A Rosie Life in Italy

October 1, 2024
An Irish wedding planner recovers from a series of setbacks to build her dream life in Italy. Meleady was a child when she first began to dream of a big house abroad, complete with an idyllic al fresco tablescape. For decades, she remained in Ireland, built a career and a family, then lost businesses and buried her sister, continually recalibrating and postponing her dreams. Somehow, she was able to start over again and again, both emotionally and financially, finding her way into international destination wedding planning and building a business that allowed her to mount a sense of financial security. Meleady's path to finally laying the first bricks of a life in Italy is long and winding--her children are teenagers before she finally makes a permanent move--and unfolds in a series of waves of ambition, excitement, and interruptions, alternatively inducing whiplash and slowing to a turtle's tread. Initially, the text provides a charming antidote to the "just do it" missives and unencumbered immediacy of younger influencers or aspirational writers, peppered with relatable practicality. But Covid-19, the regulations for gatherings and business that surrounded it, and the economic havoc it wreaked erected a final barrier between Meleady and her dream. Just as Italy and the world devolved into the murk of the pandemic, so too does Meleady's narrative. Despite hints at inner work and transformation, the author reveals little about these processes, instead filling pages with tedious details of Google searches, wine counts, grocery shopping, and lockdown legalities. To be sure, the author is to be admired for her relentless pursuit of her dream and her adaptability in the face of such a vast number and variety of obstacles. But the author's exacting specificity of banal occurrences hollows her text, interrupting both the plotline and the connection to the author. Sweet and mildly entertaining but rather uninspiring.

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October 7, 2024
Wedding planner Meleady blends HGTV, The Money Pit, and Under the Tuscan Sun in this entertaining account of her family’s move from Ireland to the Italian countryside. After their landlady unexpectedly doubled their rent, Meleady and her photographer husband decided to pack up their children, pets, and belongings and drive in a camper van to Italy, where both had worked at destination weddings. Having dreamed since childhood of restoring “a beautiful home in an exotic country near a lake,” Meleady fell for a dilapidated 1923 villa in Umbria that she dubbed “the Sighing House.” She and her husband put it in a fantastically lowball offer that the sellers ended up accepting, thus embroiling the family in a bitter dispute between eight cousins who co-owned the villa. Shortly after the deal went through and Meleady’s family began restoration, the Covid pandemic hit, forcing them to stop. Meleady regularly sidetracks the main story line to recount comic misadventures including a plumbing mishap in Ireland and accidentally buying her son a guide to drawing erotica. These detours bog things down a bit, but Meleady’s charm and enthusiasm win out in the end. This will delight armchair travelers and aspiring expats alike. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.