-dwellers, this is new territory. We ensured it was functioning properly and not full (ick, I don’t want to know what happens when we get to that point). Finally, as much fun as it was to pour a bucket of water down the toilet to flush it, we installed a toilet tank to make this process a little more convenient.
Basic Luxuries Save Our Sanity
With those essential human needs sorted, we looked into greater luxuries. First, we hired a contractor to install air conditioning which thankfully was installed the day before the temperature peaked at 43°C (109.4°F). We also bought a stovetop and oven because my attempts at barbecuing in the dark on our makeshift brick BBQ were abysmal (raw hamburger, anyone?). We brought in a washing machine as by that point we had run out of clothes and we installed ceiling fans in the bedrooms and living area. A memory foam mattress and a sofa later, and we finally have a home we feel comfortable in (sort of).
The following weeks were filled with cleaning, sealing the mosquito screens and windows, donating or disposing of the junk left by the previous owners and more cleaning.
We are still without internet access, our phones are virtually off-grid and there is a lot still to do, but we can at last sleep peacefully listening to the cicadas and the soft swaying of our olive trees outside our bedroom window.
Continue on our adventures! Chapter 2: Our Inherited “Treasures” is next.
More to come on Under the Puglian Sun: Adventures in Renovating Our Italian Villa. Don’t miss a post, follow the blog below!