VILLA IS MORE THAN A HOUSE
Life — and death — interrupt plans for weekend place
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon immortalized in his 1980 song, Beautiful Boy.
That is the story of my house in Italy, which my husband, Mick, and I bought 23 years ago in the little town of Trevignano, just north of Rome.
We were in our early 40s; it was a long-term project — build a house on the land, with its breathtaking view, and make it our weekend place — and later our retirement home.
We were living in Rome with our two young sons, both of us working, dreaming we would stay. We had met and fallen in love in Rome after all — me Italian-American, Mick British — and started our careers there.
But life had other plans for us. My Italian parents grew elderly and frail in the Washington area, where I grew up after they emigrated from southern Italy when I was age three. They needed me.
And it seemed better for our boys to grow up in the States. So just two years after buying the land, we left, and moved to Arlington, Va., to work in Washington and raise our sons. Through it all, we pressed ahead with our Italian home — just a concrete shell when we left.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2013.
Mick and I were now looking forward to retirement. He’d had a 33-year career as a news cameraman, the last two years in the Middle East, which was growing more dangerous by the assignment. I had taken a buyout from my newspaper job. Patrick and Ben were adults and working in Europe.
Mick was talking about retiring the following spring. At 61, he’d had enough of breaking news — and the Middle East’s intractable problems.
It was the day before Italy ’s midsummer Ferragosto holiday, Aug. 15, when our small Italian town puts on a midnight fireworks show on the lake. I love being in Trevignano then, and hosting dinners on my terrace overlooking the lake before the fireworks start.
Mick was working that August on assignment in Egypt, having just spent his two-week summer vacation at the house in late July. Both Patrick, who was living and working in Rome, and Ben, who was living and working in London, had joined us at the house with their girlfriends.
I stayed on in Trevignano to ready our Italian place for our big move there in less than a year. We needed more closets, more storage space. It had always just been a vacation house, never a family home. There was work to be done.
But life had other plans for us then, too.
Mick was shot and killed by an Egyptian military sniper in Cairo while filming Egyptian demonstrators protesting against the regime — the day before Ferragosto.
My house in Italy has shaped the story of our life as a family, while also serving as its backdrop.
When we left Rome for Washington in the winter of 1997, we could have sold our Italian house — what there was of it — abandoning the project like our life in Italy.
But houses can be difficult to abandon, besides the all-important money and time invested. They’re often the stuff of dreams.
I’m a first-generation Italian immigrant to the U.S., born in Naples of Italian parents, with a love for Italy borne over many childhood summers spent with my grandparents and cousins. Although I was growing up in the U.S., my father especially never let me forget that we were Italians; we spoke only Italian at home.
So having a house in Italy was about my parents, my grandparents, my cousins and those idyllic summer weeks of my childhood, the beautiful Italian my family spoke, the rich traditions I got to live with them, at least during the summer.
And then later, I met Mick there, my British husband who also loved Italy, and we started our life together in Rome.
So, no, we couldn’t really give up on it.
We built the house over the next few years, going with our by-then teenage boys, every summer from Washington, D.C., for the standard two weeks a year, taking almost seven years to build and furnish it. The boys were in high school when we were finally done.
That’s the other thing with second homes. You need to go to them a lot, even if they ’re far. That’s what makes the memories — and forges the links.
Surprisingly, both boys studied Italian at college. They had a memorable summer in Florence together, invited friends and girlfriends to the house and went on a couple of European summer college trips that involved stints in Trevignano.
Patrick decided to combine his two majors — business and Italian — with an internship at a Rome accounting firm. He ended up staying in Rome, working there for four years — his first professional job. He met his wife, an Italian colleague, at work. When they were courting, Patrick would take her to the house in Trevignano on weekends; she fell in love with our house — and the area — as they got to know each other.
But with Mick gone, what to do now with the house that he and I built?
I decided one project I could undertake to give me some needed focus was the pool that Mick had been hoping we could put in once we retired.
I moved all our furniture there, Mick’s favourite chair now in our big kitchen. I spent some devastatingly lonely weeks there, awash in painful memories.
Meanwhile, yet again, life had other plans for us.
I decided to stay in London, though, since I’ve met a kind British man who loves my Italian house, too. And he goes there with me in the summer. I don’t think I can ever sell the place.
However, the boys — now in their early 30s and married — opted to go back to the United States. I can hope that the house will always remain a draw to them as they build their own families.