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2 Dipping our toes in the Dolce Vita

It was our first trip to Le Marche. We’d never heard of the place before and still hesitated to say the name aloud. It sounded so foreign in our mouths. It was hard to believe that the ‘ch’ wasn’t pronounced as it is in ‘church’. Also, that ‘Le’ looked a bit more French than Italian to our unseasoned eye. So we felt we were making a mistake if we said it right, or we’d go the whole wrong hog and pronounce the region ‘Les Marchais’, which made it sound like a French triumphal march.

Most people still haven’t heard of Le Marche. If they have, it’s probably because they have seen an article in a Sunday paper entitled something like ‘Is Le Marche the New Tuscany?’ A question which only serves to underline the fact that it isn’t.

We were there because, in the course of conversation with old family friends Noddy and Graham, we’d mentioned our ‘new life’ plans as a sort of distant hypothetical project. But as a first step, we’d said, we were keen to explore a bit of Italy, starting from the imminent bank holiday weekend. Graham mentioned this place called ‘Le Marche’. I think he probably pronounced it lemarshay. He’d spent a lot of time in Croatia, which is just a nip across the Adriatic from the Italian swampy marshland, and he’d heard it was fabulous—‘like Tuscany but more of a secret’. He’d even acquired some little booklets about it. The booklets were full of photos of olive groves and vines and overcolourized photos of plates of food, like a 1970s cookbook. The text was really badly translated from the Italian. All of these facts we took as an excellent sign that it was indeed, unlike Tuscany, charmingly un-up-with-the-times.

Le Marche hadn’t exactly featured heavily in Jason’s olive oil research, but nonetheless the next day we booked some flights with Ryanair to a place called Ancona, which the ever-informative and ever-growing airline flight map assured us was the capital of this Le Marche. I think at the time they had four or five flights a week, all from London’s glistening Stansted Airport.

So it was that we came to be in Le Marche. Which for the record is pronounced ‘ley’ (like the end of ballet) ‘markay’.

When you arrive, the airport is just as you’d hope. One small runway and a cramped single-storey building by way of arrivals, departures, customs, airport shopping, all rolled into one. The look of it, in dusty sunshine, brought to mind one of those impermanent outpost airports constructed quickly for an unworthy war. When the flight disembarked, the one building became full to bursting for a few minutes, only to be returned to sleepy silence within an hour. We knew this because the only car rental place, despite being in an airport where the one daily international flight arrived at 1 p.m., was closed for lunch.

The good thing about being on holiday is that it doesn’t matter. We sat in the sunshine and had a delicious tiny coffee and a panino and, before we knew it, there was a smiley man with a tiny dog on his lap at the Hertz reservation desk.

Our little car took us north. We’d decided to follow our noses on this trip. Important as it was that Le Marche cut it on the olive-growing front, and that it produced good olive oil, we also wanted to make sure that we actually liked it. Against instinct, we were trying to approach the trip less as TV producers on a rigorous recce and rather as young hopefuls ready for some romance.

We both love the feeling of seaside places out of season and we spent a few hours kicking sand around in a place called Cattolica. We contemplated swimming but it was just a bit too nippy. We did find one gelateria unseasonaly open and couldn’t let the opportunity go to waste. I had half chocolate and half hazelnut and, upon one lick along the border separating them, was rushed straight to heaven.

Why is ice cream so much nicer in Italy? I mean, isn’t it just milk and then stuff that you can get anywhere like nuts and chocolate? Is it, like the coffee, something to do with having fancy machines that just do the job better? Or is there something they’re hiding? Because you go into one of those awful British or American places and the ice cream is just horrid by comparison—vulgar, crude, not even tasting of what it’s meant to. The Italians aren’t averse to the odd horrid flavour—a bright blue one named after the Smurfs that tastes of nothing on earth, at least nothing this side of Belgium—but at least it seems they’re choosing to do it, rather than doing it because they don’t know better.

