Welcome to Italy!
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HI everyone! This is Chip Stites, your Italian Correspondant - I want to welcome you to this site and to Italy and all the contacts and information you might need. I have contacts for travel agents, who live full time here, not just those traveling here. I have tax consultants and visa and realestate consultants. So If you want more information about Italy... please click on the Italy button to the right and post a question... don't be shy: beleive me, if you need an answer so do hundreds of other people. I look forward to talking with you! Chip
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thank you, Chip. The two European countries that most readily come to mind for me to spend more time and perhaps purchase property or Italy and Greece. I am bilingual and speak modern Greek fluently as well as read and write it, to a degree. I am a 71-year-old New Yorker, married and in good health. Any suggestions about how to start exploring the possibility of living abroad several months a year, for now.
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Hello, CGREGA, and thank you for the question. I do have some suggestions. Italy is chock full of different areas: for climate, for food, for outdoor recreation, with mountains, seashore, islands, the Alps or Italian Dolomites, wine, beaches and I could go on and on. I am going to quess that if you are interested in Greece you prefer warmth and possibly the sea. So,
- Pick the climate area you are interested
- Pick the type of topography you are interested in.
- Take a month or two - without a Visa you have 90 days and travel to the areas you are interested in for topography and climate.
- When you find a couple of places you feel really good in go back to that or those places i the times of the year when the climate is most likely not to your liking. This will give you an idea of what year-round living might be like if you moved there permanently.
- The compare your interest in Greece and your favourite place with your interest in Italy and your favourite place and choose! Or don't choose and move back and forth between both... Good luck and let me know what happens!
Chip Stites, International Living Italy Correspondent, International Living Magazine.
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Hi Chip.
I am a dual US/Italian citizen living half the year in our house in my ancestral hometown in bella Sicilia and half in our house in Tucson, Arizona. I speak Italian, French and Spanish and am retired but my husband (who speaks Spanish and is learning Italian) is not so we arent ready to sell the Tucson property and move permanently abroad. This background to explain that we're not beginners when it comes to msking our way through Italian bureaucracy and I'm not finding a lit beyond the very basics in IL to hrlp us prepare for the next phase of leaving the US for good. I thought the Bootcamp seminar sounded good but unfortunately its not online and we aren't going to Las Vegas.
In sum, Im hoping you might be the person to offer the "beyond the basics" information we are looking for to prepare for the fulltime European life we envision that invludes a homebase, msybe a second rustic getaway and travel.
First, although I am in the Italian healthcare sustem, my husband is not yet an Italian citizen so what health insurance options would he have here? Health insurance with his current job in the IS is one of the reasons he hasnt retired yet and a concern even when he is here on vacation.
Thank yoh do much and I look forward to hearing from you.
Christine Conte