Foreign at Ciao: Ten Years of Speaking Italian

One World is Enough ~ The R Bar ~ The Woman Who Disappeared ~ 

What Our Italian Can Do ~ My Grandfather Was American ~ Foreign at Ciao

 

We enter a bar, a shop, or an office and say ciao.

“Di dove siete?”

One word is often enough. We haven't ordered, explained our problem, or asked where the bathroom is. Nonetheless, the international portion of the conversation has begun.

This is not a big deal in the scheme of things. The question is usually friendly, and often it leads somewhere interesting. We have met people, exchanged travel stories, and explained many times how two Americans ended up living in Bergamo. Still, after ten years, there are mornings when we would prefer simply to order a macchiato.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that we write about our odyssey with the Italian language. We have dozens of posts (TravelMarx: Italian Language) on the subject. We love Italian, we love living in Italy, and our lives here would be impossible without the language. But affection does not eliminate frustration.

After ten years, we speak enough Italian to live in Italy, but perhaps not enough to disappear into it.

One Word is Enough

“Where are you from?” after a single ciao demonstrates how quickly we can be identified and sorted. The question may be nothing more than curiosity or an easy way to make conversation. Repeated hundreds of times, however, curiosity can begin to feel a little like border control that you weren't expecting.

What tires us is not being foreign. We are foreign. It is the speed with which foreignness can become the subject, pushing aside whatever we were trying to say or do. How we pronounce the words becomes more interesting than the words themselves.

Italy has a highly tuned linguistic ear. Italians identify one another by pronunciation, vocabulary, rhythm, and regional cadence. A few sentences may reveal that someone is Bergamasco, Roman, Neapolitan, Sardinian, educated, provincial, working class, or trying rather hard not to sound like any of those things. Italians are not only locating foreigners through language. They have long been locating one another.

The difference is that a regional accent usually places an Italian somewhere within Italy. Our accent places us outside it.  We can get placed "outside" of Italy anywhere from Germany, the Netherlands, England, or the US. It's a slight chuckle on our part when we asked if we are German.

We touched on this feeling in Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad, where we described our accent as a kind of passport carried in our voices. That post considered the larger experience of living between cultures. In this post, we want to stay with one small but persistent part of it: how a single ciao can locate us before the conversation has really begun.

That may be all that is happening after ciao: a person hears something unexpected and asks a natural question. But repeated over years, the exchange begins to carry a little more weight. It reminds us that we may participate fully in the conversation while never becoming acoustically invisible within it.

The R Bar

The Italian r has become our recurring symbol of linguistic struggles.  Someone rolls an extravagant r for us. We try to reproduce it. What comes out is recognizably an r, but not the correct kind. Everyone laughs, including us. Then we try again, with greater concentration and usually worse results.

Repeat for ten years.

The joke is affectionate. We understand that. Often the person correcting us is genuinely trying to help, and we would not want people to stop correcting us altogether. The tiring part is how easily the correction can take over the conversation. We may be explaining something complicated, making a joke, or telling a story, but one poorly executed r suddenly becomes the most interesting thing at the table. The message briefly disappears behind the delivery.

In that moment, the Italian r seems to outweigh years of vocabulary, grammar, residence permits, utility bills, medical appointments, friendships, misunderstandings, and daily life. We may have explained the problem perfectly, but we have not rolled the r with sufficient authority.

Perhaps this does not mean we failed to work hard enough. Adult learners vary greatly in their ability to perceive and reproduce unfamiliar sounds, and late learners (like us) commonly retain a non-native accent even at high levels of proficiency. According to the research A hypothesis on improving foreign accents by optimizing variability in vocal learning brain circuits adults learn foreign pronunciation poorly because they stop experimenting too soon and the result is a foreign accent. (This is research to follow up on!)

Many people like us who learn a language later in life retain an accent even when they speak fluently. At some point, the mouth seems to settle on its preferred collection of sounds. Ours settled before it encountered the Italian r.

The Woman Who Disappeared

We went to a party recently where many of the guests had international backgrounds. One English woman had lived in Italy for more than twenty years. She had married an Italian, raised children here, studied languages, and could move easily between English and Italian.

A few days later, a friend who had attended the same party remarked on how perfectly she spoke. He had to listen closely to tell that she was not Italian.

His admiration was generous, and deserved. Still, I felt a brief flash of envy. Apparently, there was a finish line after all, and we haven't passed it (yet).

The English woman had achieved a kind of native invisibility. Her Italian no longer announced her before she had a chance to say anything else. She could enter a conversation without immediately becoming the foreign person in it.

Do we want the same thing?

Yes and no.

We do not necessarily want to disappear. The way we speak is part of who we are and how we think. Our accents record where we came from, when we learned Italian, and the fact that another language still lives close beneath the surface.

But we would like the option to disappear now and then.

Sometimes we want to say ciao, order a coffee, and not explain how two Americans ended up in Bergamo. Sometimes we want the conversation to continue without turning toward our pronunciation, our origins, or the inevitable question: “Why Bergamo?”

What Our Italian Can Do

It is easy to measure our Italian by what it cannot do.

It cannot disguise us. It cannot reliably roll an r. It cannot always keep pace with a crowded dinner table when three people are speaking at once and a fourth is beginning a story from the middle.

But isn't this a strange way to measure your language ability?

Thinking about the woman at the party also forced us to take stock of what our own Italian can do.

It has built a life. It gets us through bureaucracy, friendships, driving exams, meals, repairs, jokes, and misunderstandings. It allows us to participate, not perfectly and not invisibly, but fully enough to belong to the life we are living. That's all good.

Also, our language level has allowed us to notice things we would otherwise miss. We hear differences between formal and informal speech. We recognize regional expressions. We stop at signs and wonder why Italian phrases an instruction one way while English would phrase it another. We may not speak like native Italians, but we no longer experience Italian as noise passing around us and because of our gap, we notice more. Or, that's our hope!

There are, of course, limits. In a fast conversation, we may arrive at the perfect response several seconds too late. A joke may need to be explained, which is rarely an improvement. Some days our Italian feels fluent; on others, we struggle to assemble a sentence we are certain we used successfully the day before.

Still, "medium-level Italian" may be an unfair description. Medium compared with what? A native speaker? The English woman at the party? An imaginary version of ourselves who studied the congiuntivo (subjuncitve) every evening instead of doing something else?

Perhaps the more useful measure is not whether we can pass as Italian, but whether our Italian language level allows us to participate in the life around us. And by that measure, it works.

Our Italian is imperfect, accented, and occasionally held together with gestures. It is also durable. It gets us through the day and into conversations, relationships, and situations that would otherwise remain closed to us. That may not be mastery. It is not invisibility. But it is much more than nothing.

My Grandfather Was American

The United States is hardly innocent when it comes to judging people by the way they speak. Accents can affect how people are treated at work, in public, and in everyday conversation. Race and class are often tangled up in those judgments. Someone can be born in the United States and still be asked where they are "really" from.

Still, that was not how I understood American identity growing up.

My grandfather was born in the United States to Italian parents. He spoke and wrote English imperfectly and was possibly illiterate. In an earlier post, A Happy Sound in the Grotto, I wrote about the sounds he made while sitting at the kitchen table, working slowly through the newspaper. His limited literacy was part of his history. It was never evidence that he was somehow less American. He did not have to pass linguistically.

Perhaps that is because the United States tells itself that it is a country made from arrivals. The story is often contradicted by the country’s behavior, but the story still matters. An accent may identify someone as Italian American, Chinese American, Southern, Midwestern, working class, or recently arrived. It can place a person within a complicated American landscape without necessarily removing them from it.

Italy tells itself a different story, one built more around place, family, town, region, and inherited culture. This is curious because Italy contains enormous linguistic variety. Italians have always used pronunciation and vocabulary to locate one another. Yet a regional accent usually places an Italian somewhere within Italy. Our accent more often seems to raise the prior question of whether we belong inside the category at all.

That may be too simple a comparison. Perhaps I remember the United States generously because it was where I grew up and experience Italy more critically because I am still learning how to inhabit it. Perhaps this is rosy retrospection with an American accent?

But the difference continues to feel real.

My grandfather’s imperfect English did not make his nationality conditional. Our imperfect Italian can sometimes make our connection to Italy feel provisional, even after ten years of living here.

Maybe that is the question beneath all the questions that follow ciao: not simply where we came from, but how a person who came from somewhere else can ever become fully from here.

Foreign at Ciao

So, where are we in this discussion? After ten years, we speak enough Italian to live in Italy, but perhaps not enough to disappear into it.

Fine.

We may never be mistaken for Italians, at least not once we open our mouths. But being mistaken for Italian may be the wrong measure.

The woman at the party could pass. We cannot. Yet passing is only one form of belonging, and perhaps not the most important one. A perfect accent can conceal a history. An imperfect one can reveal it in interesting ways.

