live life fully

by: Gillian Longworth McGuire

I didn’t move to Italy so much as I stayed. 

I never planned on staying.

Unlike so many people who chase the Italian dream, Italy was never mine. There is no Italian in my heritage. My lineage is a map of elsewhere — English, Slovakian, Alsatian. I was an Anglophile who studied in London and a French speaker who worked in West Africa. I had been to Venice once as a teenager and Rome and Florence on one of those Eurail trips where you made decisions standing underneath the departures board to the clacking of the destinations looking for routes that didn’t need visas or a night in a hotel. 

For decades, Italy was simply another stop on an itinerary dictated by my husband Mark’s career with USAID and the United Nations. Another country after Niger and Zimbabwe that wasn’t Washington, D.C. or New York City — the places where I had always imagined my real life would eventually begin.

When Mark retired and the time came to move, we chose Los Angeles where our son Noah lives. We had lived in Rome for 20 years. But, as I started to prepare for the move I realized something. After all those years of wishing for the East Village or Dupont Circle, Italy was where I had actually spent the longest.

The temporary stop had become the anchor.

Why Venice? People always ask, expecting a poetic answer. The truth is I don’t have a good answer. Certainly not a poetic one.

Honestly, it just kind of happened. Maybe I was looking for a way to claim Italy on my own terms, rather than as a diplomat’s wife. One late night Google search for comprare casa Venezia revealed a surprising reality: the bewitching city on the water was within our reach.

The decision to stay in Italy was an easy one that came with clarity. Being able to stay in Italy legally was less straightforward. We slowly worked our way through the tangled process of converting our visa with the help of lawyers, well connected friends and the privilege of our many years with a UN agency. A long awaited green check on the Polizia di Stato website transformed us from expatriates to immigrants in an instant.

Finding our Venetian house

Venetian house hunting has its own specific vocabulary. It is another whole language to learn. Luckily Lorenzo, the engineer we hired, was fluent and happy to translate. I saw a damp house near the site of a 500-year-old miracle and another with a view of the Piazza San Marco bell tower that hid a worrying crack in its facade. I learned to count how many bridges stood between a front door and the grocery store, and how the brackish lagoon water seeps into the bricks, causing them to crumble from the inside out. We almost had one — a very pretty one, with a rio below where gondoliers and trash boats were the view. Just as we were about to make our offer it disappeared from the real estate app.

Eight agents. Fifty calls. Back to the beginning.

One afternoon, standing in the Museo Corer, I looked at Jacopo de’ Barbari’s 1500 woodblock map — the famous View of Venice. I spoke an audacious desire out loud to Mark: “I want to live in a house that is on this map.”

We found it on a gray February morning. The night before, I had been wearing meters of yellow silk, dancing next to Tiepolo frescoes at a Carnevale ball. The next morning, all of that glamour had evaporated. We only had a few hours before our train back to Rome, and exactly seven days before the movers would arrive to box up twenty years of our lives. We had temporary arrangements to sleep in both cities, but I didn’t want a place to stay.

I wanted a Venetian key that finally belonged to me.

Marco, not the real estate agent or the owner but someone the real estate agent dispatched, something that in hindsight really should have been a red flag, was waiting for us at the end of the street that ended at a rio and the wall of the Arsenale. The two young tenants grudgingly stepped aside while we looked for leaks on the ceiling and sniffed for mold (or bleach, a sure sign there is mold). The house was dated and plain, save for a shockingly electric-green living room and a steep staircase that was squeezed next to a low ceiling beam that everyone hit their head on. Lorenzo, who had said no to every other house, took a sip of coffee, ate a Carnivale frittella, and nodded, This is the one.

The Murky In-Between

Five weeks after that February morning we finally met the owner, Palmira and her husband Gino, a retired gondolier, in a tiny real estate office around the corner from the Rialto market. The negotiations took hours. Our banker in Rome confirmed the approval for a mortgage. The kitchen would stay, the septic tank would be installed, the cadastral plans could be easily approved by the comune. Mark wrote the biggest check of our lives and then we raced to catch the last train back to Rome. What could possibly go wrong? We asked.

The answer was: everything, and nothing. 

What followed was a 330-day odyssey.

There were fierce lawyers, tense WhatsApp messages, and many trips to a grim notary’s office on the other side of the Ponte della Libertà. We lived in a legally murky in-between for months. The gracious owner gave us the keys and let us live in the house that was still legally hers. Thanksgiving was celebrated with paper plates and our family’s line up of Christmas movies was watched. All four of us squeezed onto a mattress on the floor with a tiny tree from Ikea beside us. 

After five months there was a final trip across the lagoon to the grim notaio’s office on terraferma and the house at last belonged to us. We had already spent hours with Lorenzo drawing up plans for ripping up the entire downstairs to install underfloor heating and build a better staircase. Upstairs we were going to tear down a wall and swap out an enormous sliding glass door for a regular sized wooden door. Five or six weeks was the time estimate. We made plans for a long winter trip to Sicily and a few weeks in Rome to be away for the worst of it. I realize now that sounds naively optimistic.

The numerous delays in buying the house meant the team of builders and tilers and electricians and plumbers had all scattered across the Veneto to work on other jobs. By the time the band was back together again we had run out of money for other places to stay and we had no choice but to move into the dust. There was now a precarious open square outside of the bedroom door where the stairs used to be, an absolutely we mean it this time final deadline set by our moving company and non refundable airline tickets purchased by family and friends for one of the busiest weeks in Venice.

The Liberation of the Floor

The electric-green walls are gone. Mark painted over them in deep, bold colors. They now hold the photographs and paintings of our lifetime spent traveling. The real soul of the house is upstairs, under our feet. First we pulled up rooms full of plastic laminate floor boards. Next we chipped away leveling cement, centimeter by centimeter. It took almost two weeks. What we uncovered was that the entire upstairs had traditional Venetian terrazzo floors.

Today, that hodgepodge of ancient stone, marble and lime gleams beneath a zebra skin from Kenya and our carpets from Iran, the sahara and Zimbabwe. It is a room that finally reflects our life  — a collection of far-away places that has found a permanent place.  

The clacking of the departure board has been replaced by the morning call of spazzino! from the trash collector to let us know he is downstairs and the evening song of blackbirds from the back terrace. I have learned the neighbors names and have found a place around the corner that knows exactly how I like my spritz. I hang my sheets on le tagge, the sturdy lines that connect all of our houses. The funny little yellow house with two front doors next to the Arsenale is mine.

For the first time in my life, I am not looking for the next route. Venice is home.

You can follow Gillian on her Substack ‘Gillian Knows Best’ or on Instagram.