India Hobbs followed her passion and moved to Italy with her fiancé, Charlie Mauger, in 2007, and with a new business and a romantic wedding on the way, the future looks bright.
“I had never been to Italy until my parents announced that they were going to be buying a holiday property in Le Marche in 2004. While the first house they brought was being renovated they rented a townhouse in Cupra Marittima, a lovely beach town, to use as a base while travelling back and forth from the UK to oversee the building work.
Charlie and I came on holiday there for the first time in the summer of 2005, and both immediately felt that this area had something very special about it. Charlie also proposed to me here, on the steps that we used to have to climb up in 30º heat each day on the way back from the beach to the house.
Charlie and I both knew that we didn’t want to live in the UK. We didn’t like the fast pace of life, the weather or the feeling of being so enclosed everywhere you went. We’d spent a year living in France while Charlie was finishing his stonemasonry apprenticeship. Charlie’s parents were living in the Loire Valley at the time, and Charlie went straight over to France after we finished school in the spring of 2005. I, however, went to Australia for what was meant to be a gap year. Absence didn’t make my heart stronger, however, it broke it, so I flew back to be with Charlie after just eight weeks in Melbourne.
When my parents decided that they were going to be spending more time in Italy we saw that as a great opportunity to ‘escape’ the UK before we had big ties keeping us there. I am a real family-orientated person and I like knowing that my parents are close by.
I can’t really say what led my parents to Le Marche. The more time we spend here, though, the more we understand it. It’s real Italy: the core values are all still set in place, each town you go to has its own community and the locals are all so loyal to ‘their town’. You can sunbathe in the summer and ski in the winter. We have real seasons here too, a proper spring and summer (the warm weather starts as early as Easter) and winter isn’t just dark, rainy days. Don’t get me wrong, we do have rain and grey skies, but they never seem to last as long as they did in the UK.
For Charlie and I, the move was very straightforward. We just had to pack up our things and get on a plane. My dog Willow (who I have had since I was 12 years old) followed behind us. We used a pet transporter to bring the animals over – two dogs and two horses in total. We didn’t have a house to sell in the UK, and we didn’t have children so this obviously made it easier.
When I first started working with my parents, I was at a loose end and didn’t really know what I was going to do here. The first few weeks after the move I spent a lot of time down on the beach. Then Dad told me about his latest idea, fractional ownership, which at the time I wasn’t really familiar with. He asked me if I wanted to help him do some research into it.
After a month and a lot of research, I become pregnant with Lucas. I carried on working and helping Mum and Dad, staying involved in the setting up of Appassionata, until I was about 8 months pregnant. I then decided to spend the last month of my pregnancy relaxing…back on the beach!
Once Lucas was born, I would take him into the office with me and he would sleep for a couple of hours while I got on with whatever needed to be done. Now that he goes to nursery three days a week, I’m the Sales Director for the company. I deal with all the clients from their initial enquiry to their first stay at the house as owners. I completed my sales training at the beginning of last year, and since then we have sold 50% of the shares in our first house, Casa Giacomo.
Our project seems to be attracting very like-minded people – people who love Italy for its traditions, food, culture and so on. They want to immerse themselves into real Italy, not somewhere that is overrun by tourists and stripped of its originality. So far, the majority of people have brought into Casa Giacomo so that it can become somewhere their families can come and make their own memories.
They all like the idea of being able to drink their own wine, produced off the estate’s vineyard, and use olive oil that has been made from the olive trees that are scattered all around the gardens. What makes it even better is that they don’t have to do any work in making this happen. They all love the fact that it’s hassle-free ownership. They turn up and the house has been cleaned, the beds have been made, the lawn has been mowed, and they can just immediately start their holiday in their home-away-from-home.
It’s been no walk in the park to build the properties, that’s for sure. It gets easier with each one, though. Once you’ve found a good team of builders, electricians, plumbers (in our experience they seem to be the trickiest to find here) and people to supply the materials, and have made it abundantly clear that you aren’t willing to pay 20% more than the Italians just because you’re English, it certainly makes things easier. The key is to stay on top of them. Give them deadlines and annoy them, so that in the end it’s easier for them to just do what they agreed to do, rather than having us continually chasing them. Now that Charlie and I are here permanently, Charlie is on site every day, making sure things are going as they should be.
I didn’t speak a word of Italian when we first arrived. I just immersed myself into the Italian community. I’m a real talker, so for me it was a case of just jumping right in. I haven’t had lessons and I get by. Charlie spent the first year working for Italian builders, so again he just jumped right in. If we need help, we just get friends to translate for us.
We’ve made many lovely Italian friends here. We’ve been made to feel incredibly welcome. Don’t get me wrong, though, in our local town, Petritoli, it took them a month or so to suss us out ... they would watch us and stare (they are big on staring, something we aren’t used to coming from the UK).
Once they saw us out and about a few times, the buongiorno’s started and now it takes me ten minutes to walk the 50 metres to the local cafe for my coffee in the morning. If I have my son Lucas with me, it takes 20 minutes – the nonnas all need to get a good cheek squeeze in!
You can’t pick up the phone and order a Chinese takeaway or get a ready meal from Marks & Spencer on the way home from work. I can’t just jump in my car and drive to meet my best friend for lunch, which some days I would give anything to be able to do. On the other hand, I can wake up each morning and open the shutters to look at the beautiful views surrounding our house. I drive my son to nursery via the beach, taking him in covered with sand.
Lucas is two-and-a-half. His life, in our opinion, will be hugely different to how it would be in the UK. Lucas is blonde and he is known about town as the “angelo di Petritoli” ... the angel of Petritoli. We go into the local greengrocers and he struts in now and shouts “ciao” and the lady working there will immediately come over with a banana for him.
Children are the heart of Italy; everywhere we go we are made to feel welcome with Lucas. He’s already speaking Italian and English, and he goes to a lovely nursery called Il Giardino di Perche (The Garden of Why). It’s an Italian nursery right on the beach in a town called Pedaso. He speaks Italian there and then at home we speak English to him.
If I could get my friends and grandparents to move over and the takeaways to deliver here, life would be pretty much perfect. We have a much healthier diet here, though. We eat a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables that are all grown locally and fish that is caught 20 minutes away in the Adriatic. If it isn’t in season here, chances are you’ll find it very hard to get it.
Charlie and I are finally getting married in July next year, at a lovely traditional old country villa in Cupra Marittima. The villa where we’re holding the reception overlooks the sea, has olive groves, palm trees and a beautiful old fountain in the main garden. We’ve been engaged now for five years, but so much has happened that we never got round to it, so next year, we’ve decided, is our year.
We’re making sure that the wedding involves as many different aspects of our life here as possible. We’re going to serve local wine, a Montepulciano and a Passerina, which is the same wine we’ll be making from the vineyard at Estate Giacomo Leopardi. We’re also going to get a local artist from Fermo Stefano Rosa to design our wedding favors. The dinner will include a few local specialties such as olive ascolani, cremini and mozzerelini -– all fattening stuff, but luckily by then I’ll be in the dress so I won’t need to worry about it.
My dad wants to drive me to the church on the back of his Triumph motorbike. Unfortunately, though, I don’t think my hair and veil would survive that too well!”
www.appassionata.com
