Buying a house in a small Italian town was not something I had in mind when I initially arrived in Italy in 2015 as a graduate student. As someone who enjoys big cities, I was all about the Milans and Johannesburgs of the world at the time. The bigger and more chaotic the town, the better.

But in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic tested my affection for big-city living. Living in Milan and being under lockdown in an apartment in a usually bustling city that had grown uncharacteristically silent was, to put it mildly, unnerving.