The Other Side Of The Coin

We always knew coming to Umbria carried with it the risk of it all going very wrong. And so it has.

With a very clear objective (as described in the title of this blog), the Umbrian house was never going to answer our needs at all, so in many ways, the decision to leave was very easy.

Of course, after months and months of negotiation and a substantial amount of money as well as the logistics of moving the family and all of our belongings from Australia, pulling out wasn't something we ever wanted to do, nor was it a decision we took lightly.

It's easy to slag off just how awful it was, but there is another side to this coin, and her name is Angelika - the lady who owns the house.

Angelika is an amazing lady - hardened to live in such conditions, and blessed with a heart of gold. We all became very fond of her; she welcomed us with open arms into her world, with a view to us turning the place around with her. She fed us many times, supplied us with wood for the fire, and lent us her snow chains to visit the shops, and ultimately escape the grip of the Umbrian hillside on our last day, telling us to hang them in the trees for her to find when walking Amelie later. Her endless ability to be resourceful was incredible, and every day, she laughed - often at us, but never in a nasty way - giving us hope that things would be ok. Her positive outlook on how the world should run was very inspiring and also remarkably infectious.

But the farm needed more than us to turn it around - it needs an army of young, enthusiastic idealists to take almost everything and pump it full of much needed life.

Almost everything needs some form of maintenance, from reaffixing garage doors correctly, to painting window frames and gates, sharpening the axe, and maintaining the lawns. Everywhere you look, it's falling apart, and many things (as we discovered) simply don't work anymore. It's the perfect backdrop to entice wealthy couples, in a truly beautiful part of the world, yet without some simple changes, the only sort of people that will be interested are either idiots like us, or hippies. And those sorts of people don't turn muck into brass for others.

Angelikas situation is almost exactly the same as those folk who inherit stately homes, but can't afford to run them - they end up living in the kitchen, which is cheap to heat, light, and furnish, and never manage to work out how to generate cash from the paying public.

It takes 'Country House Rescue' to save these people, but sadly for Angelika, we never went to Umbria to rescue her property - we went to build a better existence for ourselves. Plain and simple. Spending hours cutting wood to survive was never going to appeal to us, purely because it takes physical strength to do things like that, on top of the physical tasks we were meant to undertake - we expelled almost every ounce of energy over the 5 days on simply surviving, leaving none for each other or any of our projects. Had we signed up for a survival course, we'd have left very happy with our new skills, but we didn't go for that.

If the weather hadn't been so utterly bitter for us, maybe, just maybe we'd have stayed long enough to get the ball rolling on what the property absolutely must have to pull it from the brink of certain death as well as carry out our own projects and needs to ensure all parties were happy, but sadly, I fear this place will ultimately be boarded up, and abandoned like so many other beautiful old buildings all over Italy.

So, think you can last longer than us, and help Angelika out of the doldrums? Let me know (urgently!), we'd love to hook you up with her and Amelie, her beautiful dog.