I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
You do not need children to do this
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Italy will tax you at seven percent. Seven. For ten years. On everything that arrives from outside the country: your pension, your dividends, the rent from a house you kept. There are conditions. The pension has to come from abroad. You cannot have been a tax resident here in the last five years. And the town has to be in the south, in one of eight regions, and it has to be small. Until April the limit was twenty thousand people. Now it is thirty thousand, which quietly opened about eighty more towns. I am not a tax advisor and I will not play one in your inbox. What I know is what happens after the paperwork. You arrive in a town of twenty-six thousand people. The pharmacy shuts at one. Nobody stands in a line the way you understand a line. The woman at the Comune asks you three questions and you answer all three wrong, politely. And for the first few months you are not unhappy. You are unreadable. Nobody knows what you are doing there, so nobody knows how to treat you. That is the part no tax guide covers, and it is the only part I work on. Now the thing I need to say to the people who joined this list recently. I use the word family constantly, and I think it has made some of you decide this is not for you. Family is whoever you arrive with. A couple who finally stopped working. Two sisters who have not lived in the same place since 1974. A woman on her own, taking the year she kept postponing. A man and a dog with an opinion. And here is the part that surprises people over sixty, so I will say it plainly. You are not the hard case. You are the easy one. In an Italian town the people who decide things are rarely thirty. They are in their fifties and sixties. They have time, they are curious about you, and they have already watched the young ones leave for Milan. The only currency that works in a small Italian town is time. Not money, not a better address. Time, offered slowly, in person, in the same place, over and over. Which means you are arriving with the one thing you were never allowed to spend before. So, is this your year? Reply and tell me. |
Fabiana Stringa
I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
Look closely at yin and yang. Black and white, curled around each other. Most people stop there. But there’s a detail that changes everything: a small white dot inside the black half. A small black dot inside the white. Each one carries a trace of the other. Always. I call what I do Italian Taoism. I was born in Genoa, on the same Ligurian coast as Portofino and Cinque Terre. Then I spent a decade across three continents. None of those places erased Genoa. Genoa didn’t erase them either. They...
The other day I was waiting at a red light in Turin. Impatient. Counting the seconds. And I remembered something I’d read about The Italian Job. Not the 2003 remake. The original, 1969. Michael Caine, three Mini Coopers, and a gold heist in the middle of Turin. The screenwriter, Troy Kennedy Martin, moved the story here for one reason. At the time, Turin had one of the most advanced computerized traffic systems in Europe. Traffic lights run by a computer. In 1969, that sounded like science...
Late 1980s. A young Italian at university, Francesco Cirillo, can’t focus. He sits down with his books, and every few minutes his mind wanders off. So he grabs a kitchen timer. Shaped like a tomato. Un pomodoro. He sets it and makes himself one promise: until it rings, I do only this. Twenty-five minutes of attention. A short break. Repeat. After four rounds, a longer break. The Pomodoro Technique. It works because it doesn’t ask for willpower. It asks for a small, honest container. Your...