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Talking Location With … Barbara Boyle – PIEDMONT

14th January 2025

Barbara BoyleTalkingLocationWith ... Barbara Boyle, author of Pinch Me set in Piedmont.

House at First Sight

Even though we had talked for years about someday living in Europe, the day I fell in love with my home caught me by surprise.

We were vacationing in Italy, and as we often did when visiting someplace interesting, engaged a realtor to show us around, “just in case.”  The little hilltown of Monforte had certainly captured our hearts, but the reality of living there was still a dream.

The realtor picked us up at our hotel and drove us around for the day.  After several hours, he said he had one more option to show us. It was unconventional, off the beaten track, and it needed work. The price was ideal, and the property sounded fairly large. The only problem was that it was not in the town of Monforte, but in Roddino.

Roddino barely qualifies as a town. It is a commune that does not even appear on some maps of the area. Merely four hundred souls live there. It has one church, three good restaurants plus a pizza place, and a post office that is open three mornings a week. That’s it!

But my husband felt it was worth a quick look, so I reluctantly agreed to go along.

We turned off a main road onto a long driveway that curled up in front of a lovely big home. It was brick, with a tile roof and dark green shutters. It had several mature trees, a big garden and a staggering view out to the west.

“Is this it??” I asked our realtor, incredulous.

“No.  It’s that one, there…” he said, pointing across the way to an old barn with a dilapidated pergola. “This newer home is where the sellers live. They’re selling that old house and barn over there.”

I turned and faced the empty old house and barn sitting demurely in the afternoon sun—tall, proud stone walls and rusted iron doors, broken windows and shutters, crowned with a roof of old terracotta tiles, logs, and twigs. There were three outbuildings, crammed with wood, wine barrels, old farm tools, wires, tiles, and stones. The house sat precariously on a narrow level plain that sloped up the hill behind it and slid into the valley in front. And it looked out over the whole world—vineyards, hazelnut orchards, farms and forests–even the little hill town of Monforte, all the way out to the craggy Alps, still brushed with just a smattering of snow on the highest peak.

I looked at my husband, touched him on the arm and said, “This is it.”

“How can you say that?” he replied, always the pragmatist. “We haven’t even seen it yet. Let’s go look inside.”

I don’t remember much about what I saw inside the property that first afternoon, other than it was huge, charming, rambling, and filled with spiders. There did not seem to be a front door anywhere, and the actual house was rather small and sat behind the barn. The barn was massive, wet, muddy, and musty. Down the stairs and to the back of the barn was a long, dank wine cellar that was knee deep in sludge and murky groundwater. This caught my husband’s attention perhaps more than anything else about the house. The other rooms were a maze broken by a few stairs leading up, and a few more leading down, and some leading nowhere.

What I do remember very well is sitting on the grass overlooking the valley. Everyone else was exploring the house and I was alone, just the songs of a thousand birds calling from tree to tree and to me. The sun was warm and steady on my skin, but there was the barest of breezes.

This is it, I thought again.

Barbara Boyle

I was interrupted in my reverie by our realtor saying that the sellers had invited us for coffee on the terrace of their home. I now know that this is very much the custom. Whether you are a potential buyer, an old friend, or a delivery person, any proper Piemontese will invite you for a coffee. I gratefully accepted a water, my husband and the realtor each enjoyed an espresso, and that was my first meeting with Biagio and Angela, two of the most delightful people I have ever known, and certainly the best neighbors on the planet.

Neither Biagio nor Angela speak English, but Biagio’s smile says all he ever needs to say, and Angela seemed to understand whatever I tried to say. Fortunately, the really important words, like caffe and vino and aqua, are pretty international. But then Angela walked over to their impressive vegetable garden and picked a beautiful little flower, pale lavender, with tear-shaped petals, and held it in the palm of her hand. She said a word I didn’t understand: zafferano.

She plucked the intense crimson stigmas from the center of the blossom and gave the little threads to me to inspect. I thought, astonished, this was saffron. Then I remembered that the Milanese use saffron in Risotto alla Milanese for the beautiful golden color and delicate flavor, and Milan is just hours away. Pleased that I understood the significance of her harvest, she went inside and returned with a small jar, placed more stigmas inside, and gave it to me. I would be delighted to break a few import laws to smuggle that precious gift back to San Francisco.

Barbara BoyleWe made the offer on the house that night, uncharacteristically not negotiating the price, but we did add one important clause to the deal. Renovating this barn into a home was going to take time, and many trips to Italy. We asked if they might have a spare room we could rent when we came to visit. They said they did have a small apartment on the second floor of their home. It had its own entrance, a small kitchen, a dining table, couch, and twin beds to push together for couples. Serendipity.

And with that, the deal was done.

Barbara Boyle is the author of “Pinch Me” (She Writes Press, Feb. 11, 2025), a memoir about leaving her California home to restore an old stone farmhouse in Italy’s Piedmont, only to fall in love with the food and people of her enchanting new town.

Connect with Barbara via her website 

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  1. User: Barbara Boyle

    Posted on: 15/01/2025 at 8:36 pm

    Thank you for sharing my story!! Piemonte truly is enchanting, and I know others will find it so, as well.

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