CATCHING UP…THE YEAR WAS 2020. WHAT HAPPENED THEN? WHERE HAVE I BEEN?
Well, it’s been four years since our somewhat hurried relocation. This page is for my friends in an effort to compensate for my absence from personal correspondence and the so-called “social media” (ugh) that substitutes for correspondence in these times.
(ABOVE) A metaphor for 2020 for all of us!
ITALIAN VACATION: August, 2018. Rhonda and I attended a dinner and luxury auction at Filoli Gardens in Woodside, California. It was a spectacular evening, with proceeds going to the Ronald McDonald House in Palo Alto, the largest in the country. Dinner for 300 was in a huge greenhouse tent, and following dinner was an auction. We bid on an augmented tour for four to Northern Italy, including air fare, limousine ground transportation, and events: cooking school, wine tasting, and truffle hunting in Tuscany, three days in Bellagio on Lake Como, four days in Bologna, two days in Venice, and three days in Milan. We added our own trip to Florence. So, April 2019 found ourselves flying to Bologna from SFO on our trip, which turned out to be a combination of business (design Salone in Milan) and pleasure, seeing sights in all these places. While in Bologna, I noticed that Modena and Maranello, homes of Ferrari and Maserati (among other auto-related towns), were only a half-hour away by train from Bologna. I suggested to Rhonda that we visit these towns on a day trip, and, literally, within an hour we found ourselves in Modena at the Ferrari Museum and birthplace.
Long story short, as they say: a couple of days after returning home to Nor Cal, we changed our originally-planned retirement location from Cascais, Portugal (near Lisbon) to Modena, and I started to browse the Net, looking at real estate in the Modena vicinity. After browsing roughly 850 properties in four months that seemed suitable on screen, I had narrowed things down to eight candidates in our price range, locating a competent agent in the area, and finding an Italian mortgage broker to handle the transactions.
We booked flights for mid-January, 2020, and flew over with the intention of securing a property on a ten-day schedule. Two days before we were to leave, we got a call from our agent telling us that six of the eight properties had been sold—an unusual thing for Italy, where the purchase of real estate is usually a very slow process, and none of the properties were shown on the Web to be in escrow or under contract. Disappointed at all the wasted work, we told the agent to find us some comparable properties, which she did promptly.
We flew over to Italy, and looked at different homes for three days. What we saw was not really what we had hoped to find, but gave us a good background on how the “average” Italian family lives. On the third day, we had become somewhat disillusioned. There were really no solid houses on which we agreed, and we had only two properties left to inspect—a 14th century farmhouse with some land that had been beautifully renovated, and a strange listing for an industrial loft that had no photos of the building itself, but details of a room or two and a vague description of features. It was mysterious and intriguing, so we scheduled it for the morning, and left the farmhouse for last. The next morning, after viewing this odd duck of a property, we cancelled our visit to the farmhouse, and decided to make on offer on the converted loft. Here’s why:
OUR NEW HOME: We walked into the building and immediately knew that it would be perfect for us. The property was brick and stucco—wood is not used very much in Italian cities. We could immediately visualize where each piece of furniture in our two combined households would naturally fit. So this place was very solid and relatively “new”—built in 1970, but the oldest property on the block, the area was mostly built up with 5- and 7-story apartment buildings in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was the smallest building on the “very urban” street, as Rhonda characterized it, being only 2 stories tall. It had been converted from its former use as the headquarters of a small messenger service. There was a garage below ground level and offices on the first floor which had been repurposed as a residential unit, with a great room measuring 21’ X 57’ with a 10 ½’ ceiling. Off to one side of this large space were two bedrooms and two baths, one suite in each corner. The whole residential space was about 1600 square feet, and the underground garage was another 1200 square feet. I worked out that the residence would take some upgrading and the basement would have to be completely finished, but otherwise it would be perfect for us. All of the previous conversion work was about 20 years old, apparently architect-designed and using premium materials. The walls were mostly plaster over brick, as drywall is seldom used. Typical American “balloon” construction, using 2 X 4s and drywall or plaster, is not done here. PROOF: I could not find a claw hammer in any hardware store or home center (glad I brought a bunch!), though there were lots of tools for working brick and stone! These impressions convinced us that we’d found suitable housing, virtually on the spot, so with our flight date fast approaching and nothing but disappointments so far on this brief trip, we decided to make an offer.
We went back to our hotel, excited and ready to write things up. Within an hour of our arrival, we received a call from our agent informing us that the seller had dropped the price by 30%, actually well below our proposed offer. He apparently knew that he had a live customer and did not want to lose us. We wrote up the offer, opened a bank account, applied for and received our Italian “Codice Fiscale”—their equivalent of the USA Social Security number, without which no business can be transacted, and found a Notaio to review the paperwork, all that afternoon. Two days later, after a lunch meeting with the seller at which we signed paperwork and with whom we left an earnest money check, we were on a plane back to SF.
However, the very day we returned to the USA, in the Uber from SFO to our homes in the East Bay, we heard on the radio that the area around our new city had just been shut down entirely, due to a huge number of COVID cases and many fatalities. We thought: just one day prior, we had been freely circulating and walking down crowded streets in Bologna which had been closed to traffic, as they were every Friday evening, with restaurants spilling out onto the street and everybody in great spirits, partying, drinking, singing, eating street food, and generally having a good time. Little did anyone know what awaited them within 12 hours. As for us, somehow we dodged a bullet, because we didn’t get sick. But we were concerned about our home purchase. When would it be finalized? We had a contract for closing on April 30th!
So, meanwhile, we proceeded with our own arrangements, acting on faith and hope. We sorted our belongings and began to pack. We had, in total, an inventory of 507 boxes, much of the combined furniture from our two houses, dishes, books, carpets, paintings and graphics, bookshelves, and the entire contents of my workshop: two table saws, three band saws, sanders, jointer, planer, thickness sander, table and overhead routers, my wheel buffer, and four deep drawers filled with hand power tools, my spray booth and bins and bins of guitar parts. I had six ongoing projects, a dozen cases, and sixty Pulstar light show guitars in four colors, cased and boxed. I scheduled two forty foot hi-cube containers for this stuff. Crates had to be built for our large paintings and glass coffee table. We gave Rhonda’s Mercedes to her sister and I donated 12 bicycles to a charity and sold another 10. I gave a dozen guitars to the local music school. Extra clothing went to charities. I booked an additional container to ship my two cars and one motorcycle to our new home. (This is a book-length tale in itself, as it turned out.)
On April 1st, our seller requested that we delay the closing until July 1st, as he couldn’t leave the house yet to view and acquire a replacement property. We agreed and amended the contract. Then, in July and in September, we amended twice more. Finally, on October 20, we granted our agent power of attorney and she signed the closing paperwork in the Notaio’ s office in Bologna. The paperwork folder on this transaction, due to Italian red tape, was about 1 ½” thick.