As any of our Facebook friends know, last spring we came back to Seattle for a brief period to sell our house and then move back to Italy once that was complete. An agreement to sell the house was actually in place by the time we landed in Seattle and all that was left for us to do was find a place to move what little was left of our belongings from the basement to a storage facility.

We had already made the decision to find a place to live in Padova and landed here with only an Air B&B for 2 weeks and high hopes. As if it were fated to be, we immediately found a wonderful apartment (first place we looked at) on one of the main squares, Piazza dei Signori. It is in an older building but the apartment has been completely updated and modernized. It has a small balcony that overlooks the Piazza, where we have a ringside seat (sometimes literally) to everything that goes on there.

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The day after we moved in was June 2nd and Republic Day in Italy. The piazza was filled with a parade and speeches. It was a grand welcome, although I think there may have been more people in the ceremony than were watching. It was a nice welcome.

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The piazza, with a 15th century clock tower on one end (it has 24 hours and tracks the movement of the moon, stars and astrological signs) and the beautiful medieval Church of San Clemente The Pope, on the other, is always full of life. It hosts a market 5 days a week, 12 months a year (mainly clothing, linens, cookware and plants), outside dining for hundreds of people during the warm months, and special events: concerts, parades, protests and even a night of boxing.

There were several reasons for choosing Padova. First, with over 200,000 inhabitants and one of the oldest universities in Europe (with over 60,000 students, founded in 1222 and Galileo taught here for 16 years), it is very active and vibrant. Then, with Venezia and Verona nearby to attract all of the attention, it is not overly crowded with tourists. And lastly, it is well located on a main train line and within a couple of hours we can be in Venezia, Firenze, Milano, Roma, Lago di Garda or Torino. It takes less time to get to Napoli from here than it did from Lecce. We are close enough to
Venezia to go there for lunch and we have done just that several times.

We have been very active exploring our new neighborhood and I will update you later on that. For now we are studying Italian (and even teaching a little English) and waiting for spring to begin our travels again.

Just a little note, Facebook changed how I can feed these posts to my profile there and made me create a “Page” to link to. This is the first actual post since that change, so if anything weird happens let me know.