Italian ice cream tastes so good it almost manages to convince you that it’s good for you. So, healthily nourished, we headed inland to the pretty little town of Urbino. Up winding roads and through unlikely positioned hilltop villages, access hasn’t been made easy and that’s partly why it still feels secret. But once you’re there, you vow to come again. It is like a miniaturized version of the Tuscan big boys—the Sienas and the Florences. Cobbled streets and spectacular cathedrals and art palaces all positioned in a setting that could be taken straight from the backdrop of a Renaissance portrait. Bar a few telephone lines, the landscape looks unchanged for half a millennium.

We struck lucky with a hostel to stay in—on a steep cobbled hill, a couple of doors away from the house where Raphael was born—it was cheap as chips and right in the middle of town. We got rid of our stuff and went wandering around, a cardiac exercise in itself given that no part of the town is on the flat. Everything seemed to be small—there was a tiny carwash for tiny Italian cars, a tiny petrol pump, it was hard to keep the word ‘cute’ from your mind. Then, within minutes, the whole town was suddenly awash with luminously dressed cyclists careering around every corner and we kept being offered free Red Bull by passing strangers with funny Red Bull hats on. Yes, it was the day of the Red Bull sponsored cycling race around town and we had arrived in time for the start of festivities, which it transpired would go on all night in the form of Euro rock in the main square.

So this was Le Marche, ancient and modern. And we decided we liked it. That night, our fate was sealed when we tried our first Le Marche olive oil, a delicate oil from a place called Pesaro, on a delicious plate of orecchiette which was simplicity itself. A glass of Verdicchio was the final piece in the puzzle. Le Marche it would be.

A few months later, we were en route to Le Marche for the second time, via London. It was one of those traditional Ryanair journeys which begins at an hour of the day that should really be called night. At 4.30-something you ask yourself whether it is really worth it and at 11 a.m. in Italy you answer yourself ‘yes’.

This trip had a different feel about it. It was more than just a holiday, filled with pleasant but aimless wanderings. It was greater than a vague sniffing out of an area. Things had moved on and somehow, without either of us really spelling it out, we knew we weren’t just dipping our toes any more. This trip was the first real step towards our new life.

Our plan was to find a house in an olive-friendly area, then find a nearby olive grove to buy afterwards. Secretly, I think we both had hopes of stumbling across a beautiful house positioned in the middle of a huge olive grove, but we knew that was a long shot.

We’d lined up an array of estate agents for the trip. Le Marche covers a pretty big area so we planned to hop from one part to another with a different ‘tour guide’ for each, hoping that way we’d learn more about how house buying works as well as getting to know the region.

Pretty much all of Le Marche is hilly—the views forming that curvaceousness that is the hallmark of the Italian countryside and that spawns fresh lovers every day. All of these deeply tilting hills are divvied up by the lines made by olive trees, often used as a marker of the border of one farm to the next. It all looked just like the romantic vision we all secretly nurture of a new life abroad.

First up on the estate agent front was a duo: Sandro, a suave Italian in an Audi, and his scatty German assistant, Valeria. We’d told them our plan about the olive grove so occasionally Valeria would excitedly say something like ‘This house has fifteen olive trees in the garden’, which only served to confirm that we’d never find house and grove together. The important thing, instead, was to make sure the area was suitable—which ruled out places too high (olive trees don’t like frost), places too near the coast, where the trees don’t tend to thrive, or any shady oak-filled valleys (obviously they need loads of sun).

Most of the houses we were shown ‘needed work’. That’s what the English buyer wants, we were told. But we weren’t sure we wanted trees growing through the middle of our living room, and some of the cracks dividing houses pretty much into two were frankly frightening. Prices varied enormously; the range we were shown started at 45,000 euros and went up to about 200,000 euros. Estimates for restoration at least doubled the price.

We saw about 20 houses that first day, fanatically photographing and documenting each one. Sandro turfed us out about 6 p.m., telling us to have a think and that he’d see us in the morning. He left us at a place called Hotel Ristorante Giardino in San Lorenzo in Campo, where he said the food was ‘rather good’.

