It’s hugely encouraging that every week more people are reading the Villasfor2 ‘About Abruzzo’ blog which I started writing about a month after our arrival in Italy in early October 07.

I know from your mails that you regard me and Pauline as a mix of brave, crazy, misguided and/or visionary, but the simple fact is that we wanted somewhere new to live and to run the kind of small, low-key, laid-back villa rental place that we were never quite able to find ourselves…

(Click on the headline title for the full story - with pictures !)

Neurotic ? Us ? Looking back, I wonder why we got as wound-up as we did about how the cats would react to the 1400-mile trek in the back of the car from Somerset to our new home in the hamlet of Ascigno in Abruzzo, where we'll be running a small-scale villa rental business providing […]

Little Plum, Aurora and Edwin. Slightly eccentric names for kids; marginally less so for cats. LP and Rori are blue-point Birman girls; Eddie’s a chocolate-point Siamese boy. If you’re a cat-lover - and let’s face it, the world’s divided into cat lovers or non-cat lovers. Nobody’s indifferent to cats - you’ll now be nodding your head sagely at the mention of Birmans and Siamese and thinking it utterly normal to refer to ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ instead of ‘females’ and ‘males’