From our past vacations, we narrowed down our search to the Abruzzo & Molise regions. The terrain & climate are somewhat similar to Virginia. We love the mountains and the water so living in the hills, between them both, appealed to us. What isn’t there to love? The food is always good (well more like amazing), views to die for, the people capture your heart and living can be very affordable. And also, a biggy – half my family is from San Salvo, Abruzzo, which is just on the line between Abruzzo and Molise. And actually prior to 1963, Molise was a part of Abruzzo.

Now that we had sold our house here in VA, I had to make a conscious effort to locate some prospects. John and I didn’t want to buy quite yet as our nest egg needed to grow a bit more. Our plans were to rent for about 5-10 years then ‘possibly’ buy. We wanted to live in a few different places around Abruzzo and Molise to figure out our permanent home. We were and still are hesitant to buy at our age (mid 60s) with the amount of resources we have, knowing there will be maintenance, taxes, upgrades, etc. needed.

I started looking at all the real estate sites available, both on Google and Google.it. I didn’t find too many houses for rent year-round within our price range or with our requirements. We have two very large Labrador Retrievers and both them and us are very use to being outdoors with loads of room to move. There are many great houses on the market today at very enticing prices, but we aren’t in the market….yet.

When I contacted real estate agents, some said they just didn’t deal with rentals. I did find rentals in other regions fitting the bill, but seemed to struggle with Abruzzo & Molise.  I then found out that property owners have some additional taxes for renting homes long term. You can read about it here at Gate-away.com. (Toward the bottom of the article) Also, noted by a good Italian friend of mine, ‘extra’ homes were parceled out to relatives. Now I did find a lot of apartments along the beach for rent, but detached houses habitable in the hills… not a lot right off. But remember, we weren’t able to put an extensive amount of time into searching and just may not have looked in the right places or asked the right people.

Vacation/holiday homes are another story, many to find on Airbnb, VRBO, etc. I started writing to the managers/owners of houses that I thought we may be able to afford with a long term rental discount. You will find that many of the vacation home owners will rent from October/November through April (their off-season) at deep discounts. If we could find a place for 6 months, we could then make an all-out search for a year or more lease in the region. And it worked. I got a number of good responses, narrowed down the ones I wanted us to see, and we proceeded to do so during our two week vacation. A bonus on doing these off-season rentals is, even though the rent may be a bit higher than a year-round, it can be all-inclusive; wifi, garbage, utilities (maybe a surcharge for extra heating during the cold months), furnished, etc.

We finally narrowed the search down to one house near Citta San’Angelo; a lovely holiday house with a stunning valley view. There was plenty of room for our dogs, nicely furnished and amenities and services galore. The foil in this was those services and amenities ( shopping, doctor & vet offices, etc) were just a bit too close to us. I’m talking shopping, shopping and more shopping, which I’m not crazy about.  John and I are country folk. Traffic makes us cringe. Too much development is claustrophobic to us. So we went back to the property managers and asked “Do you have anything a bit further out in the country”? And yes, they had two properties of interest. One was another holiday rental for the off-season. It was actually a bit too much for us, good price, but large house with pool. We don’t need all of that now in our lives. The other was a year round rental! Finally! Unfurnished and just languishing for someone to move in and give it some tender loving care.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself a bit here. After we looked at the holiday house near Citta San’Angelo, we headed south to Molise for our week vacation in Palata. We had rented a lovely townhouse in this small hill town. It turned out that our property manager there was also a real estate agent, who proceeded to show us many rentals. One in particular caught our eye; a bit rundown, and small, but loads of character.

The view was lovely over the fields to the Adriatic Sea with the Tremiti Islands in the background. But we soon found out it was for sale.   It appeared that all the rentals were for sale. True, they may not sell for years the way the market is, but we just didn’t want to be in that situation. So we ended back up near Citta San’Angelo looking at the unfurnished house.

To be continued……