½ûÂþÌìÌÃ

A future as wage slaves on the corporate grindstone, trying to pay huge mortgages, or a future as members of a well balanced and deceptively orderly society that hasn't yet found it neccesary to regulate the clothes young people wear or how they choose to congregate with their friends on the street?
A future as well-travelled, adaptable, bi-lingual employees who have been exposed to more than one culture, or a future serving at MacDonalds or working in tele-sales?
It really all depends what you mean, doesn't it?
As an aside, although finding employment is tough here, any enterprising person with a good idea and good communication skills should be able to start a successful small business.
I can't imagine there's a better place in the world to bring up kids.

I think you've answered my question, Marc........
....your overly defensive response really confirms what I suspected, i.e. that some people at a certain time of life are making these changes for their own benefit and ignoring the potentially large downside for their dependants.

I know of many people whose parents moved to the "country" and went native when they were kids... they had a great life bringing up chickens etc, but HAD to leave to go far away when they grew up in order to get some real work and progress.

Remember that almost everyone who moves to a "cheaper" place (and that is often what we are taking about, downsizing) is able to do that because of equity built up in the place that they left behind.

So that boring 9 to 5 job gets the farm house in the rolling hills, but how are the kids ever going to get that for themselves? And no, the answer is not to go and work in London for 20 years....

we currently live in the countryside. our children have had great fun growing up and playing in woods, fields, climbing trees etc. we are moving to italy which has been our dream for many years, however as our children are teenagers we have decided to live in an apartment in the centre of florence so that the children will have easy access to teenage things .My husband and I would dearly love to be in the tuscan hills somewhere but we feel that our children would be happier and reap all the benefits of italian life by being in a city. We hope that we've made the right choice , only time will tell........

[QUOTE=Wishful Thinker]It seems a lot of people move to rural Italy for the dream lifestyle with children in tow. I agree that growing up anywhere in the country is great for children (I live with our 4 children on a farm in Kent), but what happens when the children grow into their teens and later? Its one thing for them to up stumps from Hampshire to London, but wither from an obscure little village in the wilds of Le Marche?

With Italy's notorious labour market (who you know not what you know etc) and the high unemployment and dodgey economic outlook, do your kids really have any future in Italy?[/QUOTE]

I suppose it's always possible to stay in the UK and run the lottery of appaling state education, dumbed down degrees and omnipresent crack cocaine in the hope that one's children grow up to be productive burger flippers with a PhD in hamburgerology care of President Blair's City Technology University ChillOutZones.

Speaking as someone who managed to make a reasonably succesful life despite starting out in a rural village with a population of a few hundred congenitally stupid people and an unemployment rate of about 50% I don't think my children could be worse served in Italy than my generation was in the UK. At the least they would grow up as bilingual in English and ½ûÂþÌìÌà and that of itself isn't a bad start in life.

Furthermore why should a life in a society where people find jobs for their relatives and friends work against my children? I suppose if I choose to be a recluse and never make friends I could nd up with no one willing to offer work to my children, bt that seems the least likely of all scenarios. And unlike England, my children get to inherit free of inheritance taxation so they get to own a house in the fullness of time or if we choose to build one on our land, sooner and at a lower cost than in the UK.

Anyway, as I've said before if you don't like Italy, don't come. It's still a free choice at the moment despite the best efforts of our politicians.

... surprisingly for most italians..... and in the first time in italies modern history if you talk to young italians they feel that they will be worse off than their parents.... this is a major turnaround as each succesive generation in the past has managed to pass on to their children a good helping hand.....

now instead of buying them a new apartment or a new car parents are often borrowing money to have their annual holiday..... much of this is blamed on the changeover to the euro..... whatever the reason... and it will be a lot more complicated than a currency change... the outlook for young people is gloomier than ever before.... at least in their perception

one sentence that often occurs on this forum which drives me crazier than any other and has appeared in many of my postings as a reply is this one about having to love or like everything italian or else go home..... believe it or not if you have no national attachments apart from a passport then in general where people live is their home....

i might have been born in a different area of the world to where i live now....where my home is now .... so the sentence does not make much sense .... and in this time of european citizenship.... our rights include making a home where we choose and with this right we do not sign any paper to say we then have to live without criticising.... be it constructive or not....

