Our Italian Dream – how it’s all started

I love when its warm, the sky is blue and the sun is shining. For me 30 degrees celsius is just ideal temperature. I have always thought that I was born at the wrong latitude and I should live somewhere in the south. Unfortunately I was born in Warsaw, Poland. Don’t get me wrong I love my country and I am really proud to be Polish, but the weather here is just killing me. Although, I must admit that the last two years have been really great, it does not look so beautiful normally. Our polish summer weather is very capricious and unpredictable. You never know if its gonna rain or not, and you can be sure part of your long awaited holidays you will have to spend in hotel room because of the rain or rapid temperature drops.

There is one more thing that makes it very difficult for us to spend our dream vacation in Poland. It’s geography. Like our great comedian Marcin Daniec said in one of his standups: “Every normal country has a sea in the south and mountains in the north. But of course in Poland it must have been the opposite.” As a result, it is often too cold and unpleasant by the sea in the summer, and in the mountains in the winter it is too warm and there is no snow.

But by far the worst for me when it comes to the weather in Poland are the long, dark periods of no sunshine in autumn and winter. Often for many days or even weeks all we can see are dark, steel and heavy clouds that cover the whole sky. Every winter I feel that it will never end and I will never see the sun again. After every winter I am trully exhausted because of lack of the sun.
We both with my wife simply love the wormth and hate the cold. That’s why for our holidays we choose mostly south destinations. So few years ago we decided to go on Canarian Islands. We stayed one week on Tenerife and one week on Grand Canaria. Before this trip I was only one week on a boat in Croatia, so for me this was the first true holidays in someplace warm.

The whole holidays were amazing and I simply can say that Canarian Island are true paradise. I remember that waking up with certainty that today the sun would definitely shine was a great experience for me. I felt like a great weight was removed from my shoulders. It was very, very nice feeling.
I feel that I never came back from this amazing place. I mean my body is back in Poland but my mind and heart stayed on those amazing islands.

Just after returning to Poland I started to search the information how we can move to Canarian Islands. My plan was simple, we will buy a house and we will start Guest House there. Unfortunately I found very quicky a law that says you can’t rent a home to tourists in which you live at the same time. It simply means that you have to have two houses – one for you and one for tourist. So, because we simply can’t affort to buy two houses, this was the end of the Canary dream for us.

But the idea to move to the south didn’t died with this little spanish obstacle. We continued our search and soon we found two new localizations: Croatia and Italy. We have been in both destinations few times and we loved them both. Two years ago we decided to go on two weeks holiday – one week in Croatia and one week in Italy. The oportunity to be in both countries on the same holiday really helped us made the final decision. We always wanted to live in Italy but we tought that we simply can’t afford it, that’s why we were looking for an alternative locations. Croatia was looking really good especially when it comes to financial issues, so we consider it very seriously. Unfortunately we discovered that many things has changed in Croatia over the last few years and the prices went really high and now there are even higher than in Italy (sic!).
In the meantime we did some research about the prices in Italy and we discovered that we are able to buy a House there. So the decision was done – Italy will be our new home!

Ok., so now we only had to pick the region and start looking for a house. In the past few years we visited: Merano, Cortina di Ampezzo, Bergamo, south and middle part of Lago di Como, northern and middle part of Lago di Garda (Molveno, Tenno, Arco, Riva del Garda, Limone, Malcesine, Arco, Bolognano).
We love Dolomites, so we liked Lago di Garda the most, especially around Riva del Garda. However, this is one of the most expensive regions in Italy and we don’t think we will be able to find a house that we can affort, so our search is around four regions: Trentino Alto Adige, Lombardy, Veneto and Tuscany.

Moving to Italy is by far the largest and most complicated project I’ve ever carried out. In this section I will describe each step we take to make our Italian dream come true. There are so many aspects that need to be taken into account that I’m sure we won’t have any problems to find new topics.