My Chief Recipe Taster and I are now nearly three months into the great adventure called, “Let’s Pack Up Everything We Own and Move to a Country Where We Don’t Speak the Language,” and I am finally writing this from our own space, rather than an Airbnb. Let me tell you, no matter how nice a rental, there is no place like (your own) home, where you can accumulate condiments and spices with abandon.

I’m thrilled to be able to fill the cupboards, but my relief at being in our apartment is much greater than that. We’ve been nomadic since August, soaking up time with friends and family before heading to Italy, where we went from rental to rental. Now that we’re in our own space—where we plan to be in for the next few years—we’re both coming to grips with how stressful the last few months have been.

You might wonder why we feel that way. Moving to Italy is a dream for many people, and it was—still is!—for me, too. But let me be real for a minute: it isn’t all Under The Tuscan Sun. When I pictured my Chief Recipe Taster and I moving to Rome, I knew it would be difficult and that the learning curve would be steep. But truth be told, I also pictured us always being in the sun, laughing and drinking wine and just being really happy all of the time. There has been a fair amount of laughing and happy and wine drinking and a LOT of sun (until the start of November), but it’s also been hard to start a new life, in a new city, with new jobs, in a country where we know almost no one and don’t really speak the language.

Food remains a way to ground ourselves and to explore our new city, whether that’s going to new restaurants or simply navigating the grocery store. We’re trying to find the middle ground between what we know and what exists, retrofitting recipes we know and love with what’s available; learning new ingredients and ways of buying and preparing food. Recent experiments have included using piadina flatbreads as tortillas and sampling every flavor of stuffed gnocchi we can find. Befitting my interest in all things culinary, my knowledge of Italian food words is far larger the rest of my vocabulary.

It will take time to bring it all together, to really make a life for ourselves that feels exciting but comfortable. We’re still assembling the ingredients, but I’m confident that this is one experiment that will turn out deliciously.

We’ve now lived in Italy for one month. It feels absurd to say that.

We’ve been in Italy for one month. We’ve been attempting to create a life in Italy for one month. We’ve been wrestling with Italian bureaucracy for one month. Each of these seems more accurate than saying we’ve lived in Italy for one month, because that denotes some form of comfort with a place, or at least (semi)permanence, and this still doesn’t feel real. There’s still an ephemeral quality to our existence here, as though a good strong wind would blow it away.

This feeling wasn’t helped by shifting from one Airbnb to another, as we wait to move into a longer-term home. Getting to explore a new neighborhood has been fun, but also a bit tiring. After two months of moving around, I want to settle in one place.

In the meantime, we’re enjoying our Airbnb’s lovely terrace; we’ve managed to eat outside each night. The food we cook is still very simple, and we’ve discovered the great Italian invention of pizza al taglio, essentially pizza by the slice. The bakeries make meter-long pizzas with a broad array of different toppings. You buy as much as you want by weight and, if you’re us, take it away for dinner. It doesn’t get much more easier than that, and when you’re wrestling bureaucracy or trying to make a life in a new place, there isn’t much better than easy.

* Originally posted on social media on 13 October 2023.

In early September, my partner, our dog, and I moved to Rome.

It’s such a simple sentence to contain so much: months of waiting and of frantic action, of intense excitement and of fragility, the sense that it could all fall apart and that this thing we’d been acutely hoping for could fail to materialize. Throughout it all, there was a sense of unreality: was this really happening? Were we truly planning to pack up all our possessions, leave behind our flat and our friends and our lives, and move to Italy?

We’re here now, but in many ways the sense of unreality remains. Our first week, as we explored different neighborhoods and searched for apartments, we kept turning to each other and saying, “We live here!” It was and remains a way to ground ourselves, to claim this new space and place.

One of the other ways is through food. It exasperates me sometimes, how I need to keep caring for this body of mine, providing it sustenance three (at least) times a day, but it is also a way to anchor myself in the present. Nothing makes you feel reality like needing to go to the grocery, or cook a meal, or eat it.

We’re staying in an Airbnb as we look for a more permanent home. While the kitchen is perfectly adequate, it’s a bit small and sometimes challenging. The stove burners are finicky. The refrigerator temperature was set too high and kept freezing our salad greens (if you’ve never had frozen arugula, there’s a reason for that: it isn’t good). There’s only one cutting board and little counter space on which to place it.

Befitting the space, the meals we’ve prepared have been simple: faro with sautéed eggplant and tomatoes, pasta with broccoli rabe and spicy sausage, fish curry with rice. Still, it’s enough to nourish us, and to allow us to act—until we truly feel—as though we’re at home.

* Originally posted on social media on 22 September 2023.