Our accents record lives lived in two languages. They tell people that we arrived from somewhere else and learned Italian later. They do not tell them how long we've been here, what we understand, what we contribute, or how thoroughly we have made Italy home.

Perhaps this is what people are trying to discover when they ask where we are from. The question may be less a judgment than an opening, an attempt to place us within the story they already understand.

Still, there is a difference between being welcomed and being unremarkable.

We have been welcomed. That is for sure. We have built friendships, routines, and a life in Italian. We participate fully, even if we do so audibly as foreigners. What we may never achieve is the ordinary privilege of passing unnoticed. But, there are worse things in life.

Remaining recognizable as ourselves while living in another language may be a more modest achievement than mastery, but it is also a more interesting one. We do not need our Italian to erase where we came from. We need it to carry us further into where we are.

Even if, immediately after ciao, we are sometimes asked to explain the whole journey before we have managed to order the macchiato.

Transplants, Time, and the Stranger Within

When we first wrote about living abroad, we described the experience as a kind of transplanting: uprooting from familiar soil and learning to grow in a new cultural ground. We also noted similarities between transplanting and aging. Both migration and aging confront us with the loss of taken-for-granted fluency. In a new country, even ordering coffee or catching a joke requires conscious effort. With aging, the body and social roles we once inhabited without thought begin to demand renegotiation.

Alfred Schutz, in his essay The Stranger, discusses how outsiders must explicitly learn what insiders assume. Later theorists of sociocultural models (TSCM) describe this as the accumulation of cultural “recipes” — scripts for how to act, speak, and belong. Massie and Staude, in their phenomenology of ageing, show that growing old is also an accumulation: of biological rhythms, personal narratives, and historical time. Both processes force us to confront our own strangeness in the world. We wrote Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad before discovering these references and were delighted to find our observations mapped onto a much larger conversation.

Living abroad, we find ourselves caught between languages and identities, neither fully at home nor fully foreign. Aging, too, places us in a liminal space: still ourselves, but transformed, negotiating continuity and change. To be a transplant is to be a stranger; to age is to become a stranger to oneself. In both cases, the task is not to erase difference but to learn how to live meaningfully within that strangeness.

Learning to Laugh Again

One of the first signs of being a stranger abroad is missing the punchline. Humor depends on shared references, rhythms, and cultural cues. In Italy, we’ve often found ourselves smiling politely while others laugh, only later realizing the joke hinged on a pun or gesture we hadn’t yet absorbed. Schutz would say that insiders rely on “recipes,” while the stranger must consciously accumulate them. Each missed joke becomes a tiny research project, a reminder that belonging requires deliberate learning.

Aging works in a similar way. Massie and Staude describe aging as the intertwining of biological, narrative, and historical time. Just as the migrant must relearn cultural cues, the aging person must relearn bodily ones. A staircase once climbed without thought now requires calculation. A word once recalled instantly now hovers just out of reach. The fluency of youth — cultural or physical — gives way to slower, more deliberate accumulation.

Visibility and Invisibility

Living abroad, our accent marks us as visible. Even when we blend in with clothing or gestures, a single phrase betrays us. At the same time, there are moments of invisibility: when locals dismiss us as not quite part of the conversation, or when our cultural references simply don’t register. Schutz’s stranger is caught in this paradox, both hyper-visible and overlooked.

Aging carries a similar paradox. Wrinkles, slower movement, and retirement make one visible as “old,” yet at the same time older people are rendered invisible in social life. Massie and Staude call this a form of “social death,” where retirement or frailty shifts identity from agent to dependent. In both migration and aging, visibility and invisibility are intertwined experiences of being marked as other.

Negotiating Identity

In our earlier blog we wrote of being “neither fish nor fowl,” caught between American and Italian identities. Aging, too, produces hybrid identities. We remain ourselves, but transformed. Looking at an old photograph, we see someone who is both us and not us. We are looking at stranger we once were. Schutz’s phenomenology of the stranger and Massie and Staude’s analysis of aging converge here: identity is not a fixed essence but a negotiation across time and culture.

The Strange Shape of Time

Living abroad has made us aware of all sorts of unfamiliar rhythms — how people speak, joke, gesture, or structure conversations. But aging brings its own unexpected rhythm, one that doesn’t have much to do with culture and everything to do with time itself.

We came across a study from Yorkshire (Degnen) that stayed with us. The older adults in it didn’t tell stories in neat, chronological order. Their conversations wandered comfortably between decades, past and present sitting side by side as if they had always belonged together. Details that younger listeners might dismiss as “irrelevant” carried their own meaning — a kind of shorthand built from a lifetime of associations. And sometimes the pace of these stories drifted free of what others expected, unfolding in their own logic.

It struck us because it felt familiar. Living abroad has its own version of nonlinear time — moments when the past intrudes unexpectedly, when old habits collide with new contexts, when identity refuses to stay in sequence. Aging just makes this temporal looseness more visible. Perhaps both experiences reveal that time is less of a straight line and more of a shape we grow into. We are invited to embrace nonlinearity.

When Time Stops

We were thinking about this recently as we finished Book Three of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. Its protagonist, Tara, becomes a stranger not because she relocates, but because time itself stops for her. She wakes each day into the same date while the world continues around her in ways she can sense but not join. Tara must relearn the “recipes” of this new condition — how to navigate relationships, routines, memory, and meaning when chronology refuses to cooperate.

Reading her while thinking about migration and aging, we realized that strangeness is not only spatial or bodily. It can also be temporal: a sudden shift in the rules by which life proceeds. Tara’s halted time echoed something we were already feeling — that belonging, at any age, is partly the work of adapting to a world that will not stay still, or in her case, will not move forward.

Toward a Philosophy of Transplants

To live abroad is to transplant oneself into new soil. To age is to discover that the soil itself shifts beneath us. Both experiences demand humility, patience, and creativity. They remind us that cultural or bodily fluency is never permanent. We are always accumulating, relearning, renegotiating. Migration and aging, then, are variations on a theme: becoming a stranger and learning how to inhabit that strangeness.

Living Meaningfully Within Strangeness

To migrate is to discover that the familiar world has become foreign. To age is to discover that the familiar self has become foreign. In both cases, we are transplants — uprooted from the soil of fluency and asked to grow again in uncertain ground. Schutz’s stranger reminds us that belonging requires conscious accumulation of models. Massie and Staude remind us that aging reshapes time itself, expanding the past and narrowing the future. Our own experience abroad reminds us that these processes are not failures but invitations: to relearn, to renegotiate, to live deliberately.

A line from that Yorkshire study keeps echoing for us: older adults aren’t “lost in the past” at all — the past simply moves more freely through their stories, another thread in the weave of lived experience. What can look nonlinear or “irrelevant” from the outside is often just a different way of stitching moments together. That image stays with us. It suggests that strangeness, whether cultural or temporal, isn’t a deficit but another kind of knowing, a rhythm shaped by the layers a person has lived through.

Perhaps this is the gift hidden in strangeness. Migration and aging strip away the illusion of permanence. They reveal identity as a rhythm of continuity and change. To be a transplant is to accept that roots can grow in new soil. To age is to accept that roots deepen even as branches bend. In both, the task is not to recover lost fluency but to cultivate meaning in the midst of difference.

The Expat Life – Thoughts and Suggestions for Better Terminology

Overview ~ Terminology ~ Transplants ~ Our Thoughts ~ 

The City Poem ~ Quotes ~ Conclusion

   
Views around Bergamo, Italy. Our new home: transplants.

Overview

Lately, we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to live outside the country you were born in. This is our 7th year living outside the country we were born in (the USA). What started out as a sabbatical in Italy morphed into living here. See TravelMarx: Sabbatical Lessons: Thoughts and Stories from our Italian Sabbaticals.

We recently started rethinking about what we call ourselves as we finished two unrelated books "The Lion and the Nightingale” and "Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice". That coupled with the unease of referring to ourselves as expats started us down the road of many walking-conversations around Bergamo to work this out.

We think words matter and, in this post, we propose some ways of thinking about the situation of living outside the country you were born in.

Terminology

When dealing with the concept of people who live outside their native country, here are some words you might run into. It's a word soup with each term having some baggage associated with its usage.

Expatriate - a person living outside their native country.

• Simple enough, right? No, because the term is often used to describe rich white people who live outside their country.
• We get that, but for us, what bothers us more is the image conjured up by the word. As if we were living it up in Paris with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. We don’t identify with the Lost Generation.
• As well we don’t identify with influencers, libertarians, or cryptocurrency stars calling themselves expats and fleeing something inconvenient, taxes, or needing to take refuge somewhere until the storm blows over.

Emigrant – a person when they leave their country of origin.

• Yes, you could say we emigrated from the USA.

Immigrant – a person when they arrive at their destination. (definition)

• Yes, you could say we were immigrants in Italy.

Migrant – a person who moves around from place to place typically looking for work or better living conditions.

