Ciao tutti!

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Feb 28, 2016 Oh how I wish I was typing this from Italy, in italiano. Instead, it's the greeting from one of the YouTube channels where I've been studying the language. I took two years of Italian in college back in the Triassic period and I find that some of it is coming back. I follow a few Rome-based people on Twitter, also, and listen to Italian-language music almost nonstop a day or two each week; I've bought The Idiot's Guide for Learning Italian on Your Own, plus a novel I hope to be able to read someday: La voce del violino, a story with the character Salvo Montalbano mentioned in the first paragraph. I'd like to gain fluency before I move to Brindisi. Yes, that's the grand plan. Brindisi, a main port of Italy since forever, is at the end of the Via Appia, and Julius Caesar was once its curator. The climate there in southern Italy, on the coast of the Adriatic, sounds ideal. And I've been reasearching other aspects of the area such as rents, transportation, proximity to Rome, and also to Athens. I've been reading about the red tape others have dealt with in their moves to the country. Sounds daunting, but one step at a time is my approach. So meanwhile I study on. My immediate goal is to gain enough fluency to hold my own at a meeting of Portland's Amici d'Italia. I've already started mentally packing. Ciao tutti!