Tick-tick-ticking down

Status report with 11 weeks to go

Ciao a tutti!

A quick update from the launchpad.

Yesterday, my daughter toured her future college campus. We’d registered for the standard group walk-around, but an administrator recognized our surname and took us around personally. On the way home, we honked at a marathoner pal on a training run. Then, I bumped into some favorite neighbors at the post office. These mini-moments of smile-inducing serendipity are something that I treasure. I will certainly grieve this loss of community when I enter Verona as a complete unknown.

And this is precisely why I am buoyed by the letters, postcards, emails, calls, texts, and DMs! Grazie mille for your encouragement. Each night, I tend to fall asleep with demons of doubt only to awaken with morning hopefulness redolent as fresh bread. The headspace of hot yoga helps a lot, too. I’ve been dedicating each practice to something quite practical: guide Cecilia to a college plan that excites her ✅, light a clear path through the murky chaos of change ✅, help the whole family find peace and blessings even in separation 🟩 (working on that one).

Since you’ve been asking… some Virginia → Verona FAQs:

• Are they letting your wife stay more than 90 days?
  Yes, we’ve secured Amy Lee’s Visa. One helluva story, too! I’ll get into it another time, but suffice to say that it involved dumplings, pizza, a frigid sprint through morning rush hour Philadelphia, a wrong place wrong date catastrophe cum miracle, and a kind and curious Italian consular officer who is also deaf and mute.

• Found a place to live?
  No, we still do not have an apartment. Decoding lease agreements and bureaucratic nuance at the scale of an international move – in another language – is a part-time vocation in itself. It’s fascinating and also infuriatingly opaque at times. In short, we likely won’t secure a place to live until we’re physically in the city spying rental signs on doors.

• So, where will you go from the airport?
  Buona domanda! We’re finalizing plans, but our latest entry in ‘The Universe Provides chronicles’ includes Italian friends with connections deep in the Barolo heart of Piemontese wine country. Soft landings in Alba and Castiglione Falletto await… because my relationship with Nebbiolo is beyond time and space.

• Are you selling your house?

  Nay. We love our home and the idea is to build a life that connects dots both foreign and domestic. Maybe in a few years we can live here and there. Meanwhile, we’ve found renters who will take over with much of the furniture and some of the big artworks in place. They settle-in on June 18.

• Wait a sec, I thought you’re leaving July 15?
  Sì! We’ll have nearly a month to test-drive life away from home while we’re still in Richmond. Because we’ll have already packed-up (🤞), it grants us a span of weeks without much responsibly beyond long goodbyes and the final-call punch-list. Re: couch-surfing, Brazilian friends are headed to South America; their empty home and lonely dog are wont for companionship. Perfetto! (Universe provides again.)

• Do you have a job?
  Also nay. However, I’ve updated my website into a kind of digital portfolio – complete with CV and letters of recommendation. Between that, word-of-mouth, yoga mat manifesting, and ye olde LinkedIn, I remain confident that my utility will attract opportunity.

Lastly, some gratitude.

Recently, the Why is This Interesting? team (“A daily newsletter for the intellectually omnivorous”) posted The Monday Media Diet with Jeff Gordinier. Even if this name is new to you, you’ve likely encountered his work as Food & Drinks Editor at Esquire. Gordinier is also the American Society of Magazine Editors 2025 National Magazine Award Winner for Lifestyle Journalism (with this incredible story: How a Single Grain Shaped the History of This City — and Holds the Key to Its Future – in Food & Wine).

One of the queries posed to JG:

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I shall take this opportunity to tout three friends who are revving up their engines here on Substack: (1) Peter Barrett, whose Things on Bread is a soul-nourishing and thought-provoking paean to the deep satisfactions of gardening, fermenting, slowing down, making stuff, and cooking at home.… (2) Klancy Miller, whose new Klancy’s Potluck percolates with the joie de vivre that Klancy brings everywhere she goes…. (3) Jason Tesauro, whose L’Avventura wittily unspools the story of how he secured Italian citizenship and now plans to move his family from Virginia to Italy — in a matter of weeks! Jason, like Klancy, radiates joy — in person and on the screen. We could all use more of that. Jason doesn’t know this yet but I plan to move in with his family a few days after he gets to Italy.

The guest room is yours, Jeff!

Thanks in no small part to your support and the likes of Gordinier, L’Avventura has crossed the 5,000-subscribers mark and cracked Substack’s ‘Top 50 Rising’ in Travel. It’s read in 44 states in and 36 countries. And that’s all since Jan 31, just 91 days ago.

Our Mission Control dashboard shows nothing but green (and white and red 🇮🇹) lights. We are all systems go for launch.

74 days to go.