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Fall in love with the Tuesday version.

Anywhere in Italy is lovely on a Saturday in June. This free 11-page guide is about the other six days: the school run, the winter hours, the drive to a hospital, and how to choose the town where your life actually works.

Why this guide exists

We chose a house. We should have chosen a town first.

We found our dream farmhouse in the Valdichiana, signed for it, and lost it three weeks after moving in. The town was what we got right, almost by accident: the school, the bar, the neighbors who caught us when the plan broke. This guide turns that accident into a method.

Eleven pages, written from inside the life, on how to choose the place before the property. What's inside:

The Tuesday-in-February test for any town you love in June
The practical questions that decide daily life: schools, healthcare, winters, drives
How to shortlist areas from abroad before you ever fly
The signals a town will hold you when something goes wrong

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Frequently asked

Is the guide really free?

Yes. Drop your email above and it lands in your inbox a minute later. You will also get my field notes from time to time, and you can unsubscribe whenever you like and keep the guide.

Who is this guide for?

Anyone still deciding where in Italy to land: movers, buyers, and the realistic dreamers doing their homework early. If you have already found a property, the red-flag checklist is the deeper tool.

What makes you qualified to write it?

We did the search ourselves, chose partly on faith, and got lucky with our valley after being unlucky with our house. The guide is the version of that research I wish someone had handed us, tested by a year of actually living here.

Does it cover the whole of Italy?

The method works anywhere in the country. The examples lean Tuscan because that is where we live, but the questions, the tests, and the shortlisting process apply from Piedmont to Puglia.