Women Who Travel Podcast: A Life-Changing Move to Italy

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03-04-2025

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Ever fantasized about giving up the grind and starting a new life in Italy? This week, we hear from a listener who did just that, swapping her life in San Francisco for the rolling hills of Piedmont, where she renovated a 300-year-old farmhouse' and built a new life—Under the Tuscan Sun-style. Listen to the episode to find out how Barbara Boyle, who penned the experience in her new memoir Pinch Me, pulled the move off and found joy and community in a small Italian town.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. It's Lale Arikoglu and this is Women Who Travel. Today, we have one of our listener dispatchers from around the world. It's the story of how Barbara Boyle, an advertising executive, does the whole under the Tuscan sun thing and retires and moves to Italy. She doesn't reckon with the challenges ahead, but well, she's going to reveal it all to us. And she also describes her love affair with a remote town in her book that was recently published called Pinch Me.
Barbara Boyle: This story isn't like a handbook for how people should move to the Piedmont and buy an old house and fix it up because that was our story. The story is more, if you have a dream, be open to it, listen, kind of tiptoe into it. Follow your heart. Here's my story. Basically, I'll tell you today about how we found it, what we love, and why we are so in love with this special place. We found it when we were on our honeymoon. It was a second marriage, so we weren't children. We got married in December and by March, we decided we should take a two-week honeymoon. We picked a really nice place in the south of France, more Burgundy than Provence, but I've always loved that area. That was beautiful. And then we drove over to Northern Italy, mostly because it was convenient to where we were going in and out of, which was Geneva, not because I had a clue about what I was doing.
So as we come driving from gorgeous, lush, elegant France into Northern Italy, it was cold, it was rainy, it was March 31st. It was getting snowy, foggy, and I'm thinking, "Oh dear, what have I done? This may not be the end to my honeymoon that I'd hoped for." And it was sort of flat. There was a lot of manufacturing. There were freeways. It just wasn't the charming honeymoon I pictured, until the last 45 minutes to an hour. And suddenly the whole topography changed. The landscape changed, and little hills were appearing, and on the hills were little castles and churches and stone buildings, terracotta tiles.
So the weather's getting worse and worse. We're driving finally up the hill to Montfort, to Alba, to this hotel I had seen online. And as we're going, following the GPS up this tiny little hill on a winding cobblestone road, I kept thinking, "Oh my gosh, where are we? We're lost." I thought we might slide down the hill at any time. But by the time we got to the top, suddenly right before me is this just beautiful, charming hotel, like an old house, clearly a restaurant off to the side and the most lovely woman greeting us. So we go up these beautiful old stairs and check into this just charming room with velvet curtains and high ceilings with frescoes and a big comfortable bed, old furniture, a bottle of wine waiting for us and three little candies. And I just said, "Okay, if we never leave the hotel room for the next week, it'll still be a good honeymoon. I'm okay with this."
So we rested a bit and went downstairs to check in with Monica and said, "Okay, we're feeling a bit better. Would it be okay if we just eat dinner in the hotel?" And she says, "Oh, we serve breakfast and lunch, but unfortunately not dinner. But there is one restaurant, it's not far, less than a kilometer, right down the hill." Well down the hill, were nothing but icy sleety, snowy cobblestones. I'm in my slippery leather shoes thinking, trying to picture me walking down there, and I thought, "Well, this might not work. Is there a taxi?" And she says, "Yes, but he's in Milan." And then she says, "But that's okay. I'll take you." So she locks up the hotel. We get in the back of her little Fiat, we have this amazing dinner, and there was one other table of people in the whole restaurant.
And as dinner's winding down, we had a couple glasses of wine and just a delicious meal, felt very nourished. I started worrying about how we were going to get back up the hill, when the chef/owner came to us and said, "Okay, I'll take you home. I promised Monica that I would." So he drives us back up to our hotel, just that kind of welcome warmth, a sense of family from the get go. So we just knew we had found something really special. We were there five days and when we left, we said, "We really need to come back." When we went back to San Francisco, it just kept calling to us. It was really love at first sight, but you don't know if it's just a crush or is it true love.
Lale Arikoglu: How Barbara and her husband put down roots in Piedmont After this short break. You're back with Women Who Travel and this dispatch from Northern Italy.
