This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kaitlin Landolfa, 25, an American who moved full-time to Florence, Italy, in 2022 after studying abroad there. She now works as an English teacher at an Italian school. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
At Florida State University, the study abroad programs give you the opportunity to go to Valencia, London, or Florence. Originally, I was supposed to study abroad my freshman year summer in Valencia, Spain, but I didn’t get the money together in time, so I ended up not going.
Then I completely changed ideas and said, “Nope, let’s go to Florence.”
I love Italian food, which was a big push for me to go to Italy instead of Spain, and I said, “I’m going to do a whole semester instead of just six weeks in the summer.”
In January of 2020, I arrived in Florence for my first semester studying abroad.
I met some of my best friends that semester, and we were there for about two months. We were supposed to be there for four months total, but around the end of February, the first case of COVID came to Florence, and my program was canceled.
I was devastated because I was having the time of my life in Florence. I was obsessed with the city, and I was really sad that my time there was getting chopped in half.
So my two friends, whom I made there, and I said, “OK, we’ll try to come back the following spring, and we’ll study abroad again.”
We came back in January 2021 for another semester studying abroad.
That semester was still not normal because it was still very much COVID times. We had a curfew — not just the students, but the entire city — of 10 p.m.
The city was empty, and it was very strange because we’d be walking by some of the biggest monuments in Florence, and it would be just us.
It was absolutely beautiful to see things like the Duomo, the Ponte Vecchio, and Piazzale Michelangelo, completely empty.
In this semester abroad, I really fell in love with Florence because I got to see it in its truest form — without any tourists, without anyone really there.
After my second study abroad program, I went back to FSU and finished out my senior year. At this point, my friends and I decided that the summer after we graduated, we needed a normal experience in Florence. We thought, “Let’s not just do the whole summer, let’s stay for 10 months. We’ll get jobs, and we’ll just live there.”
I moved to Florence nine days after I graduated in May 2022.
February of 2023 was the end of the 10 months, so it was the time that I was supposed to be leaving, but something in me just wasn’t quite ready to leave.
I had loved the life that I had built in Florence. I had fallen even more in love with the city. So I said, “OK, I’ll do another six months and stay until the end of summer.”
By the time I stayed another two months, I said I’m going to stop it with the timeline. I’m going to stay here until there’s a reason to not stay here anymore. Now I’ve been here for almost four years.
In my head, I really thought, life is short, and you never know what’s going to happen. Getting to live abroad and experience those things, of course, is something I could have waited until I was older to do, but I just saw beauty in doing it while I was young.
Italians have generally been welcoming to Americans like me in Italy
In Florence, there’s a huge American expat community, and I would say a large majority are people my age. I have a whole friend group here of just American girls my age who have all made the move to Florence. It’s really crazy actually how many Americans there are in Florence now — aside from the ones who are studying abroad.
A majority of the Italians I’ve met have been super welcoming; they want to show you things, and they’re super happy to know that someone moved all the way from the US to live in their city.
Most of the reactions have been very positive, but, of course, you can’t win them all, and there are some people who are not very happy about the Americans who have moved here.
One day I was walking down the street with two of my American friends and an older Italian woman started screaming at us in Italian to go back to our own country.
A small amount of people aren’t happy with Americans moving here, because they think that the Americans coming in are causing prices to go up, because Americans have more money than Italians.
So there is some backlash, which is understandable. Even I have noticed since I moved here that prices for rent have gone up astronomically in Florence.
But, if someone moves here, most likely they’re working on an Italian salary, so they’re not going to be paying an astronomical price for an apartment like someone making an American salary would.
Coming from the American perspective, people think that life in Italy is much cheaper than in the US, because compared to the US it is.
But if you take the difference in salaries into comparison, it’s about equal. The cost of living in Italy is low, but the average salary in Italy is also extremely, extremely low.
A culture shock I experienced was at my first job out of college when I first moved to Italy and I saw how much I was going to be getting paid. I was like, “What?” It seemed so crazy low. But then I took into account the cost of living, and I said, “OK, we can survive with this. It’s nothing crazy.”
I don’t think I’ll ever return full-time to the US
My family is my No. 1 thing that I miss. It’s sometimes hard because I’m not there for everyone’s birthdays, or some big events I have to miss because it’s too much to fly all the way home.
I miss my friends. I miss Chipotle. But I really don’t miss a lot about the US.
Never say never, but if I had to guess, I think I will be here forever. At this point, I love it here. I’ve built a life for myself here, and a life that I don’t ever see myself wanting to leave. So I think this is home now.
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