The Town 40 Minutes from Turin That Every Expat Misses

 Choosing between a big city and a small town in Italy involves significant trade-offs regarding cost, career opportunities, and social integration. Here: Confrontation outlines of pros and cons

Two kinds of expats move to small-town Italy. The ones who romanticise it so hard they forget to check whether there’s a pharmacy within 30 kilometres. And the ones who actually stick around.

I’ve been living in this area for a few years now, and I’ll be honest: I go out alone most of the time. I called a friend to come with me to see a menhir in Mazzè last week. She wasn’t feeling well. Called another. Too busy. I didn’t even call the third one because I already know that her partner, now retired and living with her, doesn’t look favorably on her friends.

This is not a complaint — it’s just the reality of adult social life, anywhere in the world. The difference is that in a small Italian town, the loneliness can hit harder when you don’t speak the language yet, and the community feels impenetrable. But it’s not, and Mazzè is actually only a good example to speak of why.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-town-40-minutes-from-turin-that

Like a Lost Soul

 The miracle of wanting to go somewhere again, after months of numbness.

The car thudded. Then it creaked. Then — I swear — it meowed. And then it stopped.

I was somewhere on a mountain road, sixty or seventy kilometers from home, and I felt the familiar cold hand of dread. This is it. Tonight I’ll sleep in the car. I have mandatory insurance, but the kind that looks good on paper and doesn’t quite reach you when you’re stranded on a cliff at dusk.

But my old Mitsubishi — God bless the hands that built her and the soul that gave her to me — had paused for dramatic effect. A breath. A theatrical moment. Because that is her character, she is battered and dented and beloved, and she has taken me places no sensible vehicle would agree to go. I stroked her roof and told her she was magnificent. My golden hen. My mountain witch.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-road-that-meowed-and-stopped

Forget the Job Hunt - This Is How Expats Actually Earn in Italy

 Five Euros, One Field, and a Business Idea: The Expats Who Brought Their Homeland With Them — and Made It Bloom

A few days ago, I drove about an hour from Biella to see tulip fields — entire fields of them, not just a vase on a windowsill. I’m a devoted tulip planter, so when I read there were farms worth visiting, I woke up early and went.

The town nearby is medieval and half under construction, its narrow streets the kind that make you wonder whether your sat-nav has quietly given up on you. But then the town ended, and fields spread out on all sides. I turned down a gravel lane — and there they were.

A patch of rainbow in the middle of green. The Alps behind them are still snow-capped. Above everything, a wide, luminous blue sky and light that felt almost apologetic for having been away so long. And the air — cool, crystalline, the sort that makes you stop mid-step just to breathe it.

Continue reading if you like this article https://exegi.substack.com/p/forget-the-job-hunt-this-is-how-expats

The Corinthian Codex - A Mediterranean Diet Series

 Psychological and metabolic thriller — blending rigid scientific accuracy with mystical, serialized story. A Mediterranean Diet Series where every meal is a story, and every story feeds something.

For anyone who has ever stood at a stove and felt, without knowing why, that they were not cooking alone.

Episode One

The Jar That Never Emptied

I. The Curve of Coast

The complex sat on a curve of the Peloponnesian coast that had been eating the Mediterranean way for three thousand years before anyone invented the word “diet.”

From the road, it looked modest: twenty whitewashed bungalows arranged in a loose semicircle, the open end of which faced the sea like a cupped hand catching light—a central kitchen with a wood-fired oven that had not gone cold in thirty-seven years. A garden so densely planted with oregano, rosemary, wild thyme, and lemon verbena that the wind coming down from the hills always arrived smelling of a spice rack — or, depending on your state of mind, of a very old apothecary.

And a long, shaded terrace, its limestone floor worn smooth by decades of morning feet, where guests ate breakfast each day at precisely nine o’clock. Breakfast was always the same, give or take the season: fresh tomatoes halved and drizzled with oil, a wedge of feta that the owner’s supplier drove down from a mountain village in Epirus every Thursday, thick slices of sourdough whose crust shattered like fine porcelain, and coffee brewed in a brass briki over a low flame until it foamed exactly twice without boiling over.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-corinthian-codex

In a Flickering Glow

The Rise and Hollow Fall of the Frichignono. Much more than just a name in a dusty ledger.

The tunnel does not merely lead you underground; it swallows you.

The vaulted stone ceiling presses down with the weight of a thousand years, the air turning cold and damp — the temperature of a held breath.

Ahead, a dim amber glow flickers; behind you, a darkness so thick and deliberate it feels like a physical presence. You find yourself walking faster. Everyone does. This is where the castle keeps its oldest secrets, and in Castellengo, secrets have a habit of refusing to stay buried.

The stones here have been watching people arrive since the Middle Ages, but they learned a different kind of silence after the Frichignono arrived. As you walk, the echo of your own footsteps begins to drift. The rhythm falters. It’s a classic trick of the acoustics — or perhaps it’s the sound of the fourteen original noble clans who were slowly, methodically bled out of their inheritance to make room for one name.