• This doesn’t apply to us in the normal use of the word unless you really stretch “better living conditions” to include a greater sense of happiness. But that is a stretch.

Dispatriate - a term used by the writer Luigi Meneghello as opposed to expatriation. Dispatriation for Meneghello meant a deliberate, sometimes painful, distancing of himself from the Italian culture he had grown up with, learning a new grammar of being.

• This neologism avoids the racist overtone of expatriate while more precisely indicating intent of the move. Dispatriate is an expatriate who intentionally distances themselves from their nation of origin.
• We are not intentionally trying to distance ourselves from American culture. Of course, moving away naturally creates distance, which can lead to feeling disconnected. It's unavoidable.

Move abroad – when someone moves outside their native country.

• We don’t like the term because no matter the starting and ending point, it suggests a hierarchy, a movement from a “central” place to somewhere else floating, untethered.
• Maybe it’s best to just to say “moved”, as it applies to us: we moved to Italy.

Nomad – someone who doesn’t stay long in the same place.

• We are not nomads. We thought about trying it. We wondered if we could spend a year or two in a city or country and then move on to another. We abandoned the idea.
• When we thought about being nomads, we realized we need a community that builds around us in time. A base of operation is more our style.
• Today there is the fashionable term “digital nomad” – someone who works online in locations that change.

Extracomunitario – someone/something that isn't part of the European Union. 

• Often used to refer to an illegal alien in Italian, and not in a positive way.
• We've had friends use it with us as a joke.

    
Views around Bergamo, Italy.

Transplants

Perhaps the best, neutral word we can think of in our case and others like us is “transplant”. We transplanted ourselves into another country. Why did we transplant ourselves? It wasn’t for economic gain (that’s for sure!), for fear of persecution (though with current situation in the US, you might wonder), or because there was a community of ex-Americans hanging out in Italy that we wanted to join (we are not those types).

We transplanted ourselves into Italy because we wanted to. We were curious and wanted to explore Italy. That curiosity and sense of exploration started when we took several trips here long before we moved here. Instead of visiting and saying “oh, that’s nice, no need to return”, we kept wanting more. The process of getting citizenship was part of the exploration.

As a point of reference, I only need to think about moving around in the United States. I was born on the East Coast but would never live there again if I didn’t have to. But it’s not just the East Coast. I wouldn’t live in the Southeast and Central US. Why? These areas simply don’t appeal to me. These parts of the country have their merits and people who love living there, just not me. It's kind of like that with Italy.

On the subject of places to live in the US, my thinking of the US has never been the same after reading American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

Once I moved to the West Coast, I realized that was more my home, where I fit better. I “transplanted” myself there in my late 20s. But why did I fit better there? Too many factors that are hard to describe (or I’m too lazy to attempt). Again, it's similar to our move to Italy.

Speaking of expats, we recently finished the book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. This is not at all the kind of book we would pick to read but we ended up with it, and I have to say once I started, I wanted to finish it. The author Janet Malcolm has some great turns of a phrase, like this on The Making of Americans (a work by Stein): "It is called a novel, but in reality it is a series of long meditations on, among other things, the author's refusal (and inability) to write a novel."

Stein is one of the colorful characters of the post-war (WWI) expatriate generation, the Lost Generation. Stein is credited with coining the term and Hemingway popularized it. After finishing Malcolm’s book, we decided we would never want to voluntarily go to a dinner party with Gertrude or Alice as guests. Insufferable people (and lost apparently).

There is a interesting graphic at the World Migration Report, that shows migrations “corridors” between starting and ending country. (I guess in one year we were officially counted in the migration, at least statistically.) The USA has been the main country of destination for international migrants (transplants?) since 1970. Germany is the second top destination. Italy is just outside the top 10. Most of the migration to Italy is from Romania.

The work of the sculpturer Bruno Catalano and his “The Travelers” statues, also known as Les Voyageurs deals with emigration. His haunting bronze surrealist sculptures represent emigrants with pieces missing making them see-through.

Finally, we stumbled across the American Expat Finance web site that tracks people who are trying to get rid of their USA citizenship, officially termed “renunciation”. Many, are accidental Americans. Being a US citizen (no matter if you don’t reside in the US or ever did) means you are liable to pay taxes. So, it’s understandable why some would choose to renounce. In 2020, there were about 6,000 people who renounced.

Our Thoughts

These thoughts come from a larger list we’ve kept over the years of things we noticed after we transplanted ourselves in Italy. It’s interesting that we even keep a list. Then again, that is the value of being a transplant...you see and feel things differently and you need to stop and capture them.


* When outside your home country, your outside status is clear, at least at first. The sights, sounds, and language are the clues. You have a definite place as an outsider. Over time, that distinction may dissolve, but in the beginning it's a high. How do we hold on to the “happy discomfort” of the first week, month and year in a new place?


* Even in your own country, you can sometimes feel like an outsider, but you can't call yourself a transplant like you can when you are in another country. That feeling of being just outside is a special power.


* It can be refreshing to be on the outside because it implies no expectations, wide-open eyes to ask questions again, to be more alive.


* We are in Italy, which in many respects isn't that different from the US, but it's different enough to jumpstart our senses.


* We and others often seek relevancy in life. We have many friends moving from Seattle to Palm Springs, which feels like a move at becoming relevant again. For us, we felt both more and less relevant moving to Italy. We were a novelty yes, but also excluded (at least initially) from inside jokes, cultural references, and other “stuff” we’d know if we grew up here.


* When people ask us why we came to Italy, it’s easy to answer. When people ask us why we left (the US), it isn’t easy to answer especially when asked by an Italian. Italians often scratch there heads as why we would be here.


* We are getting better but still find it annoying when asked questions like (1) “When are you coming back (home)?”, (2) “Don’t you miss the US?”, or (3) “Which do you like better, US or Italy?”. Answers: (1) We don’t know or have it in our plan, and home is here now. (2) Yes, we do sometimes. (3) We like them both, equally. Why choose?


* We are often confronted by people who when finding out we live in Italy, exclaim: “You are living the dream!”. This is odd. The best we can do is take it as a compliment and move on rather than delve into whose and what dream is this exactly. Is it a personal dream or a collective American dream of Italy? [Since writing this post, we did take a crack at the Living the Dream (Beta) app.]

In the book The Lion and the Nightingale: A Journey Through Modern Turkey by Kay Genç, the themes of leaving or staying in your native country and expatriation are touched on. The book is about a country (Turkey) that could imprison you for what you do if it’s against the state. What do you do? Stay and fight or leave. For us, this wasn’t the case. However, in the USA these days with the rightward swerve of the US, we wonder if we hadn’t moved already would this be a factor for us to move.

In Genç's book, we learned about the poem by C.P. Cavafy called “The City”. A good description of the poem is described in the article by Orhan Pamuk Other Countries, Other Shores, where he writes “Cavafy stayed in Istanbul for 3 years and then returned to Alexandria. His leaving Istanbul is the source of the sorrow that permeates his unforgettable poem...” And continues with the key interpretation of “There is no other city to go to: The city that makes us is the one within us.”

The City by C.P. Cavafy

From Poetry Foundation. Translated by Edmund Keeley.


You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.


   

Left: Bruno Catalano statues in Venice. Right: Views of Bergamo, Italy.

Quotes

Here are some quotes that we like about being outside the country you were born and grew up in. Many are from the blog Taken By The Wind (source1, source2).

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.” — Ernest Hemingway (the original expat) from The Sun Also Rises.


“The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.” — Adam Gopnik from Paris to the Moon.


“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time” — Hannah Arendt


“You know what else is nice about being a foreigner? Whatever you do takes place in a capsule that need not be discovered and opened by someone back home. Nothing really counts–it was the life that falls in the forest. That’s how I looked at it. I felt free to…oh, I don’t know.”— Patricia Marx

“I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” – Bill Bryson

“What makes expat life so addictive is that every boring or mundane activity you experience at home (like grocery shopping, commuting to work or picking up the dry cleaning) is, when you move to a foreign country, suddenly transformed into an exciting adventure. Try finding peanut butter in a Japanese grocery story or explaining in broken Spanish to the Guatemalan pharmacy that you need cough drops and you’ll understand. When abroad, boredom, routine and ‘normal’ cease to exist. And all that’s left is the thrill and challenge of uncertainty.” – Reannon Muth (the author of the blog takenbythewind.com)

“What I found appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I liked having goals.” – David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day


“When you grow up in middle America you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief – no, the understanding – that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best. It has the most perfect form of government, the most exciting sporting events, the tastiest food and amplest portions, the largest cars, the cheapest gasoline, the most abundant natural resources, the most productive farms, the most devastating nuclear arsenal and the friendliest, most decent and most patriotic folks on Earth. Countries just don’t come any better. So why anyone would want to live anywhere else is practically incomprehensible. In a foreigner it is puzzling; in a native it is seditious. I used to feel this way myself.” – Bill Bryson

“When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.” Daniel J. Boorstin

Conclusion

For us living in Italy, we live with less than we did in the USA. No car, a much smaller house. We consume less water and energy. (We know, we measure these things.) For us, it feels just a small step closer to sustainable.

