Chapter 3: Dreams, Reality, and a 300-Year-Old French Temptation
You know that moment when your dream starts to feel almost within reach — but you’re not sure if it’s destiny or delusion? That’s exactly where we were. We’d been scouring the internet again, this time focusing on Umbria and Puglia. But after months of looking, every listing started to blur into one long string of “stone house with potential.” Our inbox was overflowing with daily updates from agents. Each email promised the one, yet each house was somehow... not it. Six months had passed since our last trip, and our enthusiasm was beginning to feel like a long-distance relationship — full of longing but light on progress. Then it appeared. A little advertisement popped up in both our inboxes — as if the universe had coordinated it. A 300-year-old farmhouse with just an acre of land (we’d long since realized that “too much land” was code for “too much work”). It even came with two barns and a separate forested lot along its southern edge. Rustic charm, a ma...
