Follow my new Italian life (and newsletter)

Friends, if you haven’t already heard: I moved to Italy!

I arrived yesterday, and my first 24ish hours in this place have been frustrating and beautiful and confusing and exhausting and invigorating—all at once.

I’m sharing updates about my new life as a queer American abroad over on a new newsletter called Finocchio. You can read my first post and subscribe here.

Here’s a little taste. I hope you’ll join me and keep reading.

I hesitate to say that moving to Italy is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but honestly, it’s pretty close.

I decided to uproot my life in Boston for a new one in Milan rather abruptly. In the beginning of the summer, I was preparing for another year in Boston: I had a lease I was planning to renew, and enrolled in a graduate degree program that would kick off in September. 

But then, in June, a handful of seemingly small nudges from the universe got me thinking seriously (again) about packing up my things and moving abroad.

• First, one of my best friends told me they were leaving their corporate job (and Brooklyn apartment) for a new life as a snowboard instructor. 
• Then, I had a conversation with a hiking friend who, upon learning that I was an American-Italian dual citizen, posed some version of the question I often get in response: “Then why are you still living here?”
• And finally, when I texted my roommate about renewing our lease, she informed me that she was actually thinking of leaving to find an apartment of her own.

Welp.

Suddenly, a strong aroma of transition was in the air. Why not embrace it?

I had been mulling the idea of moving to Italy, on and off, for years by this point. For the uninitiated: I grew up in New Jersey with grandparents who immigrated from Italy to America for a better life, and carried with them the traditions and recipes of their homeland. In other words, my childhood was steeped in red sauce and Catholic guilt.

In 2016, I was lucky enough to study abroad in Venice, where I spent four months living above the best pastry shop in the city (fight me!) and learning about the art history of that magical place. The experience inspired me to seek dual-citizenship, a six-year process that acquainted me with the sheer absurdity of Italian bureaucracy, and yielded my shiny red passport in 2022.

But I still didn’t pick up and move. I always managed to convince myself it was impractical, or somehow not the right time. And this moment, mere months before starting a three-year graduate program in Boston, was not exactly idealtiming, to be sure.

And yet. On one of the last days in June, I scheduled a call with a decision coach, hoping to finally get certainty on this vexing dilemma of mine: To move to Italy, or not? On some level, I think I had already made up my mind and was simply seeking permission. Sure enough, we both arrived at the logical conclusion that yes, absolutely, I should move to Italy.