We use the term exploration and awe a lot to describe what we like about our life in Italy. It’s like when you take a long hike and see new things. You explore and you get your awe, at least on a small scale. Living in Italy is like a long hike for us metaphorically: we are exploring and awed at what we find.

When we moved to Italy, we wanted an experience different than what we had back in the USA. We weren’t sure what that experience was until it happened. Experience first, question later.

After writing this post, we flip on the morning news to find that there's been another migrant shipwreck. Governments are in tilt on what to do. It does put things in perspective. The year we came to Italy, we did it in comfort, on a plane. Others didn't make it. We came to Italy with modest means and by choice. No matter what you call us: expats, migrants, living abroad, or transplants, we call ourselves lucky.

Sabbatical Lessons: Thoughts and Stories from our Italian Sabbaticals

Hear Ye Hear Ye | Fallowing the Land | Birth of a Sabbatical |

Experiences | A Rose by Any Other Name

~~~Hear Ye Hear Ye~~~

"We are going on a sabbatical this fall" I tell my father on the phone one evening in Fall 2015. Silence. I can only imagine the contortions he is making with his face. He finally replies, "Oh, that's nice. Will you work?"

My dad's response is typical because most people don't know what sabbatical really means or how to reply. Heck, every time I say "sabbatical", I still feel like I'm introducing a new term and need to explain it. We've heard fun frankenwords echoed back to us from friends we told about our upcoming sabbatical. One asked if we were going on a "sabbatican" (a sabbatical at the Vatican?). Another was curious about the financial details of our "sabbitaly" (naturally, a sabbatical in Italy). Still, other friends imagine us idly sipping wine in a Tuscan hilltop castle, while others can't get past the logistics like, "What are you going to do with your house"?

The response from our friends and family ranged from surprise, envy, elation, worry, to the worse response of all: no response. Most of the positive responses came from friends. Most of the worry or no responses came from family. Disbelief was also a common reaction when we announced our second sabbatical. It seemed to be too much to swallow for some folks. One sabbatical is unusual enough, but two? Really, are you out of your minds? That's what I took away even if no one quite said it that way. And the answer is that we just might be out of our minds, but boy has it been swell.

We took our first sabbatical in 2007 - 2008 for 9 months. We intended to travel the world, but the stickiness of Florence and our inclination to nest ruled the day and we spent the 9 months in a modern Renaissance town. We were happy with our choice. When we talked about another sabbatical at that time, it seemed like a ludicrous idea. However, the idea of a second sabbatical, dormant at first, began to stir and make noises reaching a growl a few months before we made the decision to do it again in 2015. During sabbatical two's 7-year gestation period, we realized that our first sabbatical was a high point in our lives and we needed to do it again. Furthermore, the memories and experience of the first sabbatical, rather than dampen, brightened in time, a beacon on the runway for sabbatical two.

I wish I had said all that and more to my father on the phone the evening I called him, but all I said was no, "I'll be taking a break from work."


Views of Bergamo: Porta Nuova, Citta Alta and Clouds, Piazza Vecchia.

~~~Fallowing the Land~~~

So here we are in 2016, over one year into our second sabbatical, and while sabbatical still sounds odd to say, it's the best word we've got. The terms "vacation", "break", "pause", "absence", "gap year", "time-off" and, gulp, "retirement", are vague, ominous, and moreover, don’t address the essence of what we were going for, which was a renewal. The word sabbatical has its roots in the bible and the idea of leaving the land fallow. The word sabbatical in the modern sense is usually considered a privilege granted, for example, to professors, clergy, and high-level corporate positions. They all share the common theme of an extended absence from normal work, be it teaching, administering a congregation, or running a company. During a sabbatical, professors might write a book, clergy might explore their faith in a different way, or an executive might pursue a hobby precluded by a hectic company schedule. One common trait is that sabbaticals are results-oriented.

While the results-oriented aspect of a sabbatical is appealing to us as well (for example, improving our language skills), the biblical sense of a sabbatical in terms of fallowing land and renewing it for some future purpose also resonated with us strongly. It's easy to follow a linear life pattern: you are born, you grow-up, you go to school, you work, you marry, you have kids, you retire, and then you die. Being born, growing up, and dying are unavoidable. It's the other events in the sequence, particularly the school, work, and retirement episodes that we wondered if we could have some control over. Why stick with a linear pattern? Can we repeat the school, work, and retirement phases in a cyclic, nonlinear way? In general, can we mix the phases of our lives as we want? This idea of mixing up our typical life pattern a bit has been a dominant theme and reason for our sabbaticals.

The concept of a renewal of land has a deeper and darker meaning if you choose to think about it in the context of corporate life. Assuming that your land is your body and mind, then working for a corporation is like renting your land out to a big farming operation. We do it because we need to pay the bills. But in time, your land might not be so good for growing the same crop year after year. And if the renter doesn't want to rent your spent land anymore, what happens? They find fresher ground. Why not renew your own land while you can?

~~~Birth of a sabbatical~~~

A pivotal event for our first sabbatical was an unassuming after-work seminar in 2005 on 401(k) plans. We were tired after one of our usual tech-company workdays, but the free refreshments lured us. We also went because while we had 401(k) plans, we had no idea how to manage them, and figured it wouldn't hurt to learn. The two of us and six other brave souls listened to the advisor's hour-long presentation. While we sipped refreshments after the presentation, we talked with the advisor and decided to follow up with him. Eventually, we started a working relationship with the advisor: that is, he would manage our savings. It was a slow process turning over our money and trust.

Our first few meetings with the advisor were nothing at all what we had expected. Instead of talking about numbers, we talked a lot about dreams and plans for the future. During those first few meetings we defined different goals. One of those goals was to take a sabbatical.

Those first meetings with the financial advisor were the first time we sat down as a couple and talked about our goals. Why would it take a financial advisor to do that you might wonder? I don't know, but it just wasn't something we had ever talked about. Up that point in our lives, we were concerned with working and saving money. It took the financial advisor to help us understand the idea of balancing current happiness with future well-being. Out of the search for balance, "sabbatical" as a goal was born. The exact timing wasn't precise, but it was a goal, and it had some money going to fund it.

Our advisor was a little surprised when just two years later, in 2007, we told him that we were actually going to go through with that sabbatical plan. To be honest, we were a little surprised too. We had just finished a house remodel and were finding our financial balance again when suddenly one of us was laid-off. The corporation didn't want to rent the land anymore I guess. They called it something innocuous like reduction in work force, but that didn't help lessen the shock. However, what seemed like a negative turn of events soon turned positive when we decided this opened up the door for a sabbatical.

We knew we wanted to spend the sabbatical in Italy, and we needed to able to stay there legally past the 90 days allowed for tourists. We considered citizenship, which we knew might be an option for us, but at the time it was easier to get visas. So, on a warm summer morning in 2007 we found ourselves standing outside the Italian consulate in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood, waiting in line to submit our application for visas for the first sabbatical.

It's 9:30 am and the line is already long enough to spill out of the small waiting room and on to the sidewalk of Webster Street, a street that when followed north takes you down to the San Francisco Bay. A tall, young priest in front of us fills out his visa application. I think about how we sweated over the visa questions for days, and yet how relaxed he is filling out the application last minute. This strapping man of God, well-coiffed and dressed in unexpectedly snappy black clerical clothing, tells us that he was hoping to go to the Vatican and that he has applied for a visa several times with no success. Ah, I see.

Suddenly there is shouting from inside. We all crane our necks to see what is going on. Seconds later a man runs out of the waiting room chased by a consulate employee who yells after him: "You'll never get a fucking visa!" Oh, what are we in for today?

Despite the drama, all went well that day. As usual, with anything that involves paperwork and Italy, we didn't get it right the first time, and we had to go home and produce some missing documents.
I wonder to this day if the young priest ever made it to see the pope.

By the end of Summer 2007, visas in hand, we were ready to go. We didn't have clue then that we'd get citizenship in 2010, let alone go for a second sabbatical in 2015. But to think that it all started in a seminar on 401(k) plans still amazes us.


Views of Bergamo: Cannoniera di San Michele, Venetian walls and fog, View northeast from Porta San Giacomo.

~~~Experiences~~~

We are smack dab in the middle of sabbatical two and it's a good time to talk a little about our sabbatical experience. There are some aspects which were expected, like experiencing lack-of-work fear, more specifically, that we'll never find work again. There are other aspects, which we didn't expect, such as the depth of our relationships and how invested we've become in our lives here, particularly in our second sabbatical.

The old bugaboo of finding work
Being out of work itself isn't that scary, rather, it's the idea that we may not be able to find work again that's scary. It's a little nagging fear of not being able to find a job again, being off your game, out of the loop. We had the same feeling back in 2008 as well, so it's not a new feeling. What keeps us in good spirits is that after our first sabbatical, when we were ready, we found jobs and integrated back into work life without too much trouble.

