Luca: Happy Saturday to our listeners. We’re back with the Magic Towns Italy podcast. I am Luca

Anna: and Anna. Today we are heading back to one of the regions that often gets overlooked in conversations about moving to Italy, but really shouldn’t.

Luca: People go to Italy, they imagine I’m gonna go to Tuscany, Rome. Milan maybe Puglia, but Le Marche is off the radar for most people. And one of the things we like to do at Magic Towns is look a little bit further.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, Le Marche have the sea, the mountains, beautiful towns, strong food culture. It’s a beautiful area. This area also feels more structured than most of Central Italy, and there are lots of towns that qualify for the [00:01:00] 7% tax scheme

Luca: of which you have spoken time and time and time again. You are the expert.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: So today we’re going to discuss the process of settling down in the Marche through the voice of our guest, Sara.

Sarah is originally from Australia and she moved to Italy after what she , described as a bit of a midlife crisis. She came to Italy to study Gastronomic Sciences. I didn’t even know it was a thing before hearing it from her. And then she made the decision to stay in Italy and to build something of our own.

Anna: Yeah. You know what I liked about Sara’s story is that it isn’t random at all. Like she didn’t fall in love with a postcard and jump, she approached the move very thoughtfully. She had a spreadsheet criteria, a town size in mind, access to airports, access to trains, and then eventually she found herself in Fabriano.

Luca: I thoroughly [00:02:00] approve of that approach as you can imagine. And the property angle in talking to Sarah is interesting too. It’s not like she came, she bought a small apartment and settled down, or she took on a big renovation project and added to, into her background in food, hospitality and walking internationally, and she imagined a creative and community-based future for the property she was fixing up.

Anna: Yeah. So in this episode you’ll hear about why she choose the town of Fabriano, what surprised her about moving inland rather than to the coast, how she found the buying and renovation process in Italy, and also what she sees in Le Marche as a place for food tourism reason and as lower, more intentional travel.

Luca: So without further ado, here is Anna with Sara on living in the Marche.

Sara: I am from Australia and i’ve been living in Melbourne for most of my life, but I’m from a [00:03:00] small country town about the same size as Fabriano. And I’ve worked in the food industry all of my life. I suppose the kind of reason that I came to Italy was a bit of a midlife crisis because I’m 50 and I applied for the University of Gastronomic Science.

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Sara: Um, which is located in Bra in Piemonte, and it’s a university that was started by Carlo Petrini from the Slow Food movement. I was accepted. So I’ve done a Master’s of Food Communication and Marketing, and I decided to stay.

Anna: And then from Bra you moved to Le Marche.

Sara: Yeah, so I really enjoyed that year in Bra. The trains were amazing. I could get to Milan really easily and just as a right size town I think as well. So when I did start my kind of like, oh, maybe I’ll just move somewhere in Italy, look around, I had quite a detailed spreads...