½ûÂþÌìÌÃ

A very nice play on words, Gala! No doubt Flip, with such a demanding schedule that perusing an irrelevant post is a disaster, couldn't possibly afford the time to become available as a moderator.

Partly the choice of provider will depend on coverage in your area. I expect all of the providers do the same sorts of 'packages' - the only one I have any experience of is a dongle from 3, which cost about €20, and this has a pay as you go SIM which is charged on connection time at €1 per hour. For me this gives me about 3.5Mb download speed, (it claims up to 7Mb) but I can't say how this might differ depending on local conditions.  Other packages are based on data transferred, and you should carefully peruse the details of these offers if it looks as if one would suit you, because the charging gets quite complex. This is the site for 3  . (The key word you want is chiavette, which is ½ûÂþÌìÌà for dongle.)

My 'house coffee' has been Kimbo "Black" for aeons. I would stock up on it whenever it came on 'special offer', and was delighted to get 250g for €1,99. So, my coffee supply had run out, and what price did I see - €3.19 for 250g. I'm sorry, that is just TOO expensive to contemplate, so I bought a pack of the Coop own brand espresso casa at €1,63 (plus a pack of Kimbo black in case the 'own brand' was undrinkable). Well, the Coop brand was certainly drinkable, and I would say a great deal less than €1,60 "worse" than the Kimbo (the difference in price benig about €1,60). So that was ten days ago, and the coffee stock situation was gettnig low - blow me if the Coop own brand hasn't gone above the €2,00 mark! I hear that in the commodities market coffee is 'on a run' - the crack is that this is down to 'speculators' - I dunno. But, do you know what unexpected consequences this has on the ½ûÂþÌìÌà economy? I'll tell you. It costs me 80 cents to drink a coffee in a bar.  I decide that, because it now costs me 60% more to make DIY coffee at home (due, possibly, to speculators) I will simply not buy coffee in bars, and if I drink two less coffees in a bar I can pay the extra €1,60 for the pack of coffee in the supermarket. This is all complete madness - the bar cannot up the cost of an espresso because the regione has 'fixed' it: does this mean they are still able to source coffee beans at the 'old price'? I doubt it.  They are not making as much profit as they did before on coffee, and people like me are nipping in to buy fags and not buying the coffee. Buying the coffee was a social thing - it used to be almost obligatory (because just nipping in for fags was a bit rude) - but everyody can cope with 'rude' when they have the piss taken out of them by the price asked for  supermarket coffee. Rant over - maybe it is called globalisation. But when your favourite bar closes the shutters finally, and there is nowhere for the ancients to socialise - it is something to regret, I think.

Yes - I do understand where you are coming from! However, in the 'good old days' when the Yellow Pages were inches thick, looking at the  'trasloco' section was utterly bewildering and very amusing for a non ½ûÂþÌìÌÃ-city dweller. They would advertise with a picture of as butch a crane as they could find, and boast that they would translocate 'fino al 15simo piano'. Che? What's with the crane - don't you have a pantechnicon? That word doesn't translate into ½ûÂþÌìÌÃ, it's Greek. But if you are lucky enough to spot a domestic (even better, an office) move into an ancient palazzo in the middle of Florence or wherever, I promise you that the Uffizi will be forgotten - there is a whole day's entertainment just hanging around watching the  slow moving guys carefully loading large laser printers, or grand pianos, onto a platform which will then be hauled up by the crane (generally mounted on a specialised lorry) and offloaded through a sixth (or higher) floor window! It's worth buying a HD movie camera for. But there are also the ubiquitous men with vans - maybe it is relevant that their packing boxes are often printed in English and German...!

I sourced some of these - large, medium and book-packing size by simply nipping into a local removal firm and buying them. They were extremely strong boxes, and usefully modular for efficient stacking. I think the biggest ones cost about €2 apiece - the smaller ones less. (They came flat packed, with strong parcel tape 'thrown in', and about 80 of them fitted into a small hatchback.)

I'm sure that your owls have found more silent pastures simply because you have moved in! It's sad, and nothing you have done wrong - owls just would really prefer to be 'alone'. I remember moving into a (few years) unoccupied farmhouse in the UK, and the first year we were charmed by 'furry cylinders' (young owls) sitting on a branch and rehearsing 'tu whit tu who' (incredibly funny, we heard their voices breaking!) but the year later the mum owls had found an unoccupied location more to their taste. Just be happy you have been privileged to experience this stuff - probably it is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

There had been for me (us) a sort of family decision that a house would be bought in Italy. This was before Ryanair etc existed, and there was also a difficulty because one of us wanted a 'holiday home' (the other half saying what sort of a moron are you to commit to spending your hols in the same place?). So (as I say, this was before affordable airfares), one parameter was 'north of Rome' (driveable). Another parameter (not that any family member had health problems) was that a major teaching hospital had to be half an hour max away. This is a sort of 'cosmopolitan' signal that civilisation is close (and civilisation has 'come good' - the teaching hospital parameter means you get ADSL etc etc) - but you don't get cheap. I'm a bit distressed these days by putative wannabe ex-pats fixating on the same wrong things which I was concerned with thirty years ago - and not figuring out that the world changes, and not always the way you expect! One clear 'appeal' in Italy, many regions, is that you get a whole load more bang for your buck landwise. So - yeah, "I have an estate of three hectares" (as a minimum!) - did you farm in the UK? Did you realise that 8 acres of impossible to irrigate land is not going to be turned into a Jeckyll garden or a productive kitchen garden without massive assistance, plus financial investment? (And if you pay peanuts broadband rather than broad beans are seriously distant.) But - as I said - times change, and this post has a shelf life of maybe six months! I'm not recommending this, but following 'your heart' is quite as valid as building a spreadsheet. Gof or it - don't be too scared of getting it wrong - you can always move on.

Maybe I am being dreadfully cynical, but the somewhat irrelevant 'article' in 'Global Edge' appears to have been written by an Estate Agent in l'Abruzzo, who I suspect is better known on this forum as 'adriatca'. (It's the typos which give it away...)

I agree with you - but to be interesting and generate traffic you do need to have enough 'new' - ideally 'off the wall' queries to keep a forum alive; those queries will get answered - maybe with many different opinions and even heated arguments. This (historically and usefully UK based) forum has two problems: firstly that Brits aren't buying houses in anything like the volume that they did at the peak of the bubble, and they are not even choosing Italy as a holiday destination. (Euro Sterling rate majorly to blame) thus an inevitable decline in visits. Secondly, joining this forum required jumping through insane hoops and a steep learning curve to figure out the forum format. Despite dire warnings, the erstwhile administrator of this forum, a nerdy aspirant social networker with limited social skills (name of Ronald) decided to coincide the change of format with the completely predictable lessening of traffic. Fred the Shred couldn't have done better...

I'm fascinated by hearing that foxes lurk about waiting for cherries and other windfalls. Maybe they have clocked the price being asked in the supermarkets - this year at the moment cherries are  €9.95 a kilo. Wow, they are pulling my leg - all my friends with cherry trees are propping up the overladen branches, and cannot give the fruit away!