Sabbatical one lasted 9 months and sabbatical two has now reached 15 months with no exact end in sight. We can say that we do miss being part of the technology world, a project, an effort, a product, etc. The newness of our surroundings, language immersion, and new people are what we are becoming part of. But at around 12 months, we started to have a slight yearning to be involved in something else. Could that be, gulp, work? The feeling conflicted us. Was it hopeless? Can we ever separate ourselves from work?

We are American ambassadors
When we are in the US, people rarely ask us questions about America. However, here in Italy, we are often called on to explain America in all aspects, big and small, good and bad. For example, we are asked where certain states are located, to comment on current news, whether everyone in America has a gun, or how the electoral college works. This means that we have to keep reasonably informed about current events in the USA, whether we want to or not. We try to talk about facts and events as if we were ambassadors of the US, without ranting or spouting our views too much.

Given their affinity for America, we also end up talking with a lot of Italians about their American vacations, where they have gone and where they would like to go. And, we are called on to give advice for future vacations. It's interesting to hear these travel stories and plans because it gives us new perspectives on parts of America that maybe we've seen or thought we knew. New York, San Francisco, and Miami are to Italian visitors to America as Rome, Venice, and Florence are to American visitors to Italy. And then there are the Italians who work in amazing trips to see all the key national parks, to drive Route 66, or to explore parts of the deep south, places we have yet to see ourselves.

We are mini, everyday ambassadors of the United States. Think about it. Most Italians don't get to spend very much in-the-flesh time with Americans. You may ask why that is important. It's important because America matters to Italians. We can't underestimate how powerful and pervasive American culture and actions are in Italy. Yes, sometimes America is the object of deserved ridicule here, but much more often, it's admired and respected. The average US citizen is blind to the impact that America has abroad. And therein lies a conundrum for us. How do we represent an America that we ourselves only know a small slice of? What do we say to someone in Italy when we don't know the answer to their question? Or, how do we speak to some of the darker aspects of America's power, culture, and pervasiveness?

Let there be English language
We used to get annoyed when Italians spoke English to us in Italy. It felt like we had failed in our ability to speak Italian, that our Italian wasn't good enough. There are a couple of reasons why this happens. First, their English may be better than our Italian, and in the interest of efficient communication, we communicate in the strongest common language. Second, we find that Italians are eager to speak English, even if they only know a few words. Many Italians want to learn, and want the opportunity to speak English. Italians learn English in school but don't often have a chance to practice it. Furthermore, from our unscientific polling: Italians like the American accent much better than the British accent. American accent equals cool. British accent equals stuffy.

Finally, there is what I would call the over-eager, tourist-friendly service provider phenomenon. Typically, it's a waiter who wants to make you feel as comfortable as possible and speaks in English no matter what. He has sized us up as English speakers, and that's what we are served. What the waiter doesn't know is that while Debbie from Dubuque or Takashi from Tokyo may feel at home with that approach, he loses points with us. Alas, a solution is always at hand. When we want to escape English for sure, we head for the hills. We've been known to talk for hours to a sweet old grandmother in the middle of nowhere.

The rich tapestry of relationships
In this, our second sabbatical, we've fallen into, or better yet, been woven into, a rich tapestry of people and place, that we like to call the Pignolo Tapestry. Via Pignolo is a historic and charming street-cum-neighborhood in Bergamo. Via San Tomaso and via Pelabrocco join via Pignolo at Fontana del Delfino to form our Italian stage set. The area around the fountain is barely a widening of the road, much less than a typical residential road in America. But what this meeting of roads lacks in size, it makes up for in richness in personalities, culture, history, and architecture.

We spend a good part of a typical day in and around via Pignolo: we chat with friends in front of the Fontana del Delfino, we grab a coffee at Caffè Papavero which looks on to the fountain, we buy stamps and a newspaper at the tabaccheria across from Papavero, and some sugar or cream at the bottega a 20 steps further down Pignolo. Sometimes we step into the impressive Chiesa parrocchiale di Sant’Alessandro della Croce for a few moments to relish the solemn and elegant interior.

The key to the magic of this Pignolo Tapestry, and of Bergamo in general, are our relationships here. We are awed and humbled by the kindness we've been shown. We noticed the friendliness of the people in Bergamo right away. In our first month, we already had a pretty good group of friends and acquaintances.

One day in our first week of arriving, we are standing in front of the Fontana del Delfino and an elegant older woman walks down the street, stops, and addresses us in English with a German accent: "You aren't from here, you smile too much." We pause for a moment, and then all three of us begin laughing. And that is our introduction to Lola, a German born Bergamasca transplant, and her dry sense of humor. We would we go on to spend much time speaking with Lola over coffee at Papavero, and lunches and dinners at her house nearby. That is just one small example of an immediate and enduring relationship that formed.

Our encounter with Lola and many others in Bergamo raises an interesting perception that the Bergamaschi have of themselves: that they are not as open nor as welcoming as southern Italians, rarely smile, and care too much about money. As we wrote about in the piece Perché Bergamo, we have not found that to be the case. Of course, there are those folks who are not reachable for various reasons; no matter how many times you try, they look straight ahead and ignore you. Nevertheless, we've found that after a smile and buongiorno or two, the ice breaks and the people of Bergamo open up.


Everyday scenes of Bergamo: A happy bride on Fontana del Delfino, a Papavero-style wedding, Fontana della Fiera, Piazza Dante, the cortile of our palazzo.

Bar Papavero and the sisters
Before leaving for our second sabbatical, we read John Hooper's book, The Italians (2015), an interesting look at Italian culture. Hooper, a British foreign correspondent, raises many interesting points about the bel paese, but one point in particular stood out in our minds: your regular or not so regular attendance at your local café. Hooper suggests that cafés are rather possessive of their patrons and if you don't show up time to time, they may think you are cheating on them. We are coffee people and visiting cafés is an important part of our exploration, so Hooper has us a bit worried.

Fortunately, the café gods smiled on us and we found, just steps from our house, the inimitable Caffè Papavero. The café is owned by the gregarious and curious, Sheghi. Her name, Sheghi short for Shaghayegh, in Farsi means poppy, or papavero in Italian. Her bar is frequented by an eclectic mix of people: locals who have lived on via Pignolo for all or most of their lives, university students, teachers, artists, professionals, counts and countesses, and others, like us, who have landed here for various motives and indeterminable duration. Everyone is welcome at Papavero, the vibe is always open and interesting. From the first moment in November 2015 when we walked in and fumbled a simple coffee to now, we always feel welcome and often find ourselves included in something that is brewing: a hike, a weekend getaway, a dinner, or a concert. It's in this café that our good fortune is rooted. You could say that Sheghi and her Bar Papavero are at the center of our Pignolo tapestry.

The warp and weft of this tapestry would be a long list of characters who frequent her café. The "sisters" are one example. From our first days in Bergamo, they have been part of daily experience. We meet them in the stairwell and the cortile of our palazzo, in the street, and at Bar Papavero. The sisters are easy to talk with and are patient with our language mistakes. They offer information and advice freely; we've learned a lot from these guardian angels. If there is anything we need to know, they are the ones to ask.

Two of the sisters live in our palazzo, two floors down. A third sister lives across the street. A fourth sister lives just outside of Bergamo, but is often around hanging out with her sisters. There is a fifth sister that lives in Città Alta, who we haven't me yet, though we feel we have because we know her daughter well. There is no escaping the sisters.

I remember the first time we met one of the sisters, Maria, a tiny, blonde former "sister", in the Catholic sense. We knocked on her door to pick up a key to our mailbox. (Like we said, if you need something in this palazzo, ask the sisters). While standing in the foyer, Maria tells us about her mother who had lived there too. As she talks, she steps from the foyer into the small living room, beckoning us in. She picks up a picture of her mother from the table, kisses it, and shows it to us. Her mother was 97 when she passed away. Her sister Lidia enters with our mailbox key. We talk for a few moments, and there it was. In the space of just a few minutes, we felt more included in the lives of our new neighbors than we could have imagined.

Communication across cultures
As we noted above, the sabbatical has opened up many new relationships for us. It has also changed our existing relationships with friends and family back in the US. Relationships ship or evolve for a myriad of reasons. However, a move outside a culture - from America to Italy as in our case - poses some particular challenges.

One such challenge is physical. In our case, a six to nine-hour time zone difference means that communication patterns change. We are on different rhythms. Before, we had our habitual times when we would reach out to parents, siblings, or friends. We are now out of sync. Our evenings are their mornings, and by their lunch time, we are in bed. It's not uncommon that we are messaging friends first thing in the morning here in Italy as they are just going to bed.

