I’ll freely admit it – I’m somewhat airy-fairy! I’m better at wishes than goals, more driven by my heart than my head, more intuitive than logical.
And so it fascinates me to watch how Fabri’s mind works. We’re polar opposites in this and yet complement each other perfectly. Where I’m emotional, a little chaotic and drawn to how things make me feel, he’s more analytical, considered, focused on detail.
We both retired in the summer of 2021, in time for our wedding at the end of July. Fabri changed his LinkedIn status to “Just retired, just married, just happy”. I loved that.
Retirement handed us an amazing gift – it allowed us to throw ourselves completely into the two greatest priorities of our life right then. For me that meant having the freedom to spend as much time as I could with mum as it became clear that her time left here with us was limited. Leaving my new husband behind most days as I headed off to the hospice was made easier by knowing that he had a very clear focus too. He was in charge of finding us a house!
This is where our different approaches became crystal clear and I became so grateful that Fabri does things the way he does. Left to me, house-hunting in Sicily would have meant arriving, renting, exploring, hopefully stumbling across some little gem or other. A romantic, Hollywood scenario was playing out in my head.
Thankfully Fabri left nothing to chance. While I was with mum he worked eight hours a day, every day, trawling websites, reading descriptions, finding houses. He then tracked down those houses on google maps, often without even having an address, using the sales photos to spot an unusual roof, a peculiar landmark or the pattern of the local roads to help him then locate the exact property on the map. He called owners, emailed estate agents, colour coded the houses according to how many of our boxes they ticked – size, proximity to a town, to the sea, original features, state of repair. He listened carefully to everything I felt I needed to make the transition from a lifetime in Ireland to a new life in Sicily, as smooth as possible.
By the time we arrived in Sicily he had appointments set up to see 34 houses in just 6 days! Of that 34, three very different properties captured our hearts.
The first was a villa 800m from the sea and the sand, in a coastal town called Pozzallo. While I had initially dismissed it when Fabri had first shown me the photos, it slowly but steadily climbed to pole position. Although it lacked the Sicilian charm of an ancient masseria or stone townhouse in a centro storico, it offered the possibility of a wonderful lifestyle. Work had been started on creating a B&B in the villa and there was plenty of space to have four guest bedrooms en-suite as well as generous and beautiful living quarters for ourselves. Also, as well as being a stone’s throw to the beach, it already had a pool and what could potentially be a beautiful garden once it was tamed. A short drive away was the little town of Pozzallo, although not quintessentially Sicilian in that Montalbano kind of way, it has a beautiful square on the sea in the shadow of an ancient tower, a boardwalk for the daily passagiata, lots of nice bars and restaurants and everything you could need for shopping and the like. It ticked a lot of boxes! We were sure instantly that this was a great option for us.
The second possibility was on a far smaller scale, a little town-house on three levels in a wonderful setting. From my very first glimpse of Modica, I was smitten. It’s built layer upon layer right into the rocky hillside in a way that is mesmerising. The houses seem to tumble higgledy-piggledy directly out of the rockface. “But how did they do that?”, I asked more than once. Like seven other towns in this part of Sicily, including Ragusa, Caltagirone and Noto, Modica is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, having been completely rebuilt following the earthquake of 1693. (To be honest, the fact that we were buying a house in an area once entirely wiped out by an earthquake was something I was trying not to dwell on!)
This house was special. I call them triangle houses although I’m sure there’s a better term than that. The side of the house presents the flattened tip of the triangle with a little road to the left and another to the right, meaning these houses have entrances from two different streets, often on two different levels. Tucked away in a cobblestoned corner in one of a thousand narrow, winding streets, this house was amazing for two reasons. Firstly it had a roof terrace. Outside space is one of my non-negotiable deal-breakers. Coming from Ireland, the idea of living somewhere where, by my standards, it’s summer nearly all year round, the idea of not being able to spend most of the year dining, reading, chatting, having breakfast outside, was not an option. The terrace made this little house worth its weight in gold. But there was more, the icing on the cake – the terrace had a view right across the centro storico – all those terracotta roof tiles, those charming ancient houses – it was like the set of a movie filmed in Sicily, only it was real life in Sicily. To the side of the terrace was the most important monument of Modica, il Castello dei Conti.. We had literally found the best little house in Modica and it was going for a song.
House number three was one that I’d found and pushed for because it was that very rare find, a large crumbling period house, at the best viewing point of Ragusa Ibla, that incredibly had a garden and a decent size one at that, on several levels. On purely emotional grounds this house had to be seen as it was hidden away on a tiny vicolo off Via 24 maggio. May 24th is my mum’s birthday and with her death so recent I was very drawn to the ‘sign’ that this house may just be the one for us. When I discovered the house itself was No 3, I was even more convinced, three having been the number of our family home, and mum’s pride and joy, for almost sixty years.
The owner was the one to show us around as the estate agent failed to show up to the original appointment and then vanished off the face of the earth. Giorgio was friendly and warm as he welcomed us and led us through the house which his wife had inherited. It was like turning back the clock! The house was once graceful and elegant but was now in a state of serious neglect. But what an adventure restoring this house would be. We noticed every original feature, every possible element to be saved, restored, reused. We bent low to go through tiny doors, squeezed up narrow staircases, stepped over years’ worth of items accumulated in a busy home, dodged cobwebs and hoped not to meet anything bigger than spiders. This one was the biggest challenge but might just reap the greatest rewards.
Three amazing options… each of them would bring its own adventure but although they were ranked – Beach House 1st, Triangle House 2nd and Ragusa Ibla 3rd – we felt we’d a great chance to make a good, good life for ourselves here in Sicily with any one of the three. Spirits were high and we were excited. Our new life lay somewhere in that shortlist. To be in Sicily was the sky, everything else was just weather…. and the weather in Sicily as it happens, is great!
