From RV Life to Italian Dreams: Our Next Adventure

About 12 years ago, I asked Cheryl, “what would you think if I retired early and we sold our home and most of our stuff, moved into an RV, and traveled around the country?” That question was the start of an amazing, life-changing journey together. We had our first outing in a rented motorhome in California at the end of 2014, went to a week-long “boot camp” for prospective full-timers in the spring of 2015, and bought our Heartland Landmark fifth wheel that summer. The following January, I told my company that I planned to retire that summer, and on June 22, 2016, we hit the road.

Since then, we have traveled more than 80,000 miles in our RVs, visiting all the U.S. states except Hawaii as well as three Canadian provinces and two Mexican states. We have experienced 58 of the 63 U.S. National Parks, plus countless other national monuments, historic sites, seashores, state parks, and other beautiful locations. We’ve immersed ourselves in local culture, food, museums, and attractions. And best of all, we have made life-long friends throughout the country as we met fellow nomads and part-time travelers on our way.

It has truly been an epic adventure in every way.

Our family and friends would sometimes ask us, “how long do you plan to RV?” Our answer was always, “until we don’t.” We did not start out with a definite end date in mind; we figured that we would simply know when it was time to turn the page.

Now, that time has come. But that does not mean that we are done adventuring–quite the opposite, in fact. Our nearly nine and a half years on the road–and all that we’ve learned along the way about flexibility, rising to meet challenges, and being receptive to new and often unfamiliar experiences–have given us the confidence to take yet another big (OK, huge!) step: we are moving to Italy!

The move

This summer, we began the process of obtaining Italian long-term residency visas. That process takes about six months, so we hope to have our visas by January 2026. Meanwhile, we will prepare to sell our beautiful home on wheels and our truck, as well as our lot at the SKP Saguaro Co-op in Benson, Arizona.

We’ll also have to decide what stuff will go with us to Italy, while everything else will be sold or donated. We definitely have the advantage of having already downsized from a house before we went on the road, but even so we’ve managed to accumulate a lot of things that we either won’t need in Italy or that won’t make sense to pay to move.

While we’re doing all that, we’ll be working with a real estate agency in Italy to help us find an apartment. (More on that in a moment.) If all goes as planned, we expect to spend a week or so in the Dallas area in early March, and then move overseas in the middle of that month.

Why we are moving

Why are we moving, and why now? Well, the answer to those questions has several parts.

First, we are simply ready for a new adventure. As much as we love the nomadic lifestyle, we never had the desire to spend the rest of our lives in an RV. Rather, RVing was a means to two ends: to lower our cost of living so that we could retire earlier, and to experience North America in depth and at a more leisurely pace than would ever be possible during a vacation measured in days or even weeks. We’ve accomplished both of those goals. Although there are plenty of places we haven’t yet visited, we have been to pretty much all the destinations that were high on our list.

Second, we want to settle down in a single location. Life on the road in an RV presents a constant stream of logistical and mental challenges: planning travel routes, deciding where to stay (and getting reservations, which has become more difficult since the covid pandemic), sometimes long days of driving between destinations, shopping in unfamiliar stores, managing the RV’s systems (I won’t miss emptying the black tank!), and dealing with mechanical problems and breakdowns. All of those challenges were relatively small trade-offs for the privilege of being able to visit all the amazing sites we’ve seen, but now that we’ve been to most of the places we really wanted to visit, the effort has begun to outweigh the benefits.

Third, we want to explore more of the rest of the world–starting with Europe–while we’re still healthy and physically able to do so. Having a home base in Western Europe will enable us to do that in shorter, easier-to-plan trips, rather than feeling like we need to cram a lot in to make the time, expense, and effort of trans-Atlantic travel worthwhile. Most of Europe is within roughly two hours of Milan by air, and intra-European airline travel is much less expensive than travel within the United States. It will also eliminate the need to store a large RV for long periods of time, which carries its own costs and logistical difficulties.

And finally, we are gravely concerned about the political and socioeconomic situation in the United States. I am saddened to say that it seems inadvisable in the current environment to elaborate on that topic in a publicly available blog post, but if you know us at all, you’ll know what our concerns are–and even if you don’t, you can probably make a good guess.

Why Italy?

It’s hard to understand just how magical Italy is unless you’ve spent some time there yourself. The natural beauty of the country; the geographical diversity, from beaches to mountains, large cities to peaceful countrysides; the warmth of the people, especially once they get to know you; the beautiful fluidity and expressiveness of the language; more than 2,000 years of history expressed in art, architecture, and music; the focus on quality of life above most other considerations; and of course, the incredible variety and quality of food: all of these and more call to us.

I first visited Florence for just a few days in 1987 B.C. (that’s “Before Cheryl”, as she likes to point out), and was blown away by the city’s history as the birthplace of the Renaissance. For many years after we got married, we had talked about going to Italy together, but it wasn’t until our 30th anniversary in 2018 that we finally made it happen. That year, we spent five days in Rome before embarking on a cruise that visited a few cities in Southern Italy along with Greece, and after that we knew we had to come back. Then this spring, we spent six weeks in Florence as part of the Road Scholar Living and Learning in Florence: Independent Stay and Study Program, and we were hooked. (If you missed our daily posts about that experience, you can catch up on them here.)

In addition to those “soft” qualities, Italy, like most of the rest of Western Europe, also boasts practical benefits like a robust public health care system, a decent social safety net, and strong protections of civil liberties. The country is a parliamentary republic, and the existence of multiple political parties means that to govern, the party winning the most votes must form a coalition with one or more other parties, which tends to keep the government’s policies from veering too far toward either end of the political spectrum. And finally, Italy has some attractive visa options–including the elective residency visa for retirees and a visa by investment in an Italian company–that will give us a path to permanent residency in five years and to Italian (and European Union) citizenship in ten.

