“Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not?”  -George Bernard Shaw

Over the past year, we’ve traveled domestically and internationally, forgoing capturing the details of those adventures here for a number of reasons. Fast forward to July 2025 and we’re about to embark on a different type of adventure that requires a bit of set up:

Thirteen years ago we tracked down Paul’s grandmother’s home in the town of Pico, Italy. Paul returned to the town in 2018 and we all returned again in 2022 (blog post is missing for some reason) vowing to spend more time here in the future. Over the past several years, Paul has been watching the Italian real estate market, researching places near the beach, and doing what many people do when they long to have a vacation home: dreaming, checking websites, researching, and dreaming some more. Some people just let the dream end there, but not us. We said “why not.”

After investigating many properties remotely, in January 2024 Paul flew back to Italy to look at a place in Pico. While that property was not the right fit for us, our friend Carlo showed Paul a place owned by his family, unoccupied for more than a decade. I’ll spare you all the details related to buying a property in Italy, but let’s just say that after hiring an attorney to help us navigate the process, ten months later we became owners of a one bedroom flat in the town of Pico. 

In April 2025 Paul returned to Pico for five days, picking up the keys to our new place. He began to clean and organize all of the items left behind. He explored the area, finding a hardware store, a homegoods store, a furniture store who will deliver a bed to us this July, and arranged for trash/recycling/compost service. He snacked on mandarins from the tree in our yard and had Easter dinner with Carlo’s family. He opened an Italian bank account. He brought in a handiman to fix the caldaia (hot water heater), tested all the outlets and most appliances, and arranged for a handiman to fix various wall cracks and imperfections. Upon returning home, he figured out how to pay our Italian property taxes online and shared photos so Miss M, D and I could begin to envision life at La Casa Pico, because “why not”?

And so this next chapter begins. Paul and I are flying from Boston to Rome on Saturday, and D is flying from Chicago to Rome on Sunday. Posts going forward will be about this next adventure. If you want to see photos without extensive detailed commentary, follow @lacasapico on Instagram.