Early days of renting and working in Italy

and other adventures

When I first went to live in Italy I was lucky to have had friends find me a place I could go to as soon as I landed. It was cold apartment in a condominium, which means that the heating was controlled centrally. It went on in the evening and went off in the early hours of the morning. This is fine if you are someone who gets up early to go to work. The building, as I understood, was filled with old people and young people who were still looking for work. I fit somewhere in the middle, because I had a job to go to, but sometimes it would have been nice to get up with a little heat.

I shared this apartment with a Greek woman who spoke better English than I do. There was one bathroom, and I think my room must have been the living room because we had to share the bathroom, meaning I didn’t have much privacy. I was also living on the floor. I had no furniture, but I must have had a mattress. When I painted, I sat on the floor, and I managed to do some nice large watercolours there, some of which I sold.

At work I was invited to be part of the team that went to Geneva to set up a summit on rural women. We would be gone for about a month, and I gave up my apartment because I didn’t want to be paying rent if I wasn’t going to be living there. Any other thinking human being would have kept the apartment, no matter how uncomfortable, and looked for something different or better on their return.

The apartment had come with a group of friends that were attached to the Italians who had found me the place to live. One translated the play I had written and had performed in New York City into Italian. I gave him one of my paintings in payment and he was very pleased. The play would be very much out of date now, but it could be reworked.

The man, who was the boyfriend at the time, picked me up at the airport on my return from Geneva and took me to his apartment. He assumed I would have a place to go to the next day. I did not. He was not very pleased with me, and said I couldn’t live with him because he was in a bit of a pickle personally. As my Italian was basically non existent at the time there was much I had not understood.

He helped me find a place to live, which was off a large open piazza in Trastevere. The room was tiny, with a hot plate to cook on and a minute bathroom with a shower. If I took a shower I had to be careful or else I would get electric shocks. I told my friend who spoke to the owner and it was fixed. I think the room I was in had been carved out of the main apartment to house a carer.

The room faced onto a closed in courtyard and, in the summer, I heard everyones televisions blaring the news. The Rai 1,2 and 3 still seem to have the same sign on music from all those years ago. Hearing it now I am pulled back to that tiny room and low key anxiety in Trastevere.

While I was there my contract came to an end at my job. It was not long before the Carabinieri came looking for me and I had to go visit them. What I didn’t know is that my permesso di soggiorno, which my work had obtained for me, was no longer valid since my job had ended. I burst into tears. I was amazed at how kindly I was treated. Everything was explained to me very gently. It was the law. It wasn’t a big problem, it could be fixed fairly easily. I only had to get a new permission to stay. I was a British citizen and part of the European Union. It was just a formality.

I managed to renew my permesso standing in line at the questura (precinct) in Rome with people from all over the world. The next thing I needed was another job. I found an English language news sheet called Wanted in Rome, and started to look through the listings. There wasn’t very much, but I found an announcement for a job with a small company. They needed a secretary for their financial department. I decided to apply and got the job since I was the only person who had applied.


This job was very boring. I had to send faxes, and I did not have an optimal relationship with the fax machine. There was nothing to do. It seemed that my job was just that … send faxes. However, I got to work in one of the most beautiful buildings in Rome. There were three or four desks in the director’s office which had immense frescoes on the walls depicting pastoral scenes.

There were some nice people there and I made some friends. One, an Indian woman, made sure I knew where everyone was going when they disappeared at lunch time. She took me to the tavola calda, and kindly explained the difference between fagioli (beans) and fragole (strawberries, and docia (a shower) and dolce (dessert).

It was while I was working at this job that an English friend from my first job in Italy contacted me and asked if I would like to live in her apartment while she went to Findhorn in Scotland for three months. I went to visit her and decided to move in. Her apartment was on the top floor of a building in a garden where other small apartment buildings had been built. Each floor had an apartment and there were six in each building. There was a magnolia tree beside my friends top floor apartment and she had a terrace, so I could sit outside and enjoy the tree. I also bought more plants for the terrace. She also had a bathroom with a proper bathtub.

It was during this period that I decided to invite my mother, Ruth, to visit me in Rome. She had had a stroke and she would have to be assisted while travelling. It was decided that I would meet her in England and then would bring her to Rome. While she was in Brighton, staying with my friend’s mother Auntie Barbara, we had a party so she could meet all her old friends.

I cooked. I am a nervous cook. In those days I was completely out of my depth. I asked the Italian grocer in Brighton to advise me. He told me to make orecchiette with broccoli. He told me how to cook everything. I was overwhelmed that so many people came to see my mother. She was unable to speak much, as she had aphasia. She was thrilled to see all her old friends and family members.

