About me and life in Italy

I’m an American living in Italy with my husband and our two boys. I have degrees in both Psychology and Studio Art.  I worked for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, WPIC with ADHD children. I planned to focus on Art Therapy until I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan where I began to work as an illustrator. This was where I met my husband, an Italian composer who was completing his doctoral studies while teaching at the University of Michigan.

In 1999 we moved to New York City and in 2001 our  first son was born. Our son has a rare genetic disorder called BOR, responsible for his profound deafness. In the US he was misdiagnosed, his care was delayed and we soon entered into problems with healthcare coverage and daycare. He required three operations his first year, a fourth  his second year and at age three he finally received a cochlear implant in Italy. This allowed him to hear and develop language skills for the first time, opening up a whole new world of sounds.

I admit our first years in Italy were quite rough. I was a new mom living in a country that was unfamiliar and I couldn’t understand anyone. Imagine going from one doctor to the next without knowing what they were saying to you about your child. I remember when our son’s  speech therapist told us we had to choose one language. She explained that if we intended to stay in Italy we would need to speak Italian at home and that growing up in a bi-lingual family would be too challenging for our son. I suffered finding ways to communicate with him. I had this little voice in my head correcting me every time I spoke in English. We worked through it with perseverance like anything else in life and things became much better with time despite my initial limitations with the language.

There are many privileges of living in Italy and these things can be blinding at first. Once settled, I began to get pinched by the daily things nobody ever talked about nonetheless any guide-book or news source in English. Expats often limit their experience to food, wine, art, architecture, history and Italian culture. There is certainly another side of Italy that is quite discouraging such as corruption, small salaries, lack of employment, high cost of housing, wasted public spending, expensive utility bills, massive funding cuts in schools and social services, or Italy’s refusal of technology, web-based businesses. Finding (accurate) information on the internet is virtually impossible.  Italy is losing it’s culture and isolating itself from the rest of the world in many ways. Among the things mentioned above, our numbers and statistics are often similar or fall behind those of new EU countries and you have to ask yourself why? Italy is/could be a greater country but it’s suffering at this moment. Many Italians are fleeing to find better opportunities, those based on merit or special skills that mean very little here.

I often write about Italian life and the truth about living here. Despite its beauty, culture and lifestyle, Italy can be a difficult country to swallow! This is a place where I leave my thoughts, opinions and sometimes great tips on places I’ve been that will never reach a travel book.