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You visit Italy as a backpacking teenager, and fall in love with the place. Or you spend your junior year in Florence, and fall in love. Or... anyway, years pass. Finally, you return for a vacation, rent a house in the Umbrian countryside for a week, an apartment in the centro storico of a Tuscan hill town for another. You travel to medieval monasteries, eat unbelievably wonderful food in simple trattorias; you visit museums housing much of the world's greatest art; you stroll or hike or wander under the Tuscan (or Umbrian or Ligurian) sun. Then you reluctantly pack for the drive to Rome or Milan or Pisa and the flight home. You think, with regret, that once again you've merely scratched the surface, and at home you dream of returning, soon, for a longer stay. You do, again, and again. You study, or brush up, your Italian, a bit. You begin to think, "Why not? Why not find a place for longer, more frequent visits, maybe a place to actually live someday..."
Okay, so now what?
Maybe you've heard horror stories about buying a place in Italy. These are the stock-in-trade of a certain genre of literature (the big pile of rocks-as-house; the strip mine around the corner; the title so muddled that Solomon couldn't sort it). Italy is far away for the occasional idle weekend of house hunting. And the bureaucracy! Etcetera.
But you persist (you found this website, right?). Because you've fallen in love again with the countryside, the people, the history, the food, the art, the architecture, the language, the wine, the cradle of Western civilization—some or all of it. You decide Italy is where you want to be, at least for significant amounts of time. You need a place.
I know how this can happen, because it happened to me. I looked, as are you, for help finding and sorting, for more information and photos than what was available on the (innumerable) websites offering everything from sheep sheds to villas. I finally made a number of exhilarating (also expensive, time-consuming, and often frustrating) forays to Italy in search of a place. At long last I bought not one but two, both small and inexpensive, one in southern Tuscany, one in the hills above the Italian Riviera, both, for me, wonderful. I dealt with long-range renovations. Along the way I made many contacts with real estate dealers and with ordinary Italians (I bought one place from each). I garnered a nascent understanding of some of the vagaries and catch-phrases of the market, and I have begun what I hope will become a comprehensive mental map of many byroads and hidden places in Italy, as well as more well-known venues: some places to avoid, and some to love.