the backdrop of a Renaissance portrait. Bar a few telephone lines, the landscape looks unchanged for half a millennium.
We struck lucky with a hostel to stay in—on a steep cobbled hill, a couple of doors away from the house where Raphael was born—it was cheap as chips and right in the middle of town. We got rid of our stuff and went wandering around, a cardiac exercise in itself given that no part of the town is on the flat. Everything seemed to be small—there was a tiny carwash for tiny Italian cars, a tiny petrol pump, it was hard to keep the word ‘cute’ from your mind. Then, within minutes, the whole town was suddenly awash with luminously dressed cyclists careering around every corner and we kept being offered free Red Bull by passing strangers with funny Red Bull hats on. Yes, it was the day of the Red Bull sponsored cycling race around town and we had arrived in time for the start of festivities, which it transpired would go on all night in the form of Euro rock in the main square.
So this was Le Marche, ancient and modern. And we decided we liked it. That night, our fate was sealed when we tried our first Le Marche olive oil, a delicate oil from a place called Pesaro, on a delicious plate of orecchiette which was simplicity itself. A glass of Verdicchio was the final piece in the puzzle. Le Marche it would be.
A few months later, we were en route to Le Marche for the second time, via London. It was one of those traditional Ryanair journeys which begins at an hour of the day that should really be called night. At 4.30-something you ask yourself whether it is really worth it and at 11 a.m. in Italy you answer yourself ‘yes’.
This trip had a different feel about it. It was more than just a holiday, filled with pleasant but aimless wanderings. It was greater than a vague sniffing out of an area. Things had moved on and somehow, without either of us really spelling it out, we knew we weren’t just dipping our toes any more. This trip was the first real step towards our new life.
Our plan was to find a house in an olive-friendly area, then find a nearby olive grove to buy afterwards. Secretly, I think we both had hopes of stumbling across a beautiful house positioned in the middle of a huge olive grove, but we knew that was a long shot.
We’d lined up an array of estate agents for the trip. Le Marche covers a pretty big area so we planned to hop from one part to another with a different ‘tour guide’ for each, hoping that way we’d learn more about how house buying works as well as getting to know the region.
Pretty much all of Le Marche is hilly—the views forming that curvaceousness that is the hallmark of the Italian countryside and that spawns fresh lovers every day. All of these deeply tilting hills are divvied up by the lines made by olive trees, often used as a marker of the border of one farm to the next. It all looked just like the romantic vision we all secretly nurture of a new life abroad.
First up on the estate agent front was a duo: Sandro, a suave Italian in an Audi, and his scatty German assistant, Valeria. We’d told them our plan about the olive grove so occasionally Valeria would excitedly say something like ‘This house has fifteen olive trees in the garden’, which only served to confirm that we’d never find house and grove together. The important thing, instead, was to make sure the area was suitable—which ruled out places too high (olive trees don’t like frost), places too near the coast, where the trees don’t tend to thrive, or any shady oak-filled valleys (obviously they need loads of sun).
Most of the houses we were shown ‘needed work’. That’s what the English buyer wants, we were told. But we weren’t sure we wanted trees growing through the middle of our living room, and some of the cracks dividing houses pretty much into two were frankly frightening. Prices varied enormously; the range we were shown started at 45,000 euros and went up to about 200,000 euros. Estimates for restoration at least doubled the price.
We saw about 20 houses that first day, fanatically photographing and documenting each one. Sandro turfed us out about 6 p.m., telling us to have a think and that he’d see us in the morning. He left us at a place called Hotel Ristorante Giardino in San Lorenzo in Campo, where he said the food was ‘rather good’.
Sandro is master of understatement. The food was exceptional. We ate one of the most fantastic meals we have ever had. When the waiter brought the menu, outlining delicious morsels of every kind of flesh, our hearts sank a little. Jason is a vegetarian and asked his daily question about the possibility of non-carnal options and the waiter looked slightly surprised. Oh no, we thought; please have something Jason can eat. But no, he was surprised because we hadn’t seen the vegetarian tasting menu at the back! A vegetarian tasting menu—with five courses of it—in the middle of Le Marche. We had to live here.
Sandro appeared at a leisurely nine-thirtyish the next morning as we muddled our way into the day through our food-and-wine hangovers. There followed many more houses and much more indecision. But today there was one house which lingered with us: Upupa, owned by a little bent lady called Pepita. It seemed to be the biggest house in the world, made up of at least four different chunks, each of which would probably have sufficed alone. It was half ‘done up’ in a deplorable style, which would have to be swiftly and expensively undone. It had a garden full of olive trees, a vegetable plot and 360 degree views, being perched on top of a hillock. The communal olive press was within walking distance and two minutes away was a sweet little town where we watched buxom Italian grandmothers cooing over a tiny baby that for some reason was in a box. But above all this, it felt like it could become our family home.
The sums, of course, didn’t quite add up. We spent the evening moving numbers around, increasing the hypothetical amount we’d sell our London flat for and decreasing the estimated restoration costs of our new house until it sort of worked. As to the restoration, we reckoned that in any case we could do it in different chunks as and when we had the money. Gradually, over the years, the house would become one unified whole. As we looked at the numbers and the estate agent handout of the house, our hearts raced with excitement and terror at the realization that we might really do this.
Another day brought two new estate agents. The first was a slightly shady seeming Englishman who’d lived in Le Marche for years and had a sort of freelance estate agent business. He had no office and we met him in a bar where he was sitting smoking a cigarette and wearing a cream-coloured linen jacket that made him look like he thought he was in the Raj. We didn’t feel enormous confidence but nonetheless our hearts bounced as we drove up to the first house he took us to. It was beautiful, with flowers growing all round it. Built of pale bricks, it looked to be in good condition, it had plenty of the little add-on bits giving interesting angles (J can’t stand big blocky square lumps of houses) and it came with a four-hectare chunk of land right by the house that looked perfect for growing olive trees. The house had fifteen bedrooms and two little outhouses. Better still, the price was a suspiciously reasonable 125,000 euros.
The catch, when it came, was an extraordinary one. It wasn’t that there was an abattoir next door or that they were about to build a new shoe factory at the bottom of the garden or anything so mundane. No, the catch was that if we bought it, we’d have to share the house with someone else.
Italian property law is, to our eyes at least, rather eccentric. When someone dies, a Napoleonic decree that still stands says that their property be left in proportion to their relatedness to any living relatives—so if you have three sons they get a third each; if you have one daughter she gets the lot. And if you have three sons, two cousins, five nephews, a niece and an ever-increasing count of grandchildren, you get a lawyer.
The effect of this is that there are lots and lots of farmhouses which lie abandoned because each has a family that never agrees what to do with it—one party wanting to sell up, another saying that selling would be a family betrayal, etc.—so the end effect is that nothing happens.
In the case of this lovely house, most of the owners had reached agreement but there was a sticky uncle who owned effectively
