John Laughland

There’s no place like home

John Laughland says that his Italian dream has gone sour

When we said we were thinking of moving to Urbino, our friends ooh-ed and aah-ed with envy. Urbino is a perfectly preserved mediaeval and Renaissance fortified town which sits on a hill in the Italian Marches commanding spectacular views over the surrounding fields and valleys. Its layout has hardly changed since the day when Duke Federico of Montefeltro posed for his portrait by Piero della Francesca, as there is no urban sprawl outside the old city walls. The etching studio where my wife once worked is housed in the magnificent cloister of a former convent, from which you can see the charming village church of San Bernardino nestling in the green hills beyond. Church bells ring all day long; the city’s pinkish brick glows in the sunlight; the air is fresh; and as you climb the city’s steep alleyways you have a strange sense of living on the top of the world.

The first thing you find out when trying to buy property in Italy is that you cannot find anything out. Just as train timetables and the existence of bus routes are a jealously guarded national secret (although the Italian transport system is in reality supremely efficient and cheap) so Italian estate agents seem to hate advertising their properties. Information can be coaxed out of them only in situ and only with considerable persistence. If you are lucky, there might be an out-of-focus photograph of a house for sale in the shop window; in most cases, however, when you ask an Italian house agent what he has on the market, he rummages through a heavily thumbed cheap school exercise book, or little slips of paper, to consult cryptic notes in ballpoint pen before grudgingly letting on.

But whereas any traveller who presents himself at an Italian station, confused and in ignorance of the next departure, will experience a moving epiphany as all mysteries are revealed with generous sweeps of the arms by kindly transport officials dressed in impossibly stylish uniforms, Italian estate agents are as taciturn as Yorkshiremen on a rainy afternoon when it comes to describing their properties.

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