Giving Up Paris for a Small Town in Italy

Stop expecting it to look like you thought it would

Iconic Paris, captured on a client shoot in 2024.

I’ve just come home to my small town in Italy, fresh off a week working in Milan on a few photo shoots. Being in any European city always gets me wondering: could I — should I — go back to city life?

I get pulled into the allure of the glamour, fun and chaos, everything available 24/7 at my fingertips, when I visit.

And it eventually gets me thinking about the hard choice I made in 2018 to walk away from all that, to leave my dream city, Paris, just when everything had finally fallen into place.

I think about everything I gained by leaving. And everything I had to give up.

In the years since, with remote work, freelance life, and online entrepreneurship becoming more viable, more people seem to be asking themselves the same question: Should I leave the city for the slow life?

So I thought I’d tell my story: how I ended up giving up my dream of living in Paris for the quiet life in the Italian countryside.

This theme of choosing where to live, city versus country life will be something I re-visit over and over again I’m sure but here’s the origin story of how I came to that decision.

Maybe it’ll help you if you’re standing at a similar, confusing fork in the road.

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2018, me on my apartment balcony in Paris by Lydia Trappenberg

In 2018, at the age of 32 — after a lifetime spent pining for Paris ever since a visit at age 12, learning French all through school and university, enduring a ‘character-building’ summer exchange in the suburbs of Paris and even moving to London (close, but not quite Paris) — I’d finally done it.

I spent several years skirting the three-month Schengen limit by hopping in and out of the country, lived in Paris for a year on a youth exchange visa, and I’d finally secured the mysterious French "talent et compétences" visa with a painstakingly assembled 100-page business plan, a five-year path to citizenship part of the deal.

I’d found a long-term apartment living with my best friend in my dream neighbourhood and everything was, at last, shored up.

Except, internally, things were starting to unravel.