A Second Home in Italy: Big Dreams, Small Villages and Trusting Your Gut

By Patrick · 2026-10-14

A house in Italy. For many people it stays a sentence said on the sofa in the evening and forgotten by the next morning. Conny and her husband made it real a few years ago, in Le Marche, far from overcrowded Tuscany. Their own driveway, a view down the valley, a village where people still live rather than just take photos. Today they rent the house out on Airbnb and use it themselves as a retreat and a home office. Patrick and Rainer are travelling through Italy for Trovara and spoke to Conny: about how the decision was made, how the purchase really went, and what she would tell others who are still hesitating.

Patrick: How did you end up in this region? What made you look here in Le Marche, of all places?

Conny: Italy was my wish. My husband had always wanted a property on Mallorca, because his uncle had one there. I said I didn't want to go anywhere I'd have to fly to before I could arrive. Covid later showed us that this was a good instinct.

I've loved Italy for a long time, so we travelled a lot around the country. We were near Genoa, in the Veneto, on Lake Garda. But I ruled Lake Garda out, because I thought I might as well stay in Germany. We looked at Tuscany. Far too expensive, far too crowded, far too touristy. On the Amalfi Coast we practically fled from our holiday because it was too crowded for us. And then we ended up in Le Marche by chance and fell in love. That feeling of arriving, of slowing down. For us, this is the original Italy, with the little villages all around.

Patrick: It has a completely different character. In Tuscany it's almost nothing but souvenir shops, restaurants and attractions now. Here the land is still farmed. You can tell this is a working part of Italy. Tourism is slowly arriving here too, and a bit of that is fine.

Conny: Exactly. That's why we make a point of shopping in the small stores. I drive to Monterubbiano for fresh pasta, then to the greengrocer whose mother grows the vegetables in her own garden, and then over to Petritoli for fresh fish. It would be a shame if these shops disappeared. You can tell that young people are leaving, for Ancona or for bigger cities. But the infrastructure in the villages is there, and I think that's really great. A little tourism would help places like Petritoli keep it.

Rainer: How long were you looking?

Conny: The whole process took two or three years. But in Le Marche, surprisingly, we only looked at two houses. One was Casa Bidi, a detached house. We really liked it, but it was too expensive and would have needed too much work. And the next one was already our current house. The owner showed it to us herself, and that same day we said: we'll do it. Everything simply fit. We knew it was her family home, which she had done up with her brothers. If you do that for yourself, you don't sell rubbish.

Patrick: It was a similar story for us. Our house had been restored as a holiday home by a family from Fermo. Before that we looked at a good two dozen houses in the area. But with ours, we came up the hill, my wife walked round the corner, and we hadn't even been inside. She just looked down into the valley, towards Petritoli, and thought: this is it. I can feel it. Then we went in, and luckily the house was great too. But it's a very emotional decision.

Rainer: You said you deliberately didn't want anything you'd have to renovate or restore. Why was that so clear?

Conny: If you don't speak the language fluently and have to buy in every service, the risk was simply too high for us: that it wouldn't work out, that people wouldn't turn up, or that in the end it wouldn't turn out the way you imagined. You can do it if you're very handy yourself and enjoy it. Then it's certainly a great thing, because you get beautiful properties. But I think it usually ends up costing a lot more than planned.

Why should it be any different in Italy than in Germany? Building prices have gone up, a tradesman's hour costs more, and even at home you're glad if you can get anyone at all. You need the infrastructure, you need your people. And neither of us comes from that field.

If you buy something finished, on the other hand, you know your final price. Of course you still spend something on furnishing it, but you have your budget and can decide for yourself. You can buy second-hand, go for something stylish or stay in the mid-range. For us it was a huge advantage that our house had been completely renovated ten or fifteen years earlier. We could move straight in and were here on our first holiday a week later. We bought a new mattress, and that was it. The kitchen and bathrooms were new; we did the garden and the outdoor area ourselves.

Rainer: How did you know the price was right?

Conny: We did a lot of research and comparing. We also talked to the other owners. There are three apartments in the building, and we knew what they had paid. Friends helped us too, people we had stayed with on holiday nearby. They run a wonderful agriturismo (a farm stay), grow their own wine, originally come from Milan and have lived here for twenty years. They were a great help with comparing prices and with the legal questions.

From the start the seller said clearly: that's my price, I'm not going down. We had set our budget, and it fit within it.

Rainer: And the process after that? Legal advice went through the notary, and you didn't have a lawyer of your own as well?

Conny: We found ourselves an interpreter; the notary was the seller's. By now we also have a tax adviser here. The interpreter came recommended. He does a lot of contracts in the region, and we asked him whenever we wanted to know something. Reliable, quick, knows his way around here.

