Ciao tutti

Ciao tutti, siamo John & ToniWe first fell in love with southern Italy in 2005 on our holiday to Sicili, which is near Policastro in the Salerno province of Campania. By chance at the local post office when we were sending our postcards back home we were standing behind a gentleman who asked up if we were English. We struck up a conversation with him in our limited Italian and his reasonably good English and he made sure we got the stamps that we needed and let us go in front of him in the queue. We told him he was "molto gentile" as we left and went on our way to pop the postcards in the postbox.While we were sticking the stamps on the postcards he came out of the post office and offered to show us round his village of Policastro. Although his English was reasonably good he did not feel that it was good enough to show us inside the cathedral and asked us if we would like to meet up with him a few days later with an English speaking cousin of his so that she could translate for us. it was such a lovely morning and we found out so much about his cathedral and other parts of his village. We met up with him a couple of times after that for coffee. By the end of the holiday we knew that we wanted to live near Policastro some day and mentioned this to our friend. We asked him to let us know if something came up for sale in the area (initially for our holidays). On a grey February morning in 2006 he phoned us to say that a friend of his had got a small house for sale in a mountain village called Santa Marina. We went out to see it on a flying visit (24 hours round trip) in March and signed the compromesso that day. We went out again that June to go to the Notiao and complete the sale. The house needed a bit of work doing to it and John drove to Italy that September to start work. A months work by John and two weeks work by Toni and the house just needed painting, so John went back the following January to do that and then it was ready for us to have our holidays there.We have since had many lovely holidays there and plan to live somewhere near there in the near future hopefully. Each time we go there we find it harder to leave to come back to England.A chance meeting with somebody in the post office has forged a special friendship and enabled us to realise our dream.