.... so without wishing to be returned to where i came from i would risk to say that a system based on reccomendation and not ability is wrong and gives half the problems in italies proffesions and manufacturing...is one of the main reasons why growth here is stagnant and innovative thought lacking..... most of the brighter graduates who do not have a friend with enough muscle to get them a job go to america.... and there you will find that many of the top jobs are filled by italians who manage to work and compete with the best of them running either succesful companies or whatever... its the system here not the people...

lord forgive me for criticising something italian

The kids could still de-camp to London if they wished, or, anywhere else in the world, the advantages to bringing them up in this environment MUST outweigh the dis advantages. Although, we moved after the kids had grown up, LOL, to MAKE one of them grow up. So, I can't really advise (Although, strangely, they are both talking about trying to re settle here in a few years, any body know of a good estate agent in Bulgaria or somewhere???)

[QUOTE=adriatica]one sentence that often occurs on this forum which drives me crazier than any other and has appeared in many of my postings as a reply is this one about having to love or like everything italian or else go home..... believe it or not if you have no national attachments apart from a passport then in general where people live is their home....[/QUOTE]

Ah well, I'm driven crazy by people who can't find a shift key, don't understand a full stop and who think that an ellipsis has more than three dots and is the way to terminate a sentence. I think however that our mutual sense of being driven crazy should be set on one side, don't you?

I didn't tell someone to go home, nor do I believe that everything in ½ûÂþÌìÌà society is perfect. I did tell them that if they don't like ½ûÂþÌìÌà society and they fear for what ½ûÂþÌìÌà society will do to their children to not bother coming to Italy, it’s not as if anyone is being forced to move to another country. People are free to make their own choices, and to characterise parents who choose to move to Italy to give themselves and their children a better life by specious claims about possible future job opportunities is bunkum. Their children will have just as many possibilities, if not more, for future career choices as if they stayed in the UK.

If someone believes that their children would suffer by being brought to Italy then obviously in the best interests of their children they should not move to Italy. However to characterise anyone who does make the choice to move to Italy as somehow feckless or irresponsible about their child’s future is nothing more than stereotyping (which in another thread people were happy to call racism as long as the stereotyping they objected to was about Albanians and not ½ûÂþÌìÌÃs.)

As to patronage/nepotism it is rife in British society and it limits job opportunities for British children, just as severely if not more severely than it does in Italy. Of course being British we tend to be less open about it that the ½ûÂþÌìÌÃs, but how many people seriously think that the boss's son in the family business in the UK competed for his job on a level playing field with all other applicants? Indeed how many people think that in publicly quoted companies that the prevalence of relatives working for the same business happens by chance? It used to be famously true for British Rail, London Underground, and every bus company in the UK that if you wanted a job first you had to know the right man in the right place (and it always was a man). The only change to that structure happened when the number of applicants for jobs fell below the number needed to run the business.

I speak as am "immigrant" myself, someone who though "British to the bootstraps" came home as a nineteen year old, twenty-one years ago...

as the old song says "I've seen life from both sides now, from win and lose, and still some how..."

I am not trying to critisize the agonising (or maybe off ther cuff?) decisions that people make in their lives, just playing devil's advocate...

I think that forums like this are very useful for those that are thinking of buying in Italy/ buying into the dream, and whilst I would not want to shatter anyones dreams, there is far too much at stake to be flippant if there are people involed whose lives will be effected by one's own folly..

[QUOTE=adriatica]... most of the brighter graduates who do not have a friend with enough muscle to get them a job go to america.... [/QUOTE]
or London (via America) like Barbara Cassani founder of the best low cost airline now sadly no more.