Sandro is master of understatement. The food was exceptional. We ate one of the most fantastic meals we have ever had. When the waiter brought the menu, outlining delicious morsels of every kind of flesh, our hearts sank a little. Jason is a vegetarian and asked his daily question about the possibility of non-carnal options and the waiter looked slightly surprised. Oh no, we thought; please have something Jason can eat. But no, he was surprised because we hadn’t seen the vegetarian tasting menu at the back! A vegetarian tasting menu—with five courses of it—in the middle of Le Marche. We had to live here.

Sandro appeared at a leisurely nine-thirtyish the next morning as we muddled our way into the day through our food-and-wine hangovers. There followed many more houses and much more indecision. But today there was one house which lingered with us: Upupa, owned by a little bent lady called Pepita. It seemed to be the biggest house in the world, made up of at least four different chunks, each of which would probably have sufficed alone. It was half ‘done up’ in a deplorable style, which would have to be swiftly and expensively undone. It had a garden full of olive trees, a vegetable plot and 360 degree views, being perched on top of a hillock. The communal olive press was within walking distance and two minutes away was a sweet little town where we watched buxom Italian grandmothers cooing over a tiny baby that for some reason was in a box. But above all this, it felt like it could become our family home.

The sums, of course, didn’t quite add up. We spent the evening moving numbers around, increasing the hypothetical amount we’d sell our London flat for and decreasing the estimated restoration costs of our new house until it sort of worked. As to the restoration, we reckoned that in any case we could do it in different chunks as and when we had the money. Gradually, over the years, the house would become one unified whole. As we looked at the numbers and the estate agent handout of the house, our hearts raced with excitement and terror at the realization that we might really do this.

Another day brought two new estate agents. The first was a slightly shady seeming Englishman who’d lived in Le Marche for years and had a sort of freelance estate agent business. He had no office and we met him in a bar where he was sitting smoking a cigarette and wearing a cream-coloured linen jacket that made him look like he thought he was in the Raj. We didn’t feel enormous confidence but nonetheless our hearts bounced as we drove up to the first house he took us to. It was beautiful, with flowers growing all round it. Built of pale bricks, it looked to be in good condition, it had plenty of the little add-on bits giving interesting angles (J can’t stand big blocky square lumps of houses) and it came with a four-hectare chunk of land right by the house that looked perfect for growing olive trees. The house had fifteen bedrooms and two little outhouses. Better still, the price was a suspiciously reasonable 125,000 euros.

The catch, when it came, was an extraordinary one. It wasn’t that there was an abattoir next door or that they were about to build a new shoe factory at the bottom of the garden or anything so mundane. No, the catch was that if we bought it, we’d have to share the house with someone else.

Italian property law is, to our eyes at least, rather eccentric. When someone dies, a Napoleonic decree that still stands says that their property be left in proportion to their relatedness to any living relatives—so if you have three sons they get a third each; if you have one daughter she gets the lot. And if you have three sons, two cousins, five nephews, a niece and an ever-increasing count of grandchildren, you get a lawyer.

The effect of this is that there are lots and lots of farmhouses which lie abandoned because each has a family that never agrees what to do with it—one party wanting to sell up, another saying that selling would be a family betrayal, etc.—so the end effect is that nothing happens.

In the case of this lovely house, most of the owners had reached agreement but there was a sticky uncle who owned effectively a single room in the house which he under no circumstances wanted to sell. But he had been persuaded to let the rest of the sale go ahead.

‘But what would that mean?’ we asked. ‘Could he just come round any time and spend the day sitting in his room?’

‘He almost certainly won’t.’

‘Well, does he have his own key? To get to his bit, he’d need to use our front door, isn’t that a bit weird?’

‘Maybe you just need to adjust your thinking a bit,’ said Mr Linen. ‘Italy is a very relaxed place.’

It wasn’t hard to say goodbye to him.

Next up was the lovely Anna Paola in Serra de Conti, a pretty village slightly further north. Unlike Sandro and Mr Linen, her office was rather immaculate and she had a computer that did modern things like make projections of how houses would look once they were done up. After the essential coffees and perusal through her offerings on paper, we got in her car to start the day’s viewings. Her car had little stickers all over it in English saying things like ‘glove compartment’ and ‘vanity mirror’, apparently there to teach her as-yet pre-verbal child the importance of knowing English. Given that she didn’t speak much herself, this seemed a clear case of transference. She, too, showed us some lovely houses and our uncertainty grew. We saw one called Graziosa, which had such huge rosemary plants growing all around that the whole microclimate had the most delicious smell, evocative of Sunday roast. We tried to convince ourselves that it was big enough but knew in our hearts it wasn’t true.

