A SMALL MEMOIR ON BUILDING A LIFE DESIGNED FOR MOVEMENT.
Location monogamy has always felt a bit like a restraint. I have always been attracted to movement and allergic to being in one place and, although I have spent many years at a time in one place or another, I like to think that the back door is always open so that I can just pack my stuff and go. The necessity to move and change for me has always felt less like a trend and more like a need, even before Covid made remote work mainstream.
My mother tells me that when I was a young child, all I did was draw maps and pack suitcases. One night, she found me and my brother outside the door, ready to take on the world. I was five and he was three, and from that moment onwards my parents learned to lock the front door at night.
These days it’s all about “location independence”, digital nomads and the like. The idea of potentially not having a fixed abode, or office, plays with people’s minds and one can easily start to imagine oneself on an exotic beach, laptop in one hand and a piña colada in the other.
But for me it goes beyond that. The idea of spending my whole life in one place, or doing just one thing, feels suffocating. And it took me a long time to accept that this was part of my personality and my soul, and not a defect.
Back in 2000, at 20 years old, I ditched university in Bologna to go and live across Europe for a few years, doing a variety of unlikely jobs that possibly taught me more than the degree I started again once back in 2004.
Thanks to those years, I got a taste for life abroad and, especially, for the idea that I do not like being stuck in one place and that I can reinvent myself constantly, regardless of my age.
Funnily enough, I have not travelled the world that much, but so far I can say I have lived in three different cities in Italy, in addition to Göteborg in Sweden, Albufeira in Portugal, Valencia in Spain, Glasgow in Scotland and in London three times.
It’s a fine balance for me between getting to know a place truly and well enough to create some sort of life there, but without mentally settling down properly. And the only way to truly know a country is to live in it and work there.
There is just so much you can learn from “travelling”: travelling, as the bougie kids intend it, seems to me more like an extended vacation aimed at ticking countries off a list than a way to truly know a place.
A similar concept to me is that of digital nomads, which I associate with people formally based in one country, normally one with low taxes, while sipping the aforementioned cocktail from a beach in Bali (please excuse the cheap provocation and cliches).
This is why I never “travelled” or was a digital nomad: I LIVED in different places, settled in all of them for different amounts of time, and then at some point packed my stuff and started over elsewhere.
Nothing against digital nomads and those who like “travelling”, of course, but you don’t really get to know a country unless you have an actual address that is not a guest house, a proper bank account, a national tax code and a routine of some sort. And I believe that in order to truly get to know a place, you need to live and work in it. Otherwise it’s just a long holiday.
I got a taste for living abroad as a young twenty-something between 2001 and 2004 when I spent a few years between Sweden, Portugal and England. And when I decided to return to Italy in 2004 to start university again in Rome, my need for the “international” could not be put to sleep, therefore I enrolled in a Linguistic and Cultural Mediation degree, basically a mix between technical translation and international relations. From day one I was already dreaming of the Erasmus programme and I worked extra hard to get the grades that would grant me a scholarship to attend the third academic year abroad. I did it and managed to spend almost a year in Glasgow where I studied and worked. Yes, worked. As my scholarship money would only arrive after the end of the programme and although my parents would helped with rent, I needed money for everything else. So I ended up getting a couple of cleaning jobs in pubs and started teaching Italian as a second language locally to make ends meet.
So, even as a student, I was confronted with a different way to live, to study, to be hired, to interact with employers, to a different tax system.
Back in Italy and near graduation, I was certain that I wanted to pursue a diplomatic career. I had always had an interest in international politics, I had top grades and I could see myself abroad and nothing would stop me. I had actually initiated the process of enrolling with the Peace Corps to go to West Asia and work in the West Bank for a few months but someone put the spanner in the works.
Just a week before graduating, and a few months before leaving, I met the man who a few years later would become my husband. And of course, true to my ever-present interest in everything foreign, the boy could only be a foreigner, precisely British, even more precisely, a Londoner which was the icing for the cake as I truly love London.
We eventually decided to stop in my home city of Fano for a while and I needed an actual job badly, or at least a way to sustain myself but guess what? The 2008 financial crash happened and the subsequent recession had turned the job market into a rut.
Questions came to the surface: did I really want to be in an office nine to five anyway? Did I really want to settle down permanently in my home city? Was there an angle that would allow me to be flexible and maintain the possibility of travelling between Italy and England with my then boyfriend, now husband, whenever we wanted?
My interest in international politics was already bordering activism, and due to being really disillusioned with the international institutions I was then aiming to work with, I decided not to make use of the international relations side of my degree, but to put to good use all the translation skills I learned while at Uni and started working as a translator.
I had already done some paid work while at university, so I was not starting entirely from scratch. Also, the job was inherently freelance, location independent and granted some sort of freedom. I liked the sound of that.
For the following few years I would manage technical translations, do copywriting, teach Italian as a second language and English to Italians. Regardless of the recession, work started to come my way.
Things were working but due to the recession companies were making cuts, and this translated into requiring that extra spark of creativity in terms of selling one’s services. I learned to become quite good at hustling and selling myself and my skills and I must say that things worked well, so much that I eventually set up a small language services agency in my local area. This was my first step towards entrepreneurship.
And then I got pregnant and this new situation arose a new set of questions: would I need to settle down for good? Get a nine-to-five job to have more security? How could I now accommodate my desire for movement and freedom with a small baby and the need to provide? I had no other option than freelancing and I decided to specialise further, so I signed up for a master’s degree in Legal Translation, which I completed while breastfeeding and barely sleeping, but this is a story for another time.
From that moment onwards and to this day, maybe also because I had become a mother, the fear of being without money and the necessity of finding stability pushed me into getting jobs from time to time, but eventually I would always go back to working for myself.
At some point in 2014 I made a conscious decision to start a business that would keep me connected to my region of Italy, Le Marche, and in touch with the foreign clients I address my event, travel and real estate services to. Merry Le Marche was born: aside from the wish to promote my underdog region internationally, it would always give me an excuse to return home for work and to see my loved ones, even if I lived abroad. Even now that I am based in London I have the opportunity to live and operate between two places. I know that this may be unsettling to most, but it is exactly how I feel free (and keep my sanity).
I must say that, sixteen years on and at 45 years of age, this is probably the first time that I can call myself relatively — and I underline relatively — stable and location independent: living in London while still being free to travel to Italy pretty much whenever I want or need. It took a long time to get here and I must say that insecurity still creeps in from time to time but I am happy I took that chance.
Looking back, I don’t think I was ever chasing the romantic version of location independence. I was not trying to escape the system, but to move within it without being crushed by it.
I was always and only trying to design my life so that it could reflect my own internal geography, again and again. And maybe that is the real freedom, at least for me.