Then I had to take her from Brighton to visit friends in London. We went to visit her cousin Eva, stayed with my father’s sister my Auntie Gladys, who came with us when we went to visit my old guardians the Dixies in Barnet. Every moment of travel was very difficult. So many of the stations in England were without an elevator and Ruth struggled on the stairs, slowly, patiently, “Calm, calm!" I carried the heavy suitcases up the stairs.

My man friend picked us up in Rome and took us to my friend’s apartment. He helped my mother up the flights of marble stairs. For the next two weeks she never left unless he came to help her up and down the stairs.

Ruth enjoyed the terrace and would look at me and say, “Rome!” It was with that same warm, happy tone of voice she would use to say, “Love you!”

Ruth had been in Rome before, but it was before any of us were born.

My Findhorn friend was returning to Italy and I felt I should find another house. Luckily, or not, a friend was leaving her room in a large apartment on via Nomentana, would I like to see the room? I went. There was a large living room, a decent sized kitchen, a bathroom with a bathtub and two bedrooms; one larger than the other. My friend had been in the larger room, but it had been decided that the woman who was there before me would move into the larger room and I would take the smaller. Fine by me. I also inherited a few of my friend’s English conversation students, and would have inherited her translation projects, but she was way ahead of me translating documents for medical and scientific research.

I lived in this wonderful apartment, the owners turned out to be the couple who had looked after me on my first trip to Italy and Tuscany. I left this comfortable apartment because I felt the need to stand on my own two feet, and I was beginning to feel I was becoming part of someone else’s family.

I was offered an apartment in San Lorenzo. The owner was living in Greece, and I had met her when I travelled there. The strangest thing is that when I visited the apartment the first time I looked out from the balcony and saw a green field, but when I returned I saw a vacant overgrown lot.

Friends came to visit me at this apartment and unfortunately answered the phone while I was out. The owner was not pleased that I had allowed anyone to stay and I, again, was looking for an apartment.

My Findhorn friend said that I had not had to move, just to move into her smaller room, but I did not want to impose on her good nature.

I was told of an architect in Rome who was looking to rent part of his office space, which was really a giant apartment in Rome. I had met a Canadian woman at an art class and wondered if she would like to share the space with me. She took the fully contained maid’s apartment and I took the dusty upstairs, which had been constructed out of wooden planks, and a large room below, which I planned on turning into a studio. I was beginning to get editing work, again through my old work contacts. I had to buy a computer, and set it up. I was without internet. I didn’t have a phone. I bought my first mobile, which cost me lots of lire. It did not work in the apartment, which had more than metre thick walls.

The building was near Piazza Navona.

We had to move because the new wife of the owner took a dislike to both these weird artistic type women living in her new husband’s office space.

I decided to move out of Rome and go to Bracciano. I knew about Bracciano because a friend had invited me to go riding with her in a little village called Pisciarelli, where there was Mara, who owned the stable and her horses, a large fluffy dog Bosco and grey and white cat Pupa. I was a very nervous rider and my English friend was the best person to go out riding with. She walked her horse beside mine, told me when we were about to trot, asked me if I would like to canter. Little by little my fear melted away and my riding confidence returned.

I was directed to an estate agent who took me to see several apartments. Finally he showed me a new building. The apartment was on the top floor with a huge terrace. It was owned by one of the contractors. I rented it. I had no furniture, only a futon, my large wooden easel, and art supplies. I painted some of my best works in this apartment because I had the space.

One day, I thought I wanted to move back to Rome to share an apartment with a friend. My new friends, a builder and his helper assisted me. They wanted to come up to see the apartment in Rome before they started to move my belongings. They went in, looked around, were silent for a few moments and then told me they would not move me into such a place. It was not for me. The builder offered me storage space for my belongings and told me he would move them when I found another apartment in Bracciano. Truth is that I had become very depressed walking into this apartment. It was pleasant, but there was no view of the sky.

My builder friend introduced me to a plumber who had a small apartment for rent. It had been carved out from a larger apartment. This apartment came with a small grassy fenced yard. I took it, knowing that I would not be there for long. I had no job. I had told all my friends that I wanted to earn money as an artist and it was a do or die situation.

Around Christmas, a friend arrived carrying a laundry basket covered with Christmas wrapping paper. I asked her if I could open the gift, and she told me to wait until she had gone. When she left I wondered if I should wait until Christmas Day. I tore back the wrapping paper and found my friend had bought me all kinds of food from fresh chicken meat to pasta and tins. I began to fill my cupboards and felt that tension that comes from not knowing where the next meal will come from literally melt off me. Seeing a kitchen cupboard and refrigerator full of food can change the very cells of your being.