Another challenge is experiential. We have less day-to-day experience in common to share. We are naturally more Italian and European-focused. Our everyday stories aren't as relevant to folks in Seattle, and vice-versa. To the folks back home, we are, in a polite sense, the indifferent expats who left the country, and in a less polite sense, perhaps the two dunderhead expats who don't know what the heck is going on back in the States because we don't live there.

Also with regard to communication, there are folks who have always been key to facilitating relationships within our circles of friends and families back home (whom we can call mavens), and who have kept in close contact. Others have dropped back, waiting for us to return. It's a two-way street because we are equally responsible for any perceived or actual lack of communication.

~~~A rose by any other name ~~~

What a sabbatical should or could be is hard to know ahead of time, especially to choose how long, where, and how it happens. No one is an expert at taking a sabbatical, and it in fact runs counter to many of the cultural ideals that we grew up with in America. Taking a sabbatical is about taking a chance, leaving what you know behind, embracing something different.

When we chose to go on sabbatical, we opened a small riff with our friends and family. We stepped outside our normal lives to take a different path. Some may feel like you are rejecting them or your local or national culture. Others may cheer you on and continue communicating across the riff. Some may even step across to join you.

If you ask the world for permission to take the sabbatical, it won't happen. If you wait for everyone around you to be okay so you can leave without feeling obligations, it won't happen. If you wait for some key milestone to arrive - for example, when you are sixty, or when you work through all your health problems - you might be waiting unnecessarily.

Also, it is wrong to assume that taking a sabbatical requires traveling great distances. It may not require any travel at all. It's about taking the time, changing your perspective not necessarily about where you go. That said, a physical break from your normal surroundings is a powerful way to inspire new ideas and define the sabbatical in a more precise way than what came before it.

At a certain point, in this, our second sabbatical, I started to be bothered by something I perceived as "sabbatical fatigue". That is, it seemed that our friends and families had lost interest in what were doing, they were no longer asking as many questions as I thought they would. Then it dawned on me: our 'sabbatical adventure' had transitioned into the two of us simply living somewhere else, albeit without work. It wasn't fatigue, but rather normalization to our new life. Maybe they had sensed something before we had. And with that insight, the question became: "Is there a precise time when we pass out of sabbatical and into just life abroad, regardless of whether we work?" Connecting the concept of sabbatical with the absence of work suddenly seemed a little problematic. Evoking "sabbatical" to describe our choices and situation now smacks, admittedly, of slight conceit. Though, we can't deny its power to stir romantic and magical images for ourselves and for our listeners. We maintain that those images are more powerfully evoked with "sabbatical" than if we said "we are going to live in Italy for a while," even if the outcome is about the same. We're sticking with the romance and magic for now, because to us it still feels that way.

So, "sabbatical" is still a word we use to describe what we are doing, at least until the next inflection point in our journey. When we return to America, will we resume our pre-sabbatical lives? Is that even possible after our experiences here? Or, will we stay in Italy and finally make a proper transition from sabbatical to living and working here? Whatever the case, I can't wait for the phone call with Dad.


Images of Bergamo: Viale della Mura, View from the Campanone Biblioteca Civica "Angelo Mai", Via Pelabrocco.


Interior of Sant'Alessandro della Croce.

Perché Bergamo (Why Bergamo)?

Photos of Via Pignolo, Bergamo. Center: Fontana del delfino with Palazzo Lupi.


Perché Bergamo? Why Bergamo? That's the question most people ask when they find out we've chosen to live in Bergamo. They seem incredulous that anyone would choose to live here. But, that's exactly what we have done and in this post we'll explain why we've chosen Bergamo for our sabbatical, and what we think about our choice.

+ Overview
+ Planning
+ Reality
+ Smiley for Bergamo
+ Borgo Living
+ Will I Meet a Tourist?
+ Addendums

Overview

In the summer of 2015, the start of our second sabbatical was looming a few months in the future and we still hadn't locked down where we wanted to land in Italy. Heck, we didn't know if we would even stay long in one place, but we knew that we needed somewhere to start.

We spent our first sabbatical in 2007/2008 in Florence. For our second sabbatical, we knew that we should not attempt to repeat the first sabbatical's magic in Florence. Furthermore, we were planning to stay longer this time, and we needed to consider factors like long term cost, education options, and ability to get to nature quickly, specifically access to mountains, which is important to us. So we studied the problem and like good engineers created maps, spreadsheets, and documents exploring the options. In the end, we chose Bergamo.

If you are interested in the factors we used to choose Bergamo, see the next section, Planning, else skip to Reality for what we think today about our choice. For more about our thoughts on taking a sabbatical, see Sabbatical Lessons: Thoughts and Stories from our Italian Sabbaticals.

Planning

Factors that were important to us for choosing a city in Italy for our sabbatical included:

• Education options
  • We had a strong recommendation from a friend and former Italian teacher that the University of Bergamo's CIS - Italian for Foreigners program was very good. And, in fact, that has proven to be the case. We just completed a semester there at language level B2 and were very happy.
• Location
  • Bergamo is close to the mountains. From the city you can access the mountains on foot, car, bus, or tram. All the goodness that comes from mountainous geography is something we really wanted as part of our stay. Bergamo is squashed up against the mountains with the Po River Plain (Pianura Padana) to the south at its feet and the Bergamasque Alps and Prealps to the north at its back. In fact, our planning map (see image below) reveals that all of our candidates for cities were located near mountains; many of the cities we considered were on the edge of the Po River Plain.
• Size
  • Bergamo was in our Goldilocks zone of not being too small or too big, coming in at about 120,000 people. We were looking for cities in a range of 50,000 to 300,000. We felt that we could get a more realistic and authentic experience living in a city of moderate size, with some economic foundation other than tourism. See Will I Meet a Tourist? for an attempt at measuring how "touristy" Bergamo is. Our sense is that it isn't (yet) overrun with tourists.
• Museums and gardens
  • We like museums and gardens and we wouldn't pick a city that didn't have them. Bergamo has small number of good museums including the Accademia Carrara, Gamec, and the 8 museums that are part of the Fondazione Bergamo nella storia. You can easily return to them every few months and not be bored. More museums can be easily reached by train in Milan, Brescia, and Verona, for example.  In addition, there is one botanical garden in Bergamo, but for us, the parks and nearby green of the mountains are as interesting, if not more.
• Trains
  • Rail stations are classified in terms of the services they offer and how many passengers they serve, which is directly related to how well connected they are. A higher rating for us would be better since we wouldn't have a car. Bergamo is rated as gold out of bronze, silver, gold, platinum (the best).
• Osterie d'Italia
  • We use the Slow Food Osterie d'Italia guide for finding places to eat and have had good results. We trust the guide and were curious how many Osterie d'Italia entries were in or close by the cities we were considering. For us, it is an indication of how interesting the culinary scene is. (We gathered the counts from the Osterie d'Italia IOS App.) Unfortunately, Bergamo didn't do so well in this category with just one entry (Al GiGianca - we tried it, very nice). I'll hold my observations on the Bergamasco culinary scene for another time. Suffice it to say, we enjoy our jaunts outside Bergamo.

Left: Map of Italian cities we considered for our second sabbatical. Center: Neighborhoods of Bergamo (source). Right: Example of spreadsheet used to select a sabbatical city.


Here are some factors we considered but didn't influence our decision very much or at all:

• Climate
  • We knew we didn't want long, cold winters or long, hot summers. Given that, most of the cities we were considering approximately fit the bill and it was hard to distinguish between them in terms of climate. Bergamo is listed as a humid subtropical climate, which sounds okay, but what does it really mean to live in that climate coming from Seattle? We just didn't know. Also, given the climate variations we've seen of late, what would Bergamo really experience in weather?
• Diversity
  • We looked at the percentage of immigrants and the existence of an Arcigay chapter as two measures of diversity, but really didn't understand what, if anything, we could infer. An interesting tidbit of information is that the diocese of Bergamo has strong ties with Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cochabamba in Bolivia which has translated into the biggest immigrant population in Bergamo originating from Bolivia. See page 220 of Statistiche demografiche 2016.  Unfortunately, we have yet to stumble across an interesting Bolivian restaurant in Bergamo.
• Health
  • We looked at the number of gyms and yoga studios for a sense of how active cities are. It's hard to readily get such a list, so we searched using maps and key words for an approximate count. In the end we didn't put much weight on what we found, because the physical activity of a city is obviously more than just these two factors. From our on-the-ground experience, we find Bergamo to be a pretty health-conscious city. There are lots of runners and walkers we see daily in the streets, as well as other indications the Bergamaschi care about their health.
• Income