Rainer: And anyone involved in these processes naturally knows everyone else, too. The geometri (surveyors), the notaries, the lawyers, the tax advisers.

Patrick: How were you able to finance it so quickly?

Conny: We didn't want to spend two years building first; we wanted to have something straight away. And we were lucky that my husband was able to sell his house in Wuppertal. His mother had lived there before. She moved into a flat, and the house became free. Then we asked ourselves what to do with it. We didn't want to keep it.

Patrick: It was similar for us. I studied in England back then and, with quite a bit of luck, bought myself a tiny student flat in London. It then simply sat there for decades. When we moved back to Düsseldorf with the children, we said: now we'll sell the thing. Thanks to how prices had developed, 23 years later that was something like a small lottery win, and suddenly the question was what to do with it. At some point an acquaintance from Hamburg said: why don't you go to Le Marche? I didn't even know where that was. We went anyway, via Pedaso and Urbino, and ended up staying here in Fermo. That evening I looked at property prices for the first time and just thought: they've forgotten a zero.

Patrick: You also rent the house out. How did you organise that?

Conny: My husband did all the registering and reporting, so the complicated stuff. I set up an Airbnb account very quickly. Airbnb is the right platform for us. On top of that there were two or three Dutch women here who run a holiday rental agency and were already well connected, and we were able to join them. It works well; the season is always fully booked. This year we even have guests in October.

Rainer: And the services around it?

Conny: Our gardener looks after the garden and the pool, and our housekeeper gets the apartment ready and takes the laundry. She's super reliable. We were able to rely on really good structures, and it all works very well. The feedback has been consistently good too; on Airbnb we almost always get five stars. I read every review myself, and the guests are always delighted. And hardly anything has ever been broken. People really take good care of things, and I'm very grateful for that.

Rainer: Do you sometimes work from here, too?

Conny: Only administrative things. In my job as a naturopath I have to be with the patient, one to one. But my husband can work from home here. Our neighbours often do that too.

Rainer: Of course, that's a dream. Whether you sit at your laptop here or at home, the difference is the surroundings.

Conny: Exactly. You go into the pool at lunchtime instead of having to grab something quick to eat in the city. I recently told my son I wish I could take this calm back home with me into my work. That my head would always wind down the way it does here.

Rainer: What's your favourite time of year?

Conny: The most beautiful time is before summer really gets going, so April and May. We're always here anyway around our wedding anniversary at the end of April. Then we can bring our bikes, we have e-gravel bikes, and you can do more sport because it isn't so hot yet. We always wonder why people don't come in April or May. It's so beautiful, and it just does you good to soak up some proper sun.

And June. Do you know Castelluccio, up in the Sibillini mountains? I love mountain sports and go hiking there; you can also go ski touring or paragliding. In June the lentil fields are in bloom, everything is red, there are cornflowers everywhere. It's a high plateau, and you'd think you were in the Andes. Unbelievably beautiful.

Rainer: What would you recommend to people who are just starting out and want to buy something?

Conny: Look at as much as you can. Get in touch with people who live there, and with people who have already done it. Learn from their experience. And listen to your gut. We sat here back then and said: this is it, let's do it.

Patrick: It's a family project, too. The whole family has to want it, otherwise it won't work. The financial commitment anyway, but also the time. And you need a solid base to fall back on, because things keep getting delayed, take longer and cost more.

Conny: We were always on the same page with all the work. We're both very practical. If something doesn't work, we just do it differently; we don't get stuck. That's how we make decisions quickly, too. The sofa fits, let's take it. I don't like the wall colour, we'll change it.

Patrick: That's the whole point, isn't it? If you treat yourself to a little house in the south, you want to enjoy it. Lots of our friends always say: I couldn't do that, you're putting all your money into a house in the south and you're hardly ever there. And what if something goes wrong?

Conny: Of course something can go wrong any day, in the worst case all the way to having to sell. Fine, then we'll still have enjoyed every day here and probably even made a bit of money. Nothing worse can happen.

At the beginning I always said I didn't want to holiday in the same place every time. Now I think it's actually lovely. When we take time off, we only decide at short notice where to spend it. If the house is free, we come here. If a booking comes in, we go somewhere else. We're here ourselves six or seven times a year anyway.

Rainer: Would you do anything differently?

Conny: My husband always says there are two things he'd do again straight away. Marry me, of course. And buy this house.

If I may add one last thing: had I known back then that this platform existed, we would definitely have used it.

Rainer: That's exactly our goal. People who want to take this path, or are only just thinking about it and are standing at the start with a thousand questions, should be able to do it through Trovara. Where do I start, what do I need to know, which region suits me? You can look at regions, gather information and compare, right down to the individual comune. And the key questions about a specific property are answered in a single report. That gives you a real head start for the next steps.

Conny, thank you for talking so openly. Enjoy your house here.