Moving to Italy With Kids: What Nobody Tells You About Small-Village Life

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If you have ever caught yourself scrolling photos of Italian villages and quietly wondering whether your family could actually live there, this one is for you. Moving to Italy with kids is a dream a lot of families carry, and also one most people talk themselves out of, because the internet makes it look either impossibly complicated or falsely simple. You have seen the one euro house headlines. What they leave out is that the one euro house often needs two hundred thousand euros of work, and there is almost nobody left in the village to do it.

There is a slower, saner way to find out if village life in Italy is right for your family. It starts with a story.

We have loved Italy for years

Long before we had kids, Italy had our hearts, and we kept going back. In 2019 I had an idea I could not shake: a place where people who wanted more than a vacation could actually live for a while, work, and go deeper. Not in Rome, not in the cities already drowning in tourists, but in the small villages, learning from the locals who hold all the stories and skills but no longer have enough visitors to keep their town alive. It was my answer to overtourism. Move the energy away from the crowded cities and toward the smaller places that have far more cultural richness and far fewer people to share it with. The kind of place a seasoned traveler, or anyone craving a slower pace, would love far more than one more crowded piazza.

Then life happened. The pandemic hit, I got pregnant, and the whole idea went on the shelf.

Worldschooling brought it back

After the girls came along, we started traveling full time as a family and joined several worldschooling cohorts along the way. Living that life is what made me realize the Italy idea had never actually died. If anything, becoming a mom made it clearer. My kids did not need another summer camp. They needed to go deeper too.

Fast forward a few years, and we ended up in a small town tucked in the mountains of northern Italy, where Liguria meets Piedmont. We went in the off season, when it was quiet, and something clicked. Every single day felt like the worldschooling we had always wanted for our kids. We were not visiting the village. We were living in it, with the kind of support around us that most families never get when they travel. It was the thing I had sketched out in 2019, except real, and better, because now it had my children in it.

So I asked the town a question

I asked the locals a simple thing: would you want to help me recreate this, but for more families? And the answer, from basically the whole town, was yes.

Here is why it works. This town fills up a little in summer and then empties out for the rest of the year. There is not enough year round infrastructure to keep people, so the population keeps shrinking and the houses keep going up for sale. But it is not a ghost town. It still functions. It still has its culture, its people, its rhythm. It is not a place you have to build from zero. It is a place worth helping survive. Local people are helping me put this together, and the town’s forestry school, one of its real treasures, is genuinely excited to be part of it.

Real Italy, not tourist Italy

This is for the family that wants to feel like they actually landed in the middle of Italy. Not the packaged version, the real one, where you fumble through Italian and your neighbor helps you anyway, where your kids play with local kids, where the days are slow and the learning is woven into ordinary life. It is for people a little tired of being shuffled around in programs built for vacationers, when what they really want is to go deep: worldschooling, a new language, places off the usual map, an experience that feels organic and real.

And it is for the family seriously dreaming of moving to Italy who wants to test drive it first. Before you buy the one euro house and discover the two hundred thousand euro renovation, before you commit to anything, you get to actually live it for a bit and feel how it fits. Slow travel, moving abroad, investing, relocating, and building real community, all in one place.

The reel that started it

I made a short reel about this dream, and it clearly struck a nerve, because it brought thousands of you here. If you want to feel it in ninety seconds, watch it here.

If this is your dream too

I am keeping the town itself close for now, but I am gathering the families who feel this pull so we can build it together instead of alone. If that is you, come get on the list and I will keep you close as it takes shape: stan.store/bravefamilytravel. The first thing there is the interest form, and it is how I keep everyone in one place.

Moving to Italy does not have to be a leap into the dark. It can start with a handful of slow days in a real village, among people who actually want you there. That is what we are building.

Xoxo, Marae: your travel mom bestie
www.bravefreetravel.com