We really wanted to buy a house from her! We trusted her, even if she told us things we didn’t want to hear about how restoration can cost twice as much as many people will tell you. It was probably because she told us things we didn’t want to hear that we trusted her. She also told us some interesting specific things, which was nice in a world of indecision and generalities; for example: the legal minimum ceiling height is 2 metres 70 centimetres; you can only extend existing windows vertically downwards and you can’t put any new windows in rural properties. She told us that the reason you see lots of houses with four odd pillars in a square or a beaten-up old metal framework in the garden is that they are marking the position of a former outhouse. Any outhouse can be automatically rebuilt without additional permission-seeking, to the same volume as the original—but if you take away the pillars you lose this right.

She showed us some lovely places but they were all just not quite right—a bit too small, a bit not in an olive-growing place, a bit too expensive. That evening, we hatched a plan to buy Graziosa, to do up the outbuilding first and then live in that as we set up our olive business and brought up (hopefully) a baby while we did the work to restore the main house. We went to sleep excited with this image—and with having a plan. But by morning the house had shrunk back to its true size, and there was no further mention of it.

One final day of house viewings; this time with Anna Paola’s sidekick Peter, a serious Swede with the longest fingers you’ve ever seen and that irritating Scandinavian habit of speaking five languages fluently. We saw a few more properties with him, had lunch in an honest workmen’s café where we were shocked to see that he drank wine at lunchtime, and went on to the two final places of the trip. One was just a bit bunkerish on the outside and a no-no, but as we drove to the last one we turned to each other to note a feeling we both had of familiarity. We wondered whether it was just that in seeing so many houses (about 40 by now) dotted all over the region we were actually getting to know the area quite well. But no, there was more to it than that. As we turned off the strada bianca and saw a familiar massive crack down the side of a pretty house next to a field of olive trees, we realized we had been shown this house before, by another estate agent! It was a disappointing way to end but also strangely reassuring in that things were coming full circle.

We said goodbye to all and prepared for our trip back to LA.

Back in LA, our thoughts kept returning to Upupa—the unfeasibly huge house we had unfeasibly fallen in love with, in all its madcap glory. At the distance given firstly by e-mail and secondly by being thousands of miles away in a city where the overriding philosophy is ‘If you want it, you damn well go out and get it’, we found ourselves composing an e-mail.

At first we played it slightly coy. There was some neighbouring land with lots of olive trees on it, which we would be interested in buying, too. If the agents could confirm whether there was a possibility of our buying this in addition to the house and its existing land, it would make our decision a good deal easier.

A few days later, an e-mail came back confirming that the owner was interested in discussing the possibility of our buying up to two hectares of land in addition to the house.

This was more than enough to puncture our coyness. Our next e-mail could only be described as…an offer! In our excitement we even forgot the usual etiquette of offering below the asking price and instead just girlishly sort of said ‘We want it!’ The asking price was 155,000 euros.

Our hearts skipped every time there was the ping of a new e-mail popping into the inbox. But strangely there was no word that day, or the next day, or the next. We sent another e-mail checking that our first had been received safely.

The next day came back the following reply. ‘The owner of the house is being rather naughtie and has increased the asking price, on the basis that she has someone interested in paying it. She now wants euros 206,500.00. We are a bit vexed that this has happened as you can well imagine, and wait to hear how you feel about it.’

Quite apart from the insult of the spelling of naughty, this was just a joke, especially given how much we would have to spend on doing up the house. And even more especially since in the meantime we’d learned that the house had been on the market for twenty years. May it long remain there.

That evening, over a consoling beer in the sunshine of our porch, we cheered ourselves up by booking tickets for our next trip back to Le Marche to see more houses. Even though Upupa wasn’t to be, there was no going back now.