It all seemed so easy, at first. You enter Real Estate, Tuscany, and voila, or eccolo, as they’d say here, the name of an agency in Lucca appears. We’d never been to Lucca, but I remember our neighbor in Switzerland saying it was her favorite Tuscan city, so, we thought, let’s give it a try. It was hard to tell what the properties were really like from the photos, but the prices seemed reasonable.
We made an appointment with the agent for the day after Christmas. He had attached a map to his appointment confirmation e-mail but through the quirks of technology, I couldn’t open the attachment, so off we went without any idea of where the hotel he’d kindly booked for us would be. In pitch dark that evening, we circled the only remaining intact medieval/renaissance walled city, Lucca, time and again in search of our hotel.
The good thing is you can circle the city following the wall and not get lost in the outskirts, the bad thing was that it was in the outskirts we needed to be and we kept hitting the wall again. Exhausted, we finally found the hotel and collapsed, hoping this wasn’t the way the whole trip would go.
Promptly at 9 the next morning we were met in the lobby by a tall dapper Englishman, we talked about our needs and desires, hopes and wishes, for what we wanted to be our paradise, a dream home, for the rest of our lives, not a short order, and he took us to see several propertes.
The first, a romantic ruin it was called. Well, let’s just say that fortunately, it had had buildings on it at one time, because in much of Tuscany there is a moratorium on new building, which is good because there are so many beautiful abandoned properties, and we were assured that the labor still exists to put them back together, so, there had been buildings, and the stones themselves could be recuperated, and it was a steal, at $35,000. , but might prove to be more of a nightmare, so we decided we’d look at a few more.
The others we were shown just were’t quite what we were looking for and there were inconveniences like, the road to get there was so narrow it required at some points actually folding the car’s side mirrors in, a thoughtful feature on European cars, but not one that we would really want to ask visiting family and friends to use, so after 3 days of driving these narrow winding roads we went back to the hotel disappointed.
There was still one property to see, pretty far out and, by the way it had been described, that “if an atomic bomb went off nearby it would be still standing,” something about reinforced concrete, had had us illiminate it immediately. But, just maybe we should look at it. Our time was limited now, and the first time we asked the agent about it, he forgot to bring the photos, the second time, the photos he showed us didn’t show any concrete at all, just a typical 3 story stone building with red tile roof, and two stone barns. The asking price was more than our budget, but we decided to take a look anyway.
It was a delightful surprise. We fell in love immediately. Perched in the Chestnut Forest in the area north of Lucca known as the Garfagnana, on 20 acres of sunny hillside overlooking the mountains surrounding the Ania River, it looked pretty much like paradise. The concrete, there was some inside supporting the otherwise sturdy 18” thick stone walls, would all be concealed behind wall plaster or floor tiles, so what was originally almost the illiminating factor, was not an issue at all, in fact it was a major advantage as the massive stone structure had already been reinforced and in the renovation process this is a serious cost consideration.
On to the negotiations, the agent introduced us to the owner, we ran into some disconcerting news, the agent didn’t know if there was water on the property, there was, and plentiful, with it’s own mountain spring, we just had to get permission from another landowner to run a pipe across her property. In addition, there was a parcel right in the middle of the front field that belonged to this same neighbor and after seemingly hours of her smoking and talking about the history of her family, how she conceived all five of her children in the full moonlight while living in the house we were looking at, it was determined that she couldn’t build on the parcel anyway, so we could treat it as if it were ours, and, if we’d give her right of way and water if she ever needed it for her adjoining property, we could run our the pipe across her property.
We made an offer, including two concessions to the owner, that he could cut wood from our forest for the remainder of his life and, we added a small sum so that he could make an access road to get the wood down from the mountainside. He accepted. The agent wrote the “compromesso”, a promise to buy, by hand, we signed and made arrangements to make a 10% deposit, which, by the way, if we renegged on, we lost, but if the owner backed out, he would have to pay us back double. The agent made us feel comfortable with the owners integrity and very confident in the process.
All told, renovations on the main house and one barn took a little over a year but we were incredibly fortunate in finding local professionals either up to date in the latest technology, as were the electrician and plumber, or true artists, the mason and the cabinet maker.
20 acres on a sunny hillside with 3 solid stone buildings, our own chrystal clear mountain spring water, peace and quiet, all the wood we needed for our woodburning furnace, and sunshine for the solar collectors. We had yet to learn anything about the area. That was the second delightful surprise.
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