Robert and I are a young couple who live in the outskirts of Manoppello area of Abruzzo. Manoppello is 20 minutes from Pescara if you drive in a straight line towards Rome along the main road.

When did we arrive?

We have lived in Abruzzo for  2 years now. We also still keep our family home in the UK.

We fulfilled our dream of coming to live in Italy Easter 2008.

Why did we move to Italy

My husband Robert wanted to live in Italy becuase an old job of his brought him repeatedly to Napoli area and he fell in love with Italy.

The place where we lived in Britain was rife with crime despite being a part of quite a well to do area. Every day we would walk round and see dog muck on the pavements, (like you never saw in your whole life) broken glass, litter, vandalism etc. Also our house got burgled and our car got smashed up 4 times in just 6 months.

There was one day when we came back from a lunchtime walk to find a group of people having a riot on there lawn, they were fighting with cricet bats, claw hammers, etc all manner of awful things. We phoned the police, but they told us to phone back if it got any worse........how could it get worse??

Also we got sick of the rain in Britain. For 2 whole years all it did all Summer in the North West was rain, it was soul destroying.

Also we noticed that our community had become very distant. Working from home, there were times when we could go for several months without seeing anyone. There were a lot of migrant workers who moved in and it made it very difficult to communicate with people when we went out to eat etc.

Obviously it was hard to leave family and friends behind, but our families are not the closest and lots of our friends moved away for work etc or just lived in other areas.

We both have the sort of work that can be done from anywhere in the world, so we decided to move to Abruzzo.

Why did we choose Abruzzo?

We did the very English thing, we bought the Italy magazines, the Italia magazine etc and scoured through those to see what areas of Italy were looking good.

Tuscany was way out of our price range, and already full of English people.

The next place the magazines seemed to be suggesting was Le Marche. so after we got married in October 2007 we went on honeymoon to Le Marche area to look for a house. We did not want to just dive straight in and buy a house, so we decided to look for a "doer upper" and rent some-where in the meanwhile.

Our journey was fruitful, we returned having bagged a great rental and also eyed up an ideal renovation project.

However upon our return we tried to book our tickets to come back to Le Marche only to discover that Ryanair had pulled the route, they no longer flew from Liverpool to Anconca, which would have been the lifeline of our journeys back to Britain.So our plans to move to Le Marche failed and we were back to square 1.

I returned to the Italy magazine one more time and studied closely what was being said.

Calabria sounded nice but lacking infrastrcuture and parts of it are supposed to be similar to third world also there are a lot of immigrants that come up from Africa.

Puglia would be way to hot for me.

We knew nothing about Sicily.

The North was too expensive.

And we wanted somewhere with constant flights access to Britain. (like Rome or Milan)

So we arrived at the choice of Abruzzo. It still amazes me that all of this was done through the humble pages of magazines and furtive Google searching......

So in our typically English fashion we had already decided to move to Abruzzo without even visting the place.

We set about finding a place to rent, and booked tickets to come and view 2 properties.