After a decade of living half my life in my second home in Italy and trying to understand how to live like an Italian, I decided to begin writing about my experiences. At first it was the odd article here and there, about trouble with Italy’s convoluted bureaucracy or setting up my English Conversation Group, but my writings began to expand into all sorts of areas which fascinated me, like taking the traditional (and death-defying) mud cure and having an article about it published in The Daily Telegraph.

I began to realize I might be able to write a book. For a while, I collected my ramblings on paper and began to sort them into categories, but I soon saw that there was no common thread to make them into a book, although individually my little tales could be quite interesting.