My English friend called me and said there was an opening at her new job. They were looking for an English language editor, and she had told them I would be a good fit. I argued with her for an hour about how I had decided to be an artist full time, and she said, “Just come in for an interview, otherwise you will make me look like I don’t know what I’m doing, because I’ve told them so many good things about you.”

I went in for the interview, fell in love with the enthusiasm of the three people who interviewed me, and decided I would take the job offered. I would work with my English friend, who would train me for that particular type of editing.

I decided to move from my small apartment. A friend was moving out of her apartment and wanted me to take it. I went to visit. It was on via dei Latini in the centre of Bracciano. It was a decent sized apartment. A real walk in sit down kitchen with a table and chairs, a sink with one of those cupboards over the sink so you just put the dishes away and they dripped dry.

There was a small living room, a bathroom with a bathtub and washing machine, and two bedrooms, one of which I turned into a studio. It came furnished. I put my futon on top of the bed. Set up my easel in the spare bedroom. The only drawback was the church bell next door that struck the hour, at fifteen minutes, half hour, and forty-five minutes, day and night.

I made friends with my upstairs neighbours who began to treat me like the daughter they had never had.

This was a good place for me to live, especially as it was so close to the train station, as I had to go into work every day. I enjoyed my job, my life, had the money to pay for a course with the Open University on natural sciences. Had room to paint. Had enough money to buy a very much used car so I could drive somewhere on a weekend.

However, I was beginning to be tired of my nomadic personality, and thought that if I got a cat I would feel more like settling down. So it was that I ended up with my cat Matisse and, as I have written elsewhere, I began to think that I should move from the centre of the town to a place with a garden for my new kitty.

One day my riding friend called and said she’d noticed a for rent sign on a house she passed when she went out riding. Would I be interested. I was. I met the owners, who knew other horse riding friends, and moved.

What the reader may have noticed is that all my moves began with a friend calling to ask if I would be interested in taking over their apartment because they were leaving for a short or long time.

I had tried to find places on my own. In the 1990s Italians did not want to rent to foreigners because we come with obligations. One is that we need to have a permission to stay, we need to have a tax code and an address where the local police and the Carabinieri can find us. This also means the rental needs to be registered, and the renter has to pay tax on the rent.

Renting to an Italian was easier for them because, generally, Italians already have identification listing their address with their parents, or the first place they ever lived as an adult. So, these people don’t necessarily need to be registered and, therefore, rental income may be easier to hide. I have also been told that Italians looking to have an address at the place they move into also have trouble renting. These were the problems more than twenty years ago. There are different problems now. Many places that would have been for rent have been bought up by people creating short-term rental properties.

Another reason is the type of contracts available. I learned that I could rent yearly, and the contract would be renewed each year, and the rent would probably be raised, or I could sign a four year contract and, at the end of the four years, the contract could be renewed for another four years and the rent would go up.

Many years after leaving the house at Poggio, with the land and barn, I was told the owners had done to the friend that was living there what they had done to me. Perhaps even to the people who had lived in the house before me.

One day I received a registered letter from an accountant saying I had not paid a month’s rent way back when. The owners had wanted their money paid as a check at first, which I soon learned they were hoarding, so that when I looked at my bank balance it seemed as though I had more money than I did. So I started to pay the landowners at the post office with a vaglia postale, which is a secure way of paying funds to people who may not have a bank account. It comes with an official receipt. So, when this letter came saying that I had not paid the rent I needed to find a lawyer, and give them the proof that I had paid in full. This I did.

However, in the meantime, a friend had already asked if I would like to come and live at their new house, rent free, with a few hours work a week. They had taken me to look at the property. It was still being rebuilt, and what they showed me as “my space,” seemed reasonable enough, and there was also space to keep my two horses, and I could bring my dogs and cats.

The day came for the owner at Poggio to come to meet me and the legal assistant. She was handed a letter that itemised all my rental payments, as well as money I had paid to upgrade the wiring and, as it turned out, she owed me a small amount, which she paid.

I was to move that evening, which I did, but as it turned out the Poggio owner was unable to rent her house for months after, and even asked my friends if I would think of returning. As it turned out, by the time I heard this, she had rented the place two weeks before, and was genuinely upset that I would not be moving in again.

I lost my chance to return to Poggio and the house I should never have left.

The following several moves form much of another part of my story.

So here I thank you for reading, and until the next time!