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Simon Capp: A Very Italian Affair
Simon Capp is a Japanese translator who took his wife and two young children over to Italy on a 16-month working holiday in 2003.
Their rollercoaster ride is recounted in hilarious detail in A Very Italian Affair, which has just been acquired by New Holland for publication in mid-2008.
A Very Italian Affair tells the real-life saga of an ordinary suburban Australian family attempting to do an international sea change.
The father works as an internet translator; all he needs is a power point and a phone line. How hard can it be?
The problems begin as soon as they arrive to discover that their much-anticipated romantic hillside getaway is a grotty run-down old farmhouse in a lonely isolated backwater of a village, complete with a grumpy old miser of a landlord who complains endlessly about the noise.
To top it all off there is no phone line — meaning no work and no money for pizza.
But just when the whole notion of the Italian Odyssey is looking like a giant mistake, our heroes manage to relocate to sunny Sansepolcro, which turns out to be every bit the country Italian town they’d been dreaming of — medieval and full of good food.
The next few months are spent living the dream — hunting out new bars and cafes, chatting with their kindly landlords and revelling in the minutia of small-town life in rural Italy.
Then summer arrives, and Sansepolcro shifts into high gear with a endless succession of outdoor festivals, concerts and community events.
Meanwhile, our heroes find themselves steadily enveloped into the warm embrace of their landlord and treated to genuine long lunches on a daily basis.
All too soon summer is over, life quietens down again and the Australians are obliged to confront the thorny question of their return tickets.
Do they belong in Italy? Could they stay on indefinitely? Do they want their children to grow up Italian?
Eventually they resolve to return to Australia, but not without considerable anguish.
Cut to nine months later: suffering from withdrawal symptoms and still in denial, our heroes journey back to Sansepolcro for a holiday to find everything just as it was and ever will be.
The return visit brings closure, and the realisation that that their year in Italy yielded more than they had ever imagined: enduring friendships.
Sansepolcro from the clock tower at dusk
Topics: Memoirs, Non-fiction, Simon Capp | No Comments »
