Welcome to Tales From the Countryside. My name is Gaby, and I am happy to have made the beautiful Italian countryside my home again after living in England for over 20 years. Paul and I had always dreamed of “one day moving back to Italy and finding a home in the countryside”. Every year, whenever we visited my family, we would drive and get lost in little countryside lanes and dream of that “one day” buying one of those run-down colonial houses to restore and live off the land.
That dreaming started in our 20s. Somehow, a couple of years ago, in the middle of the chaos that the worldwide shut down created, we took the plunge and moved back to my home county, Le Marche, uprooting our two boys and a cat! After many ups and downs, we bought a house in the country and started our journey renovating it and making it our own. This is the beginning of a journey that I would like to share with like-minded people. Our goal is to live a more self-sufficient life, replacing (wherever possible) convenience food with wholesome and nutritious home-grown and home-cooked meals. To live a life that is more “real”, maybe more “tangible” in contact and in tune with nature, to embrace both her beauty and also her flip side, which sometimes can be very harsh and brutal. To balance the new “synthetic” world that all these new technologies draw us into. I guess I was always meant to make this move as I grew up as a wild child in a colonial house until the age of 10, spending my time inside rabbit hatches to look at the newly born bunnies or running through the golden wheat fields, jumping over hay bales, playing hide ‘n seek in the vineyards. But one of the things I held most dear to my heart and really wanted my kids experiencing is the magic of fireflies and how they can turn an ordinary June night into a magical fairyland… The look on their faces when they first saw them… what a wonderful evening.. They now await their return every year! Anyway, this is it. I hope you stay to see what we get up to. I will share all I learn on the way, and you can give me some ideas too! Lots of love, Gaby xx