Then, there is the door.

Continue reading this story https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-a-shadow 

The Hidden Code. They Couldn't Write It Down, So They Painted It

 Historical detective: a silent record left by women who had no other voice.

Stand on the hill of Castellengo Castle and look down. The plain spreads out endlessly before you, flat and quiet.

But look closer, just below the castle hill: there is a church. The Church of Saints Peter and Paul sits there as it has for centuries, and even from a distance, something about it feels odd. Its back faces the road. It turns away from you, as if keeping a secret.

That oddness is, in fact, a very precise statement.

Churches were built for people who could not read. Every stone, every orientation, every image was a lesson written in a language older than words. This one follows the ancient rule: the altar faces east, toward the rising sun at dawn. Because Christ was imagined as the sun, the light that conquers darkness. So the faithful entered from the west, from shadow, from what the builders called death, and walked forward toward the light. The door was never meant to face the road. It was meant to face the dark.

Continue reading. If you like my stories, please click "like" and write your opinion. It will motivate me to research and create these stories for you :-)

https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-hidden-code-they-couldnt-write

The Wine That Remembers the Sea. Literally

 At Castello di Castellengo, a glass of Nebbiolo is not just a drink — it is a conversation with four million years of history. And it begins with a very steep climb.

You already know the stones.

If you read Part 1 and Part 2 of the Castellengo story, you know about Alberico, who crossed all of Italy with nothing but a name and a sword. You know about the political tragedy sealed into the limestone. You know the rough, primitive bones of the original fort — the stones that records erase but land never does.

But there is something I didn’t tell you yet.

Those same stones, those same medieval walls, are today the cellar of a wine that challenges time itself.

Continue reading this story

  https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-wine-that-remembers-the-sea-literally

Queens, Bulls, and a Perfect Porchetta Sandwich

 Before the tourists arrive and the season truly begins, Italy belongs, for a few precious days, to its farmers. Every spring, Italy exhales. And somewhere in that first warm breath, you will find a farmer’s fair.

There is something quietly magical about the agricultural fairs that mark the arrival of spring in Italy.

National Agriculture, Livestock and Food Exhibitions.

Long before the first warm days settle in, farmers begin preparing — combing, grooming, loading their most prized animals into trailers — and the whole countryside seems to hold its breath in anticipation.

The undisputed stars of these fairs are the cows. They arrive knowing their worth. Washed with the finest shampoos, udders carefully tended, coats brushed until they gleam — they carry themselves with the serene dignity of royalty, because that is exactly what they are here. They nuzzle each other, accept affection without fuss, and survey the crowds with calm, dark eyes that seem to say: yes, this is all for us.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/queens-bulls-and-a-perfect-porchetta

The Knights Without Fear And… (2)

 The “Pragmatic Nobles” who used diplomacy and Church alliances to rule for 400+ years. Dynasty that would learn to survive by being much ‘smarter’ than the rebel Alberico but… TOO much

The Knights Without Fear And… (1)

 

Every castle has its ghost. At Castellengo, the ghost isn’t a specter drifting through corridors in the small hours — it’s a political tragedy, sealed into the limestone like a man walled up alive.

Before the grand balconies, before the cellars heavy with wine, there was only a cliff, a river, and a man with a loyalty that would cost him everything.

Part I: The Exile’s Gamble — From the Tiber to the Alps

The story does not begin here.

It begins five hundred kilometers to the south, in the sun-hammered hills of Umbria, where a man named Alberico stood in the shadow of the Castello di Monterone and grasped, with the cold clarity that only younger sons ever know, that none of this would ever be his.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-knights-without-fear-and-1

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fog

 Winter has finally arrived in Biella, and I find myself in the peculiar position of wanting snow. After 22 years of southern living, this is character development I never saw coming.

Snow in Biella is a rare guest — arriving perhaps once or twice, staying for a polite day or two before disappearing, as if it had forgotten an important appointment elsewhere.

But this year? This year, I’m craving it

The Almost-Adventure

The walking group chat has been exploding with snow photos — gorgeous, postcard-perfect shots that make you want to lace up your boots immediately. So last Saturday, after a fresh snowfall dusted the city, I thought: Today’s the day. I’m going to the mountains.

I had errands to run first. No problem. Plenty of time for a little mountain walk afterward. Then I looked up.

Above the peaks: massive, brooding, seriously uninviting dark gray clouds.

My enthusiasm deflated like a sad balloon. Where exactly was I planning to go in that?

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and

The Pagan Magic of the Walnut Tree

 There’s something about Italy that makes people want to believe in magic again. On witch-hunts, wish-granting, and what happens when modern women chase ancient magic

There is a walnut tree that grows over a gorge in the mountains between Salerno and Benevento. I know this because I danced around it with four other women on a Thursday afternoon, and the universe answered back.