Barbara Boyle: So after we left, after our first visit, you get back into your world, your life, and we're going about newly married, figuring out our very nice life in San Francisco. But we kept wanting to go back and wanting to go back. So 18 months later, we went back, we looked at a couple other regions in the same general area, but just there was something about this town. We had a realtor taking us around for a couple of days, but everything we saw was too far out or just not quite right. And the day before we were going to leave, he says, "You know what? There's this other house you might like." He says, "Are you okay about a fixer upper?" We said, "Sure." I had been in advertising for all those years. So I have a pretty good imagination. And my husband was a real estate developer, so he is okay with taking something old and fixing it up.
And we always thought it would be a fun project for our sort of semi-retirement. And we go down this lovely driveway and pull in front of this house that was just beautiful, lots of shutters, all stone and brick and tile, nice driveway. And I said, "Wow," because it was a very modest price. I mean the price of a good car in America these days. I said, "Wow, this is the house?" And he says, "Oh no, the house is over there." And we look behind us and there's this falling down, rickety, but beautiful stone barn, rusted tools, weeds, mud, but it had an aura about it. It was sort of a demure and proud these two or three stories because it was a barn with a home attached to it.
And he goes, "There's the house." And actually, I said to my husband at that time, "This is it." And he says, "What do you mean this is it? We haven't even seen it." But I was sitting outside waiting to go in and just sitting perched on that little level, looking out at the Alps and the valleys between here and there, the hills, the vineyards, the birds everywhere were chattering away. And I just said, "I could spend the rest of my days, right here in this little place I'm sitting and I'd be perfectly happy."
He says, "Let's go check it out." So I followed him eventually, but he then fell in love as he walked into this old literally ruin of a falling down barn and building and down four or five, very steep, kind of goofy, dark stairs was this gorgeous big cantina where they were making wine and had all these wine barrels and wine bottles, and he was just enchanted with that. He says, "Oh, that would be a great place for a winery, and we could have dinner down there." Which that one I could not imagine, but he was smitten with that. I was smitten with the view and the town, and we said, "Okay, this is it."
What I find interesting about a 300-year-old structure is there is a lot of history. I learned that the person who was selling the house had passed away, she was 98, and she had left the house to our next-door neighbors in her will because she didn't know who else to leave it to, so they were selling it, and they told us about her, her name was Emma and she was born in the house, lived her whole life there. So there are so many nights when I sit there on the couch and I'm looking at the layers of stone that go up to 30 feet or so in the living room.
Because we've removed the hayloft and you are looking up at this huge ceiling and you can picture what they were doing during the different wars. I just can imagine what their lives must have been and what their hopes were and dreams during the good times, maybe some of the leaner times with all the things we were going through as well. I imagine it wasn't all that different from their hopes and dreams. So I feel very close to her because I feel like when we first went into where she slept, there was this twin bed and this little crucifix on the wall and a picture of the Pope in her bedroom drawer and a rosary, and that's very intimate, very personal. So I feel like we're now the shepherds of the house for this decade or two, and we want to do it with respect.
We didn't leap in with both feet immediately. We took our time and really were open to what it could be. And there were issues. We didn't realize it, but in the end, it turns out the person handling the real estate was skimming money from us, and that was a heartbreak. But in the end, he found us a house we would've never otherwise found, and it's still very reasonable by the real estate standards in America. So it was a good thing. You just have to be aware that there are people, it was only one really who took advantage of us, I think, to a degree.
You have to learn what you're doing. You ask questions, you get advice. We had lawyers, we have accountants, we have people that we check in with, friends and neighbors and study the laws. It's a very bureaucratic country, and there's a thousand signatures for every thing you do and a different contract for the roof and for the floor and for the windows, all these different contracts and a lot of paperwork. But in the end, we started construction and finished from an old barn to a really lovely house in 18 months and were able to live there.
It's in the middle of nowhere and I liked the idea that if my husband wasn't home one night or something, my neighbors were not exactly shouting distance, but not far. There's a path between our homes. We go across our lawn and their vegetable garden and their lawn, and we're at their door, and they're the two nicest neighbors I've ever had. She's an ex-nurse, he's an ex-construction guy. So we have medical issues, they just, no problem, they take us where we need to go and help us. My husband has a project out in the yard and within two minutes, Biagia shows up and he's got a chainsaw and two more tractors to help him do it.
Part of what we fell in love with and what's just absolutely interwoven into the culture there is the food. It's extraordinary and it's extraordinary in its simplicity and its authenticity. Everyone has vegetable gardens and little orchards, and they all cook with fresh, natural, nearby and seasonal ingredients. Their cheeses are famous. They're quite incredible. Obviously Parmesan comes from Parma and that's nearby, but they have their own kind of creamy, smooth cheeses that are quite wonderful.