  • We looked at median income of cities we were considering. Bergamo comes in at the top in this respect. And, at least according to this 2011 article, Bergamo was the second richest city in Italy. In the end, the median income didn't have much influence on our decision.
• Final rating
  • We never came up with a final ranking, that is, weighting and adding all the factors together for a final score. The act of just creating the spreadsheet and talking about the factors that were important to us, was enough to make the decision.

Some aspects of a place are hard to appreciate until you are actually living there, experiencing it firsthand. Here are a few things we missed in our analysis:

• Trains
  • While Bergamo is rated as gold (pretty good), it is not on one of the Italian high-velocity train routes. Judging by the griping we hear (especially when we take our shirts to the cleaners where we always get an earful) and our experience, Bergamo got the short end of the stick in terms of train routes. The fastest train routes run through Treviglio to the south leaving Bergamo as a sort of spur. What this means practically, is that in order to catch a fast train to another city you first have to take a train to Milan or Brescia, an extra 45 minutes. Honestly though, it hasn't impacted us that much.
• Airport
  • We underestimated how useful the Orio al Serio Airport could be, in particular, with Ryanair cheap flights. We have made good use of it so far, travelling between Bergamo and Madrid, Lisbon, Berlin, Pescara, and Bari. We hope to make more use of it in upcoming trips, and find ourselves plan trips around Ryanair routes. Getting to Milan Linate, or the Milan Malpensa airport from Bergamo is a hassle, making Orio al Serio a blessing.
• Church
  • We are told that the church exercises a great deal of control and owns a lot of property in Bergamo. This means that no nightclubs are located within city limits because the church doesn't want them, which means kids have to go great distances to party in a disco thereby causing great inconveniences for the kids and their parents that shuttle them back and forth. For us, it hasn't been a big deal. Interestingly, the city sponsors a wealth of dance, music, and general events across the city that are full of young and old. 
  • Also, the city's main and oldest daily paper, L'Eco di Bergamo, is owned by the diocese of Bergamo, and says next to nothing interesting or controversial.
• WIFI
  • Bergamo has an excellent public WIFI (see Comune Bergamo - Mappa hotspot WIFI), which is free, fast and easy to access in many public spaces. It's an unexpected perk.
• Libraries
  • There are decentralized libraries (outside the city center at Betty Ambiveri, Caversazzi, Colognola, Gavazzeni, Loreto, Pelandi, Valtesse) and centralized libraries (Biblioteca Civica Antonio Tiraboschi, Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai, Biblioteca Accademia Carrara e Gamec, Biblioteca Museo di Science Caffi, Biblioteca ISREC). For more information, see Biblioteche della città di Bergamo. Your best bet is Tiraboschi or Angelo Mai. We prefer the majestic Angelo Mai in Città Alta. Also, Bergamo WIFI is accessible from inside the library.
  • As well, there are the libraries of the University of Bergamo, the most convenient being the Biblioteca di Economia e Giurisprudenza or the Biblioteca umanistica. For more information, see UniBG Biblioteche and portale for hours and holiday closures. These libraries can be used by the general public.

We used the Comuni-Italiani.it site to gather some statistics for our decision-making. Here are the numbers for Bergamo. Also, the Bergamo comune site has detailed stats (Bergamo in cifre); most comuni have some stats if you poke around.

Passages of Bergamo, always beckoning you to explore.

Reality

Overall, we feel like we made a good choice with Bergamo. I'm sure there are a half dozen other Italian cities that would have worked, or rather I should say, we would have made work for us. I'm not sure how much we should credit our planning and how much luck. So back to the original question: perché Bergamo? The simple answer comes down to education opportunities, geography and proximity to mountains, and an good experience in a mid-sized Italian city. We just completed a semester in the University of Bergamo's CIS - Italian for Foreigners program at language level B2 and were very happy with the quality of the instruction and what we learned. Furthermore, we had an opportunity to get out and explore the area with a number of hikes and long walks (see bergamo + hiking) around Bergamo. As for an good experience in a mid-sized Italian city, only time will tell, but so far we are loving it.

Usually after giving our answer to "perché Bergamo", the conversation turns to what we think about the people of Bergamo. And here, we surprisingly find that Bergamaschi assess themselves as being hard (duro), unfriendly, and only concerned about money. What's interesting, is that we've found the complete opposite to be true. In fact, we've developed more close and meaningful relationships here than we did in Florence. It could be that we are different now. Or, it could be that Florence suffers more tourist pressure (see Will I Meet a Tourist?) and making friends with people living there is more difficult. At any rate, we include among our friends here in Bergamo, people born and raised in and around Bergamo, Italians from other parts of Italy, and other expats. So dear Bergamaschi: sorry your cover is blown…when we smile and start talking, you immediately melt and become friendly.

We've found such unexpected hospitality here, like from the owners of La Rosa Scarlatta, our home for the first few weeks after arriving last November. Their help proved to be key to finding the right apartment for us, for which we are eternally grateful. Also, unexpected are the cast of characters (dare we include ourselves?) who frequent Caffè Papavero in Piazzetta del delfino and the cafe's exuberant and welcoming owner. You just never know who you might find there or what activity you might get asked to join.

For all our vacations in Italy over 20+ years (at least 10) and our sabbatical in 2007-2008, we never stayed in Italy in the summer. So here we are in July and we are experiencing our first Italian summer. There are a few things that we notice in particular. First, the fragrance of tilia (tiglio in Italian) trees. We never have experienced the tilia trees like we have this spring and summer. At night, when we walk the Venetian walls of the Città Alta after dinner, a honey-like perfume engulfs us. It's intoxicating. Besides the tilia trees, the common swift (Apus apus) are a new wondrous sound. The high-pitched calls of these birds blend together into a pleasant background noise common in Bergamo, as well as elsewhere in Europe in the summer months. Out past stays in Italy were either after swifts has already left (late summer) or hadn't arrived yet (late spring) as they are migratory birds. Finally, in the summer, Italians take to the streets in the evenings like we've never seen before. Cities like Bergamo come alive each night with different activities. In Bergamo, among the many activities going on is the Borgo Sant'Agostino, an outdoor eatery and gathering point in Città Alta. (Other data points: recently, we spent a week enjoying the nightly shows of Cuneo Illuminata in Piedmont; and, we spent 5 nights in Lecce, Puglia where it seemed normal to eat no earlier than 10 pm and then shop the street markets until midnight.)

We griped a bit in the beginning of our stay about the fact that Bergamo doesn't have a central market like you might find in Florence (Son Lorenzo, Central, Sant'Ambrogio, and Santo Spirito). Over time, we found it works a little different here with once a week markets in different parts of the city. For example, you can find markets at:

• Piazzale della Malpensata (Monday morning, big, food and lots of low quality items)
• Piazzetta Santo Spirito (Tuesday morning, small, charming)
• Piazza Pontida (Friday morning, small, charming)
• Piazza Mascheroni Lorenzo, Città Alta (Friday morning, medium)
• Piazzale Goisis Lodovico, Atalanta Stadium (Saturday morning, medium, quality items)

A list is here, but it's not complete. We've seen other markets here and there. For example, there is a seller of food from Piemonte who appears the third Sunday in the month near Largo Gianadrea Gavazzeni (behind Teatro Gaeteano Donizetti). And, there is always something going on the Sentierone. In fact, you are guaranteed to find one or more stall, if not dozens, lining the Sentierone on any given week. We've seen stalls selling confetti for Mardi Gras, candy of every sort, cheese, clothes, huge loaves of Pan Pugliese, foods from other regions of Italy, and chocolate. The stalls are usually aligned with a themed exhibition, like chocolate, sustainable energy, or a book fair, or, they are aligned with a holiday.

For everyday needs, we go to a fruttivendolo - a small, local grocer focusing on mostly fruits and vegetables, fresh and typically local. Our current favorites are Mora Roberto (friendly and full of advice) and Bresciani Livio (great selection if not a bit expensive).

Random images from around Bergamo, Italy.

Smiley for Bergamo

The Jane Smiley story about bliss in Bergamo found its way to us from friends concerned we might be missing out on something. Even the echoey L'Eco di Bergamo picked up on it: La nostra città sul New York Times. I'm guessing the Smiley piece helped Bergamo cheer up after feeling a tad bit neglected with all the fuss about Christo's Floating Piers project and all the attention it brought to the Lago Iseo communities. (We went to the Floating Piers, and it was awesome.)

I'm happy that Pulitzer Prize winning Smiley had a good time in Bergamo, and a just little miffed because I selfishly don't want more tourism here due to her blissful reporting. She is right about the gardens and the green in Bergamo, and the beauty of the hills where she stayed. However, the thing that struck me in her piece was that in 6 months living here we have never once gone to Il Pianone, the restaurant that was the center of her blissdom (located in the Valverde area). In fact, I had to look it up to see where it was. Most of the people we know in Bergamo have never been there or dismiss it as a venue for weddings and events.