The Ghost World Between Mountains

Formula 1 track in the fog

The weather in Biella was miserable—not just cold, but the kind of cold that settles into your bones and whispers that winter has come to stay.

The Shepherd's Mathematics or The Miracle of Natural Food

I was writing a text for prospects, agricultural companies, offering them a promotion of their products – vegetables, meat, honey, wine... Suddenly, I had the idea to tell it to you as a parable...

The old woman at the market in Biella counts differently than you or I.

She doesn’t count in euros or dollars. She counts in hours—the hours between when her husband’s hands pulled a zucchini from the earth and when it lands, still warm from the morning sun, in your canvas bag.

“Quarantotto,” she says. Forty-eight.

This is the number that matters. Not the price per kilo, but the hours. Because science has proven what these mountain people have always known in their bones: a vegetable begins to forget itself the moment it leaves the soil. Vitamins flee like swallows before winter. The life force drains away, oxidizing into something lesser, something that merely looks like food.

At forty-eight hours, half the vitamin C has vanished into thin air. The folates—those delicate compounds that build our blood—scatter like autumn leaves.

But here, in this corner of Piedmont, where time moves differently, =>>>

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-shepherds-mathematics-or-the

 

Snowlit Milan City Chant

Milan, in this post’s focus, is a beautiful, snowy city, and its secrets are revealed here.

We created this winter song inspired by photos of Milan and Moscow, me and Perplexity

Snowflakes dance on lamplight gold,
City veins in silver cold.
Windows glow, a whispered spell,
Evening’s beauty, pure and fell.
Breathe the frost, embrace the night —
Winter’s kiss, pure delight!

Continue with me on our discovery Milan walk here:

https://exegi.substack.com/p/snowlit-city-chant

To Pass Through the Fog

I wrote this story many years ago, when I was (yet again) in the situation described here. It's happened to me many times. But I still believe it's written accurately.

A small, small, impossibly small man stood before a wall of fog.

It seemed the entire world lay ahead of him—a vast, impossible Universe rising from the earth at his feet and stretching into infinity. These clouds, so voluminous, like immense feather pillows, these billowing masses of fog.

Around him and behind, there was nothing. No one. He stood alone before the infinite. Leaving everything THERE.

There, far away, where no road led back, remained earthly life—so simple, so flawed, so comprehensible and familiar.

He caught himself not fully grasping the finality of this step.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/to-pass-through-the-fog

The Land Where Survival Was an Art Form

Life in Italy was never easy. Virtually every place and every period could be included in a survival manual. Let's talk about castle secrets again. Once upon a time, there was a castle... “How do we get into that castle?”

“You can’t,” I said.

The car had stopped beside us on the hill. We looked up at the ruin—another forgotten Avogadro fortress, crumbling behind rusted gates and NO TRESPASSING signs.

The driver nodded and drove off, but the question stayed with me. How do you get in? And more than that: why are there so many castles here that nobody can get into, that nobody even knows about?

It was one of those winter days you wait for all season—actual sunshine, breaking through weeks of fog and rain. I had maybe three hours before the light died, and I was desperate to escape my own head. So I did what any reasonable person does: I opened Google Maps and typed “castles.”

Three popped up. Close together. A loop I could drive in an afternoon.

I grabbed my keys.

Continue reading https://exegi.substack.com/p/the-land-where-survival-was-an-art

A Tale of Tiny Steaks and Smaller Pastries

 Every year between Christmas and New Year's, my friends and I engage in what has become our sacred ritual: eating our way through Piedmont while pretending we're not just avoiding their in-laws. 

Through the Frosted Door: The Scandalous Skirts of Saint-Pierre

Guarded by carved oak against winter's bite, a bas-relief freezes 1400s nobility: stern lords flank ladies in shockingly short tunics. No trailing velvet trains; these hems skim the knee. Why? 

 This story is my interpretation of the Saint-Pierre bas-relief on a door in the castle. Tourists visiting the castle do not notice its protagonists, and the guides don’t know what to say to you. They did not see it really. But there is an answer: medieval life was not quite the same as we imagine it from the ceremonial medieval pictures.

The October wind had teeth that morning when Caterina de Challant slipped through the postern gate of Ussel, her mare already saddled and stamping in the shadows. Behind her, in the castle’s great hall, her uncle’s men would be arriving within the hour, riding up the main road with documents and armed escorts, ready to strip her of yet another inheritance. But Caterina had learned to read the rhythms of ambush and lawsuit as other women read psalters.

Continue reading this story https://exegi.substack.com/p/through-the-frosted-door-the-scandalous

Italy’s ‘Child Queens,’ Sealed in Stone

 Across northern Italy, some of the oldest stones in the region hold secrets from a distant past, where children were interred with reverence and ceremony.

The path through the woods above Roppolo is carpeted in copper leaves, and the winter light falls thin through the bare chestnuts.