Not a Tourist
On living real life in Florence — taxes, stolen bikes, and all.
We are completing our tenth year in Italy this summer. People sometimes imagine my life in Florence as a kind of extended holiday.
I assure you, we are not on an extended holiday.
We live under a long-term lease. Our kids go to Italian schools and walk there on their own: five minutes for Eleanor if she’s walking slow, fifteen minutes for Victor if he’s walking fast. (This is usually the case because he’s running late in the morning and starving on the way home.) Jason and I bike or walk to work, a four-minute bike ride or fifteen-minute walk or quick bus ride two stops away.
We both work locally. Jason has a hybrid contract but I no longer have US income.
We are enrolled in the Italian healthcare system, which means we have Italian doctors. Dental care is not included in Italian healthcare so we pay privately for our hygiene and orthodontia.
We pay Italian taxes twice a year, in June and November. We each pay a commercialista to prepare them, because nobody in Italy files their own taxes. Nobody. It’s so complicated and the deadlines are relentless.
I maintain a partita IVA to work as an independent contractor. My freelance work is strictly regulated regarding what type of work I’m allowed to accept and be remunerated for.
Nobody in Italy files their own taxes. Nobody.
It’s so complicated and the deadlines are relentless.
We keep Italian bank accounts. We pay for many things via bonifico (bank wire). I haven’t written a check since 2016. I don’t even know if I can obtain paper checks for my Italian account. I’ve never asked because I’ve never needed them because no one uses them.
We grocery shop at COOP and Iper COOP. I pick up basic clothes and personal care and the occasional gift at UPIM. I read Italian news. I speak Italian every day with everyone outside the home: colleagues, doctors, the woman at the grocery store, my kids’ teachers at parent-teacher conferences (which are, to say the least, interesting).
I have a monthly bus pass that is connected to my tessera sanitaria, and a bus app on my phone that I can successfully navigate roughly sixty percent of the time. This is also very Italian.
I am currently on my sixth bicycle. Three bikes were stolen (extremely Italian),1 one I gave away, one I sold. The math is fuzzy but the point stands.
I am currently on my sixth bicycle. I paid for each one.
We live in the UNESCO World Heritage Center, inside the ZTL, surrounded by tour groups. We are not one of them.
I also want to address something specific: the assumption that living in Europe means hopping around Europe at leisure. It does not, not for us. The only time we have flown within Europe as a family for a holiday was last August, when we flew to Finland — my fourth trip there, thanks to family ties. My maternal grandparents both spoke Finnish as a first language, and over the years I’ve been fortunate to reconnect with cousins and extended family in Helsinki, Kuusamo, Posio, and Rovaniemi.
When we travel within Europe as a family, we always drive to border countries. We’ve been to Slovenia twice and Austria once. We’ve gone to France six or seven times in the car, often to the French Alps in summer to escape the Florentine heat in a situation we found affordable. Two winters we went to Antibes for Capodanno when Jason found a rental. We went to Turin last year — train tickets on Italo, Florence to Turin and back, something like fifteen euros a person, which is insane when you consider what a taxi to Santa Maria Novella costs.
When we travel within Europe as a family, we always drive to border countries.
I took Victor to Spain twice for language enrichment trips, once in sixth grade and again in seventh. I travel about twice a year for my work with the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, helping coordinate spiritual and discernment retreats across the diocese. (Destinations: Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Rome, Salzburg.) Those are my European travels.
I would love unlimited time and money. I would love to quietly visit more places. But we are two working parents with kids at home, and we have the flexibility of exactly that: two working parents with kids at home. Which is to say, limited at best.
So: we am not living a nonstop tourist dream. We are living a Europe-forward, mostly Italian, transnational life, transplanted from the US to Italy. We are all still American. We all still have only American passports. (Watch this space!) We all speak fluent Italian. We are locally integrated. We pay taxes, ride bikes, argue with apps, and show up to parent-teacher conferences. We are not tourists. We are four of the 35,000 full-time residents left in Firenze centro.
I am living a transnational life, transplanted from the US to Italy.
Our in-house scientist Victor has observed that bikes seem to be much more frequently stolen on the eve of a national festa, and indeed, Rossa was stolen on the eve of the Immacolata in 2016 and Olivia on Easter vigil 2019, both from the street corner outside our home. Nero was stolen in 2022 the week after I had Covid and I forgot to chain him up in Piazza San Marco. Gabriella was given away in 2018 or 2019 to a college student. And Hairspray was sold to Lisa for 50 euros in 2021. I now have Cappuccina (brown and white), which I purchased in 2022. A four-year record. But I still leave Cappuccina at Jason’s office if it’s a holiday eve or I’m taking even a quick a trip out of town.
One of the reasons we left Italy was the Byzantine tax system. Here in the Netherlands, they've tried (and pretty much succeeded) to make paying taxes as easy as possible, and we do that online. The slogan of the Belastingdienst (Tax Authority) is "Leuker kunnen we het niet maken, wel makkelijker" (We can't make it more fun, but we can make it easier).
And as for the bikes, they steal them here too, but the police sometimes manages to find them. They have a Stolen Bicicles Register and, apparently, "48% of stolen bikes are recovered by law enforcement, only about 5% actually make it back to their original owners."
Ten years is a pretty substantial milestone! And if my experience is any measure, you'll be celebrating 20 years in what feels like around 18 months!
A question: if you made a Venn Diagram that included a circle encompassing what you expected your life in Italy to be like a decade ago, and another with what it's actually like now, how much overlap would there be? A third? Half? A tenth?