A job and a vibrant social life in Dublin, or housework and pets in an Italian castle catering for bibliophiles? For Stephanie Mahon, there was no contest.
It has been raining on and off for the past week - blankets of water cascading from the sky, wiping out any need for the daily hour-long watering of the garden. There have been hailstorms in the Bologna area lately, destroying crops and car windscreens. It is Italy in August and the natives are in disbelief.
The weather is almost as important a conversation topic for the Italians as it is for the Irish, closely followed by health and dinner. Castello di Galeazza, where I live, was originally built as a summer home, and as such it is just as surprised as we are by the frequent lightning storms. It flaps its windows fretfully in the wind, indignant that July's 35 degree temperatures are gone. The thunder doesn't split your ears like at home - it reminds me more of someone dropping a stone in a bucket, or a door slamming down the house.
But it still frightens Mixo, our new rabbit. Clark, the caretaker of the castle, looked out the window last week and said he thought there was something moving in the tomato patch. On closer inspection, it was a snow white bunny, probably put in through the gates by his previous owners. He has a gammy ear and bad eye, which the vet says is from a disease spread by the omnipresent mosquitoes. But he's chipper enough; he lollops about joyfully in little circles in the kitchen garden, inspecting visitors with his good eye and hiding under the rhubarb.
Since we can't go outside much lately, we spend most of our time indoors thinking up ways to get more guests and groups to come and stay here. But today is Ferragosto, a national holiday, and the sun is high and hot. We have a private party of 30 whooping it up down in the coach house, marvelling at the marble staircase and frescoes in the hall, taking smiling photographs on the swings, paddling in the pond and craning their necks to look at the 14th-century tower.
Exactly 102 breathless steps up this imposing red-brick wonder takes you to a tiled terrace perfect for sunbathing and stargazing. Thirty-seven more and you are at the top, gawping out over an endless landscape of fair flat countryside. Clark talks up a supposed spectre, called Anna, who he says threw herself from the tower hundreds of years ago over the love of a man. I've heard her ghost crying on cold nights when I'm here alone, he says seriously, with laughing eyes.
He was first my host when I came to the castle for a week's holiday last year, and became a good friend. I visited again and again. Clark's twinkle and eccentricities have inspired many people to fantasise about a different kind of existence, so I'm not surprised the idea began to build in my mind to go live in Galeazza. It soon clouded out all else. I left my life in Dublin; my dream job, a comfortable house and a vibrant social life of gigs, jigs and cigs, to pursue a foggy notion that there is more out there.
American-born but Italian at heart, Clark moved here 10 years ago from Greece to set up a refuge for bibliophiles. He welcomes students and retirees, lone travellers and groups, families and couples to his home to read in the 3,000-book library, relax in the hammocks under the magnolia trees or just yap about life in the kitchen while helping to make pesto sauce. There are frequent art exhibitions, classical music concerts and themed events to organise - the Halloween party is so scary it carries a warning for people with heart conditions.
I mostly struggle with the past tense of Italian, make jam, change bed sheets and weed the cobblestones. Sometimes I wonder if the road to enlightenment should be paved with so much housework, but then while dragging the mop and bucket past the bathroom window, I'll spy swallows swooping through the parapets of the castle, and I'll smile a little, and just get on with it.
DIT journalism graduate Stephanie Mahon (25) is currently business development manager at Castello di Galeazza.
www.galeazza.com
