Between Botticelli and Bruschetta

There are a few times a week where I look up from whatever completely mundane task I am doing and remember where I actually live. I could be riding the bus home after dodging tourists in Centro and pass by Piazza Santa Croce, where for ten seconds I am presented with a glimpse of the Basilica backlit by the sun. Or walking to the office in the silence of early morning, when the locals are just waking up and the light is warming the terracotta buildings. Today, it was while I was vacuuming my lounge room rug. Watching the vacuum fill with what can only be described as a startling quantity of my own hair, quietly wondering how I still have any left on my head, I looked out the window and saw the hills surrounding Florence in the soft afternoon light. Golden, green, and absurdly beautiful as Spring comes to life.

And then I went back to the hair situation.

This is life here. All of it.

I think people imagine that living here is a perpetual soft-focus montage. Espresso at sunrise, effortless afternoons wandering through galleries, pasta at dusk, wine, repeat. And yes, those moments exist. They are real and they are wonderful and I will never stop being grateful for them. But between Botticelli and bruschetta, there is also a very ordinary life that needs maintaining. Floors need vacuuming (dust accumulates as fast as it is sucked up), groceries need buying, and the recycling needs sorting into at least four different categories, all of which will be judged by your neighbours if you get it wrong. Nobody warns you about the recycling.

On weekends, I wake up with the same gentle internal negotiation that I imagine happens in living rooms from Toowoomba to Townsville. Do I do the washing now or later? Later, obviously. I make coffee, read, listen to the building slowly come to life around me, and feel the particular luxury of having nowhere urgent to be. That part is lovely. Then comes the moment of reckoning where "later" arrives and the basket of laundry is still sitting there, extremely patient, completely unbothered by the fact that it is living in Renaissance-era surroundings.

I have stood in the Uffizi and stared up at the Primavera. I have walked across the Ponte Vecchio at dusk and felt something shift in my chest that I couldn't name. I have sat in a pew at the Basilica di Santa Croce and felt the weight of centuries pressing down on me in the best possible way. These things are minutes from my front door, and I am aware, deeply and daily, of how extraordinary that is.

I am also aware that the Coop (a supermarket) closes early on Sunday and if I do not get there before noon I will be making dinner from whatever is left at the bottom of the pantry. These two truths coexist without apology.

What nobody tells you about life abroad is that the magic does not replace the mundane. It runs alongside it. You can have a morning where you walk through Piazza della Signoria on your way to the one ATM that doesn't charge transaction fees and feel genuinely moved by the Neptune fountain, still slightly put out about the detour your legs made, still running through the mental list of everything else you need. The transcendent and the tedious share the same day, the same hour, sometimes the same five minutes.

There is something actually comforting about that. Because here is what living abroad teaches you that travel never quite can. It teaches you that the version of yourself who lives here is the same version who lived there. The one who procrastinates on life admin. Who leaves folded laundry on the kitchen table longer than she should before putting it away. Who starts the weekend with grand plans for cultural enrichment and ends it on the sofa watching something she has already seen twice, eating chips directly from the packet. Italy did not transform me into a more disciplined, more cultivated, more effortlessly elegant version of myself. It just put that exact same person in a more beautiful setting.

Which is, honestly, more than enough.

The beauty does creep in, though. Even on the ordinary days. I will be doing something completely unremarkable, like folding the aforementioned laundry or waiting for the kettle to boil, and the church bells will start and the whole afternoon shifts. There is light here that does something to your mood whether you are paying attention or not. Then there are the smells; garlic and onion wafting from a neighbour's window, fresh coffee pulling you towards the bar as you pass each morning, bread baking somewhere you can never quite locate, and the faint drift of woodsmoke from olive branches burning somewhere in the hills. These become the smell of home before you even realise it is happening.

You do not stop living a normal life when you move somewhere extraordinary. You just start living a normal life with much better scenery. There are moments in the extraordinary that make me feel embedded here, like my neighbours greeting me as one of them because they know I am not passing through as yet another Airbnb guest. The barista welcoming me each morning with recognition and a "buongiorno cara" instead of the formal "salve," and regulars at the bus stop who now make the effort to indulge my learning of Italian with polite, basic conversation.

There is an ever-growing list of things I want to go back and look at properly when I can muster the energy to fight the tourists, and the Notes section of my iPhone listing places outside Florence I want to visit is already onto its second page. But for now I am mostly thinking about whether I need more bin bags and calculating the best route home via a shop to buy yet more milk tomorrow.

And somehow, this is exactly how it should be. A real life, not just one that exists on holiday or in a film.

Welcoming Spring.