When I went to sleep on New Year’s Eve, I dreamt I was lying back to back with the girl who started the year.
She (I) had brought in the early hours of 2025 on one of her best friend’s sofas, still faintly high and covered in sequins: blissful in the not-knowing of what 2025 was to have in store, about to slope home and fall into a Chinese takeaway with the man she was dating, her legs tucked beneath his and fingers dipped into prawn cracker dust.
This year, I started 2026 very much alone and very much sober, with none of the fireworks or the sparkly kisses or the babysitting children or the playing of spin the bottle.
Instead, I wrote down thirteen wishes for the year on thirteen separate pieces of card, folded them and burned each one until the thirteenth was left. According to the ritual of the thirteen magical nights, it would be my responsibility to make the one that remained happen.
And the last one in the set was the only one that didn’t have a clear outcome attached:
Lead from the heart and leap into joy.
Easy, I thought.
I folded the note into my journal and sprinkled the ashes of the rest at the foot of a fruit tree.
On Zugunruhe, magnetoreception and internal circannual clocks
Now, they say that migratory birds are ruled by an internal circannual clock – a biological rhythm that runs on a year’s cycle and is calibrated by the changing ratio of light to dark.
As the days grow shorter or the mountains draw their evening breath later and later, migratory birds feel a kind of restlessness.
Zugunruhe, according to German research literature.
This, together with a sensitivity to magnetic fields through their vision, magnetite crystals in their beaks, and directional information from the stars, brings a bird thousands of miles to their destination, even if they’ve never travelled it before.
And at the start of the year, I was feeling my own kind of Zugunruhe. A curious case of restlessness and resistance.
I spent January and February circling the water in the cove on my Monday morning sea swims, unable to fully throw myself in. With each passing week, I still couldn’t go there.
I was dipping a toe – all while making viewings to flats I knew I should buy and going on dates with men I wasn’t sure I liked – to try “settling” on for size. Except, all it was doing was making me feel ever more restless and claustrophobic.
All the while, my intuition – whatever crystals, stars, and magnetism our wild human instincts are made from – was begging for adventure.
Specifically, she was crying out for Italy.
This wasn’t the first time I’d booked a one-way flight and moved countries. But it was the first one that made me feel torn in two, between the long-term stability I craved and what my heart wanted so deeply.
One Saturday night, I couldn’t sleep and started messaging villas to rent on Idealista. The next Sunday morning, I received a message from an owner and a few days later, we FaceTimed.
From there, things moved very fast.
She asked if I could make the viewing by the following Thursday rather than the Saturday as planned. And so, on Thursday 26th February, I left a tiny Airbnb in Kensington with a bag of vintage clothes and a new fur coat, boarded the night bus to Heathrow at 3am and set out.
The drive
If the flood of oxytocin in a new relationship is addictive, the feeling of landing in a new country without speaking the language, the not knowing of where you’ll end up, is exquisite. A flog of aliveness to awaken the senses. A feeling of living inside and outside of time.
On three hours sleep, I picked up the hire car from Genoa airport and drove two hours into the mountains, following the Aurelian way that flanks the Ligurian ocean on your left with intermittent plunges into tunnels lit up by headlights.
The road to the villa climbed through villages with pink and yellow houses, crumbling walls, and pillars that lean into the middle of the road – meaning, you must very slowly come to a halt and accept your wing mirror will just graze the stone as you edge forward, then accelerate back onto a road with a death drop to one side.
Turning one of the bends, the red villa appeared and my heart stopped.
The first week
It was love at first sight.
Within 24 hours, the key was in my hand and I spent the Sunday night in the house with no heating.
Bundling up wood and scrunched up sheets of an old notebook, I lit a fire in the living room, pulled up a chair in my fur coat, and laid out a bed for the night. I slept beside the crackle of wood as the house, which hadn’t been slept in for a few months, began to warm and the interior of the house felt like it started moving also. Doors opening and windows buckling little by little – piano piano – not as a haunting, but a gentle waking up.
And in the morning, I woke up to birdsong and watched the sun rising from the mountain in a veil of blue mist.
We signed the contract a week later – a legal necessity for the digital nomad visa. And the owner showed me the plot of land on an olive grove a little way down the mountain where it might be possible to grow tomatoes, basil, herbs, artichokes, zucchini, and aubergine over the coming months.
This is all still a liminal space where the future is uncertain.
But I know that no matter where it ends, I know doing these things is good for the soul. The drives under the blood moon eclipse over a mountain and all the packings of a new life – all the leaving behind of the old stories and the old loves, the grieving and the release to let something that wants to be lived grow in its place.
These are the threads I want to pull, and be weaving for as long as I have the heart in me to.
About Pasta Nipotina
Six years ago, I did as we all did in the pandemic and started to make fresh pasta. Writing about and photographing spaghetti draped over kitchen counters led me in some roundabout way to the career and business I have now – Cantadora, working with climate and nature tech startups on their storytelling.
And now, it’s led me here.
To a villa in the Ligurian mountains, twenty minutes from the sea, with a plot of land in an olive grove beside mimosa trees that wave yellow in the wind and plum trees that are just opening into blossom.
I’ll be sharing updates on moving to Italy on the digital nomad visa, stewarding a plot of land in a regenerative olive grove, Ligurian recipes (naturally) and grandmother medicine at IG: @pasta.nipotina.
Maybe in another life.
No babe. In this one.
Some free the Nip moments
- Asking if it was okay to work on a laptop in a cafe in Finale (in Italian) and actually asking for an introduction to a long table of businessmen having lunch
- Developing a tumultuous relationship with the hire car – after some vertical cliff climbs in search of food and an open restaurant between Cinque Terre and Portofino, we’re now tight 🤞
- Feeling sheer relief to be following someone driving the speed limit, only to watch a policeman throw up his hands, ask them what the hell they were doing and tell them to speed the f* up
