We left Florence two years ago after living here for 15 years. We headed back to the USA newly retired with a couple of goals. The short-term goal was to spend some significant time with our daughters and their husbands which meant visits to Montpelier, Vermont and St. Croix, Virgin Islands.  The long-term goal was to figure out how we would like to arrange our lives in this new “retirement” chapter….where would we like to settle and what would we be doing with our time?

Mountains, Sky and Green everywhere you look in Vermont

Blue and Blue and Sun everywhere you look in St. Croix

We met the first goal easily and with great pleasure.  The photos above were taken from the deck of each house…….spectacular and iconic views in both places.

The second goal was a different story.  We loved our time in each of these two beautiful places, but Italy continued to beckon….and so here we are again in this wonderful city, trying to work out how we can manage to divvy up each year into three vastly different experiences on a modest (some would say impossible) budget.

The next series of blogs will ricochet between Vermont, St. Croix and Italy…..the beauty and comfort and challenge of each place and the experiences we encountered along the way.

Meanwhile, I’ll start where we are and celebrate the happiness and excitement of being back in Florence………

The welcoming colors at the end of the day in Florence