First steps - May 2007

By the beginning of May we had definitely decided we wanted to find somewhere in the southern Marche. Chris is the researcher in the family (she's a university lecturer in Tourism and Leisure and is brilliant at finding stuff on the internet) so she set about looking through the websites of estate agents offering places to buy and restore.

There were certainly lots of sites and plenty of houses but the quality of information was very variable and was generally well below what you would get in the UK. Often just one poorly focussed photo and a few words. We filled in quite a few web enquiry forms and sent off numerous emails. the replies began coming in - mostly wanting more clarification of our requirements.

One reply came from a company called lokation.it. This was a bit of an outside bet as it wasn't even based in the Marche but their local representative came back to us promptly with a long list of questions (17 in all, including whether we thought the presence of wild animals nearby was a good or bad thing) to help pinpoint the right property. We used our replies to Lokation to build a brief that would give other agents a good idea of what we were looking for. Basically what we decided we wanted was a country house of about 200 sq m which could make a 3-4 bed house and we set a total budget for purchase and restoration of about €300k (which, at the time, was just over £200k).

However as time went on, it became more and more clear that, in many cases people either didn't bother about or didn't care what we said wanted; they felt they had a better idea of our requirements than we did. In the end, we narrowed it down to four agencies on the basis both that they had properties that appeared suitable (in terms of type, price and location) and appeared to be professional in their approach. Two were British / Irish owned, one German and one Italian.

By this time we had arranged for the children to stay with Chris's mum and dad and had booked flights to go on Monday 11 June, returning home on Thursday the 14th. We planned to go via Rome Ciampino; although this means a 3 to 4 hour journey compared to just and hour and a half from Ancona, there was an early flight on Monday and an evening flight on Thursday meaning we could look round the area on the Monday afternoon, do two full days of visits to properties on Tuesday and Wednesday and then, hopefully, revisit any property we liked on the Thursday morning before heading back to Ciampino in the afternoon. But we would have to plan it out with military precision which is not, as we might have guessed, a concept that works terribly well in Italy!

While Chris got on with finding properties and agents, I began learning Italian. I've been doing business in Spain for the last ten years and, even though it is in a holiday area where English is widely spoken and all our staff are fluent in English, I have still found it useful to be able to hold a conversation in Spanish and to read documents in the language too. In Italy, I felt it would be more than helpful because very few people (even in restaurants and other businesses catering for tourists) speak English. And it's not just a practical matter, as I was to find; just being able to have some form of conversation with people, however haltingly, helps build relationships and relationships are fundamental to doing business and making agreements. I enjoy learning new languages anyway and had already found that my Spanish was a good help with my first steps in Italian (although, as always, you have to beware the many false friends that lurk within related languages.)

With Spanish, I had gone for one to one private lessons and then used the Michel Thomas "Advanced Spanish" CDs to improve my capabilities. But now I did not have time to do once a week classes and the level of work needed would have meant spending a fortune on the lessons. So this time I decided to go electronic from the start. I bought the BBC Active Italian for beginners CD and book set but didn't really get on with it. Fortunately, I was able to pick up the Michel Thomas Italian Foundation Course (8 CDs plus revision) in Costco at well under half price. For many weeks I was almost never seen without my Ipod headphones and muttering Italian responses sotto voce. Thomas's method is, I have to say, a bit odd and you have to get past this funny rambling old man (he must have been in his eighties when he made the CDs and died recently at over 90). But, for me, they work really well and I have gone on to buy the Advanced, Language Builder and Vocabulary courses too. (If you're thinking about doing the same, be warned that the Vocab course was done after Thomas's death by an American woman who I personally find it almost impossible to listen to.) I also try to tune in my ear for the language by listening to RaiNews 24 over the web. Listening to news programmes is great because you often know or can guess what the subject is and also the pictures help a lot (just like young children use picture books when they are beginning to read).