Back when we booked the Road Scholar trip in early 2024, we had intended for it to be just an in-depth learning experience. But by early 2025, we had started to consider a permanent move to Europe. In fact, before we left for Italy in the spring, we had also booked a two-week-long combination vacation and scouting trip to Portugal–a popular destination for U.S. expatriates–for late October. However, shortly after we returned from Florence in June of this year, we knew our hearts had remained in Italy. By July, we had decided to cancel the Portugal trip and instead to return to Italy in the fall to continue our language study and explore cities where we might like to live. Speaking of which…

Where we plan to live

Well…we don’t quite know yet. But we have some ideas.

As much as we loved Florence, we don’t think it’s the right place for us to settle. It’s quite a large city, at least by Italian standards, and the parts of the city that are the most interesting–the centro, or center, where you find the museums, art, and largest variety of restaurants–tend to be absolutely jam-packed with tourists. Because of its topography, Florence during the summer is also the hottest city in Italy, a country already struggling with heatwaves caused by a changing climate. We haven’t completely ruled out Florence or somewhere else in Tuscany, but we think it’s unlikely we’ll end up there.

To help narrow down our search for a hometown, we started out by making a list of “must-have” attributes. These included:

• being on a train line with at least daily service to other cities in Italy
• being within an hour or so by bus or train from an airport with international connections
• having routine medical care services available in town
• having a hospital with emergency services in town or within 15 minutes or less by car
• offering attractive natural scenery–either mountains or the coast
• offering a variety of opportunities for outdoor recreation
• having a tolerable climate–not too cold or snowy in winter, and not too hot (at least not constantly) in summer
• having a walkable city center and a good public transportation system elsewhere in the city (because we don’t plan to have a car)
• having good local infrastructure and a variety of restaurants, supermarkets, stores and other services, preferably within walking distance

Armed with that list, we spent many hours online researching various cities and towns around the country. Fairly quickly, we eliminated most of southern Italy, where the health care system, while improving, is not as good as in the north. The rest of the requirements eventually led us to a short list of several cities in far northern Italy, in the region of Lombardy: Bergamo, Como, Lecco, and Varese. Beginning in mid-October, we’ll be spending a week in each of these cities to check them out, visit their various neighborhoods, and try to learn what it would be like to live there.

Right now, our leading candidate is Lecco, a town located at the southern end of the eastern arm of Lake Como, about 31 miles (50 km) north of Milan and close to Italy’s border with Switzerland. With a population of about 47,000 in the town proper but more than 300,000 in the metropolitian area, Lecco meets all our criteria–at least on paper. We have talked with a few American expats who have settled there, and they all love it.

Stay tuned for more on this topic as we continue our search this fall. In any event, we hope to have chosen a city and be ready to begin searching for an apartment by the time we return to the U.S. in late November.

Selling our RV and our co-op lot

Believe it or not, one of the more difficult emotional aspects of our decision to move to Italy was deciding to sell our 2023 New Horizons Majestic fifth wheel trailer. We spent two years designing our home on wheels and having it built, and in the just two and a half years that we’ve lived in it, our Majestic has been everything we had hoped for.

For a while after we made the decision to move, we considered storing the RV and truck for at least a year, until we were certain that we would remain in Italy. Because our trailer was a custom build, we would not be able to replace it easily (or quickly) if we needed to do so. Before Cheryl’s mother passed away in July, we also thought we might need to use the RV for a while to live in Dallas if she needed us around to help care for her.

But as we discussed this question over dinner one night, we both came to the rather surprising realization that we were done with full-time RV living. While there’s a good chance that we will eventually travel part-time in a smaller RV–maybe even in Europe?–we just don’t see ourselves returning to a full-time nomadic life. So it did not make sense to pay for the cost of storing and insuring our RV and truck, let alone having them depreciate further, when we could sell them before we move and free up the not-insignificant amount of money we have tied up in them. Some other lucky traveler will have the opportunity to buy a beautiful, rugged, well-designed (in our humble opinion), and gently used RV, but it will be a sad day when we watch it drive away from us.

We will also give up our lot at the SKP Saguaro Co-op RV park in Benson, Arizona, where we’ve been members since 2021. That will be a sad day as well, because we’ve made many friends in the Saguaro community, and encouraged many other of our existing friends to become members there; we’ve also become very involved in volunteer work at the Co-op.

How long will we stay in Italy?

How long will we remain overseas? For now, at least, the answer is the same one we gave when people asked us how long we planned to live in an RV: “until we don’t.”

There are some nice rewards for staying. After five years of calling Italy home, we’ll be eligible to apply for permanent residency–basically the equivalent of a “green card” in the U.S.–and after ten years, we could apply for Italian citizenship, which would also allow us to travel and live freely anywhere in the European Union.

Of course, it will also depend on whether we like life in Italy as much as we’ve enjoyed being tourists, as well as the trajectory of the United States in the coming years. So, we’ll just have to see. We are perfectly comfortable leaving that decision open-ended for now.

We will welcome visitors!

Finally, we genuinely hope that once we’re settled in Italy, many of our North American friends will come to visit us! We hope to have a guest room, or at least a sleeper sofa, for visitors, and there are always hotels and Airbnbs available too. Besides visiting us in our new hometown–wherever that ends up being–we could show you around Florence, which we now know pretty well. Or, we could meet up in any of the many beautiful towns and areas around Italy and explore them together. (Amalfi Coast, anyone? Or maybe Venice, or Naples?)

So that is our big news! Keep watching our blog and our Facebook page, Landmark Adventures, for updates on our search for our new hometown and our eventual move!