One recent, hot Saturday night, we set out to find Il Pianone.  After leaving the Città Alta and a little past the Orto Botanico Garden on Via Beltrami, we start hearing "You're the One That I Want" (Grease soundtrack) blaring from somewhere in the green hills. We soon reach Trattoria Parietti, a humble restaurant that we like, and continue to reach Il Pianone. By now, the music has changed to "My Sharona" (The Knack). We can see that a wedding reception is in progress on the terrace, probably American judging by the music. Il Pianone's commanding view and sweeping terrace make it an obvious choice for such events. We are satisfied we found it, but promptly turn around to head back down to Città Alta. Just before we were out of earshot of the reception, the music changes again to "Karma Chameleon" (Culture Club). We head for Borgo Sant'Agostino to eat in the park and listen to CarmenSita.

Another thing that struck me in the NYT article was Smiley's "faded and tragic" impression of San Pellegrino. Yes, there are a lot of those impressions to be had in Italy. In fact, Smiley need only have dropped down into the Città Bassa to take a look at the empty military barracks (caserma) in my neighborhood. The barracks was once the beautiful and noble Palazzo Lupi. After the start of Italy's military drawn down in the late 1990's and the suspension of mandatory service in 2004, barracks all over Italy were not needed. Palazzo Lupi stands vacant with weeds growing out the roof. We can lean out our window and see it's mustard colored façade and shuttered windows. It seems faded and tragic, but it will live again. That's Italy. It's hubris that we judge things by our limited concept of time.

Left: Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai. Center: A palazzo entrance on via Pignolo. Right: Light fixture under the portici near Balzer Pasticceria.

Borgo Living

Smiley's article also made me think about how you choose to see and experience a city depends on a myriad of decisions you make including where you choose to base yourself. For a vacation of a week or two, you might choose a hotel in the hills around Bergamo, but for our longer stay we needed to consider cost and the practicality of everyday living, while still maintaining some charm and authenticity - a decision different for each person.

I remember arriving in Bergamo on a cool and foggy November night in 2015, days after the Paris attacks. We walked through deserted streets alternately thinking about the violence of the previous days and noting locations of stores and services that we might need in the coming days, trying to strike a balance between past and future, despair and hope. We walked past a memorial to the victims outside the city hall (municipio) and then up to the Porto Giacomo lit up in the colors of the French flag.

The next day, the clouds and fog continued the somber mood as we struck out on foot to see Bergamo for the first time in the light. We evaluated the parts of the city we saw not in terms of a tourist but in terms of a resident. We were interested how we could we live without a car, what transportation options we could use, and where we would do our shopping, the locations of the fruttivendolo, macelleria, and famacia - the stuff of every day living.

In addition to lots of exploring on foot, we used immboliare.it to understand neighborhoods and what types of apartments were available. After a few weeks of searching for an apartment, we learned a few things. The first was that living in Città Alta was not a pratical choice for us, nor was living in the outlying areas like Valverde, Colli, or Valtesse. It's not that we wouldn't have like to, but the cost of these highly "prized" areas and access to services without a car wasn't practical. The second thing we learned was that using immboliare.it, calling and meeting real estate agents, was not turning up good fits for us. Yes, the real estate agents found places to live that were okay for cost and practicality, but suffered on charm in a big way. For example, one apartment we looked at was close to the train station, in a modern building, with a neighborhood we couldn't identify with and plain just didn't like. Another option was a beautiful apartment in a shabby building surrounded by other taller buildings; the apartment's views was out on the front door of the local Jehovah's Witnesses office. Nope, not that one. I don't care if it's really nice inside and actually has a dryer (a rarity).

So we were caught in the catch-22 of finding a place to stay that was livable, practical and kind to the wallet while giving us what we needed in terms of historical authenticity and charm. After a few weeks of what seemed like fruitless searching, we discovered that Bergamo has interesting, centrally located historic neighborhods (borghi) like Borgo Pignolo (an old and important route between Città Alta and Venice), Borgo San Leonardo (connecting Città Alta with Milan), Borgo Santa Caterina, and Borgo Canale. These borghi provide the convenience of being close to (and really part of) the lower city while maintaining historic and authentic appeal. So we concentrated our efforts in these neighborhoods as a place to live.

The third thing that we learned while searching for an apartment was that we needed to build relationships. Yeah, big head slap, right? We tried the clinical (geek way) of filling out a form on a website and waiting for something perfect and orderly to happen. Even using immobiliare.it, we really needed to get on the phone and talk to get any traction and start a relationship with the agents so they knew who we were and what we were looking for. The key we were missing for the first several weeks was building relationships. In the end, we found an apartment in Borgo Pignolo through friends. When we met the owner, we hit it off and built a relationship. The take-away advice if you find yourself in a similar situation is to make friends, ask around, and let people know what you are looking for.

Borgo Pignolo where we live - more precisely upper Pignolo around Piazzetta del delfino - is close to Città Alta while being technically located in Città Bassa (or centro). It's a beautiful and historic area, like Piazza Pontida, Via Sant'Alessandro, Borgo San Caterina and Borgo Palazzo to name just a few others. These examples fly in the face of the over-exagerated conception of the Città Bassa as a uniformly ugly place. It is true that the lower city has more modern parts than Città Alta, and there are some ugly, severe-looking structures. However, you could also leverage a sort of reverse criticism at Città Alta in that it's more stage set for tourists than livable for the average person.

A few months after settling into Borgo Pignolo, we went to Vicenza, the stomping grounds of the famous architect Palladio. We stayed the night there, and the hotel clerk after finding out we were from Bergamo exclaimed: "Città Bassa is so ugly." We were a bit crushed, and tried to explain there are other areas of Città Bassa that are very nice. I knew then we were starting to settle in and that we were proud of our new city because we felt like we needed to defend it.

Photos of buildings in Bergamo. Left: Liceo Classico Statale Paolo Sarpi. Center: Palazzo on Via Pignolo. Right: Palazzo on Piazza Giacomo Carrara.

Will I Meet a Tourist?

From the source Bergamo in Cifre 2014, we can make the following very rough calculation (using rounded figures):

• 240,000 total arrivals in 2013
• 240,000/365 = 660 tourists/day
• 120,000 people who live in Bergamo (1,100,00 in provence of Bergamo)
• 12,000 people you "might" encounter in your normal day (let's say 10% of 120,000)
• 660/12,000 x 100 = 5% of people you "might" encounter in a day would be tourists

Obviously, if you spend your day in Città Alta, the percentage of tourists you encounter will be higher, at least greater than 50%. If you spend your time in the Malpensata neighborhood (just south of center of Bergamo), you may not encounter any tourists. The percentage of tourists you encounter is also seasonal. More in summer, less in winter.

For comparison, Florence has millions of tourists arriving (3.8 million for 3/4 of the year according to this source from the provincia site) and about 380,000 people living in Florence. Let's round to 4 million tourist arrivals for a year (and this is still low), so that we can make a similar calculation as shown above:

[(4,000,000/365) / (380,000)(0.10)] * 100 = 29% (higher than the 5% calculated for Bergamo)

We used number of total arrivals (arrivi) for the calculations here. You can also repeat them using the number presenze (in the links cited above), which accounts for number of nights stayed by tourists. Regardless of what figure you use (arrivi or presenze), the interesting point is the magnitude of yearly tourists compared to number of people that live in the city, or tourists per inhabitant. For arrivals (arrivi) in Bergamo, it's (240,000/120,000) or 2 tourists per year per inhabitant. For Florence, it's (4,000,000/380,000) or 10.


Left: A woman walks up Via Sant'Alessandro. Center: A cabbage on display in front of a fruttivendolo. Right: A flower seller in Piazzetta del delfino.


Left: Città Alta, Bergamo from the Camponone Torre Civica. Center: A slice of the Po River Valley and Sky from Città Alta. Right: Confetti after Mardi Gras on Il Sentierone.

Addendum: November 2016

We just came across the ItaliaOggi-Università La Sapienza di Roma ranking of the cities of Italy. In the study, cities are ranked on 9 different factors: affari e lavoro (business and labor), ambiente (environment), criminalità (criminality), disagio sociale e personale (social and personal hardship), popolazione (population), servizi finanziari e scolastici (financial and educational services), sistema salute (health system), tempo libero (leisure time), tenore di vita (standard of living). At this time, we could not find information to really dig into the details of each factor. You can start reading about the study in La Repubblica or the BergamoPost.

In the ranking, Bergamo was number 15 in 2015, but slipped to number 25 in 2016. Top of the list in 2016 is Mantova. Bottom of the list for 2016 is Crotone.

Addendum: June 2017

A check-in: we are still asked this question regularly, no change there. However, we've realized recently that title of this post is not quite right. In fact, many people will ask the question with the more common  "come mai Bergamo", which translates to to something between "how come Bergamo" and "what brings you to Bergamo".

Addendum: June 2025

This article appeared in the Corriere della Sera: Equilibrio tra lavoro e qualità della vita, dove è meglio? A Bologna, Verona e Bergamo (non a Milano e Roma). This study reveals that medium-sized cities—not metropolises—offer the best balance between work and quality of life. Top ranked cities are: Bologna (described as the ideal equilibrium between productivity and quality of life) and Verona & Bergamo (recognized for safety, services, urban cleanliness, and green spaces.).