Their pasta is called plean, which means pinch, because you pinch them to hold the butter. Their butter, their creams, their milks, their ice creams, their yogurts are delicious. I'm just in awe of how they put their food together. It's a gastro tourism area for Europe, but it hasn't yet been discovered by most Americans, and even a lot of Europeans don't head for Piedmont immediately. They'll go to Rome, Tuscany, Florence, maybe Sicily now and Sardinia, but Piedmont is very special. And the little town we found, Monforte d'Alba, and then we moved into Roddino, which is a suburb of Monforte d'Alba, are both really tiny and just extraordinary. We're very happy there.
Lale Arikoglu: Sometimes you only realize how much a place means to you after facing a life-threatening setback, after this break. It's the 300-year-old renovated barn that's now home, even though Barbara's ties to San Francisco are still strong.
Barbara Boyle: The big surprise on this travel adventure came after we'd been living there full-time for a year and a half, almost two years. I just noticed I was tired all the time, but I'd just seen all my doctors, so I didn't think much of it. But I, one morning, found this little lump in my breast and I thought, "It feels like a lump." So I decided to have it checked out locally, and it took about three weeks for them to get back to me, which I found a little frustrating. And when they got back to me, in fact, it was cancer and it turned out to be a very lethal kind, they say. It was stage two, triple negative. Our son was in medical school at the time, and so we called him back home and said, "What do you think we should do?" And he says, "You need to go be treated where you have the most support."
And we realized that was San Francisco still. That's where we had doctors and where people would look after me if I had to undergo a whole year of treatment, which in fact I did. And it was a hard year. It wasn't as bad as it might've been. I was fortunate, but I did have surgery and five months of chemo and radiation. The whole time I'd go to bed at night, I wouldn't let myself think too much about Italy during the day or it would be too hard. But when I'd go to bed at night, usually around 8 o'clock, I'd pull the covers over my head and close my eyes and pretend I was in my bed in Italy and I could picture the stars above me being Italian stars. And I just fell off to sleep and it was a really soothing way to get through it. And I'm cancer free and have been now for seven years.
When I came back, it had never looked so beautiful. We'd been gone about eight or nine months and we pulled in. It was August and it was so green and lush and velvety. I said to my husband, "Was it always this beautiful?" And he says, "Yeah," but it looked especially beautiful to me. I just fell in the pool and laid there and said, "Okay, I'm alive. I'm in Italy. It's okay."
Our day-to-day life is very different from the states. It's wonderful, but very different. My husband decided out of the blue that he wanted to have a winery. He had never had anything like that in his life. And I said, "How do you intend to do this?" He says, "Oh, I bought a book." So he bought a book and he did it. He planted it. We got help from people, and this is his project, and it's actually turned out to be really pretty good wine. I'm shocked. And the sweetest thing is he calls it, it's a Barbera wine and he calls it, Barbera di Barbara, in honor of me. So how could I be anything but happy about that? And it is delicious. We make 100 bottles a year. We get to share it with friends. So it's a treat.
And my day is really spent slower and more purposefully because the town closes from 12 till three every day. So the only sensible thing to do then is to have lunch and take a nap, so I do that. In the morning, I take my walks through the rolling hills for an hour or so. We love shopping. We love going to the butcher or to the cheese place or to the weekly markets, which are huge big marketplaces. And you see your friends and you have coffee and plan your meals. We do have a small pool, so in the summer that keeps us cool and we have a giant yard. Everybody there has huge yards. And now we have a vegetable garden. We garden, we drink wine as watch the sun go down and have a delicious meal and pretty good.
The book that just came out is, Pinch Me, Waking Up in a 300-year-old Italian Farmhouse, but Pinch Me started as a blog and I figured as a book, I could just share my love of this beautiful land. There's a lot of people that we encounter these days saying, "Oh, you live in Italy, take me with you." A lot of people are feeling the divisiveness in our country right now, the conflicts and the frustration of the two sides that are at war here in America. And I would say if you feel the need really to pack up and go somewhere else, it's doable. I don't care if it's traveling to Piedmont or decided to become a painter or maybe making wine, something like that. Go for it. Try it. Don't leave your country completely. I'm an American still in my heart and always will be.
Lale Arikoglu: So do you have a memorable travel story or maybe there's a topic you'd really like us to pursue and dive into. If you do, please share it with us. Just write to [e-mail]. Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel. I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram @Lalehannah. Our engineer is Pran Bandi and special thanks to Jake Lummus for engineering support. Our show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. Jude Kampfner is our producer, Stephanie Kariuki, our executive producer and Chris Bannon is head of Condé Nast Global Audio.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler