Keys

We hurtled into a low orbit, the refuelling planes came close, and after some jiggling and joggling we sliced through the atmosphere to land at the Notary's office just before noon in Via Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Banks cheques were in place and we duly assembled in a high-celinged, hand-painted room of intricate High Renaissance patterns: two estate agents, two lawyers, two sellers and two buyers and the notary and her assistants.

The sale contract, a long and, some would say, an arduous piece of legal kerfuffle, was read out.

It is a very different process from the UK system. The Notary basically checks that everything is being done with due regard to process, that everyone is being paid, and that everyone understands what is going on and what their obligations are in the process. And she registers everything with the authorities to whom things need to be registered.

It is a kind of witnessing both on a legal and also personal and both intimate (this is the house they bought together before he, the husband, died) and banal (who paid the last bill and what is the number of the electricity account) level that things are as they should be and that they are experienced together and written down in the document - rogito -  that is read out to the assembled group of interested parties

It is actually quite a solemn thing to do to sit opposite the sellers and pass them the cheques and sign a document together.

An hour and half later we walked out of the exquisite 17th century palazzo in the centre of Florence with a small carrier bag full of keys having signed many pages of many documents with our 'extended' (full name) signatures.

Then we drove out to the house in thick traffic and spent an hour trying to gain access to our new possession. In the end I climbed a ricketty old ladder into an open first-floor window to unlock the many doors that had been left with keys in the inner locks.

Later we drove the hour and quarter back to our apartment as the light faded in fields of red sky and blazing cherry orchards, having had another meeting with our insurance agent and made (with the lovely Gianluca) our first failed attempt at getting the electricity turned back on.

It has been a momentous day.

Tiring, exciting, exhilarating and frustrating.

But we are there. We have flopped over the finish line with a house and barn and nearly four acres of land that are beyond our boldest expectations within the budget that we had set ourselves.

This process started on the internet in the spring of 2016, I met our first potential seller in July when he commandeered my rental car and took me to a house for sale (that in the end turned out not to be for sale) of that year and we returned regularly  to see more houses and adjust and recalibrate our expectations, expenses and dreams. We saw our first house in the Casentino in the freezing cold and snow of January 2017 and it has taken until now, with a number of false starts and hurriedly executed U-turns to get here.

There is much to do and a list of works is in the offing. For now we are transformed from searchers into owners in the blink of the Notary's eye and we give thanks to the many, many people who have helped us on our way, put themselves out and gone the extra km and mile for us, cheered us on and urged caution and adventure in equal measure.

The house is called Ca' di Bati and was built before 1825 of local stone and tile. It is a classic unassuming farmhouse and haybarn of its era. It stands at 500m altitude in the valley of the Rio Solano, a tributary of the upper Arno in the beautiful hills and mountains of Tuscany's Casentino.

The project, with its due hiccups and tribulations, and its unexpected joys and moments of disarming hilarity and surprising gravity, has begun.