Our Friends at Home Abroad Are Throwing a Housewarming, So the Italian Neighbour Has Arrived

Casually dressed, suspiciously elegant, carrying a tray of lasagne, unsolicited opinions, and one essential question: where in the world are you building your life?

There are many things an Italian neighbour can be accused of being. Quiet is rarely one of them.

We may arrive casually, but somehow suspiciously elegant. We may say we are “just passing by”, while carrying enough food to feed a diplomatic delegation. We may bring lasagne, very strong opinions about coffee, and a level of emotional participation in your furniture layout that nobody explicitly requested. We may ask, within the first twelve minutes, where you are from, where you are going, what you are eating, who made the sauce, why the espresso has not appeared yet, and whether you are really sure about those curtains.

But we are also the neighbour who opens the door in the middle of the night, makes coffee without turning it into a philosophical debate - or, at least, tries not to - finds a bottle of limoncello that was apparently “just there”, and somehow turns a small visit into a conversation about home, belonging, work, family, migration, hospitality, language, architecture, and why the table should never be too far from the kitchen. Just don’t mention football (soccer). Not this year.

So when our friends at Home Abroad told us they were turning one and invited ITS Journal to become one of their neighbours for their housewarming, we could hardly say no.

In fact, it would have been rude.

Home Abroad has opened a beautiful interactive Housewarming Wall to celebrate its first birthday, and they are asking one very simple, very large question:

Where in the world are you building a life?

That is the kind of question that looks innocent until you actually try to answer it. Because building a life somewhere is not always the same as living there. It can mean choosing a country, a city, a village, a street, a kitchen table, a community, a project, a language, a person, a routine, or even just a corner of the world where, for reasons you cannot fully explain, your breathing becomes slightly easier.

It can be practical. It can be romantic. It can be temporary. It can be chaotic. It can be a place you moved to, a place you returned to, a place you left behind but still carry with you, or a place you are building slowly, while pretending you have a plan.

And because this is a housewarming, everyone is invited to leave a sentence on the wall.

Where in the world are you building a life?

One sentence is enough. More are welcome. Poetic, practical, funny, sentimental, confused, gloriously overthought - all acceptable forms of participation.

There is also a small celebration attached to it. Everyone who adds their name to the wall goes into the draw for a “key to the house”: a free year of Home Abroad. Ten keys will be given away, and two people will also be invited to Kaila’s kitchen table for a private half-hour, one-to-one conversation. Entries close on 11 July, and the keys will be drawn live on 13 July.

For us, this invitation felt especially close to home, because ITS Journal spends much of its time telling stories about people who live between places, or who are trying to understand what a place does to a life. We publish stories of foreigners who come to Italy, Italians who live abroad, people who move for work, love, curiosity, survival, reinvention or the slightly dangerous belief that elsewhere might explain something about themselves that home never quite managed to.

We are interested in the practical side of building a life abroad - the houses, the visas, the businesses, the schools, the trains that do or do not arrive, the villages that look romantic until you need a plumber, the cities that look impossible until you discover your own rhythm inside them. But we are also interested in the stranger part: what happens to identity when it stops being tied to one postcode, one accent, one table, one set of habits, one idea of “normal”.

In other words, Home Abroad’s question is exactly our kind of question.

And, like many Italian houses, our own little editorial home has rather more rooms than one might expect from the outside.

There is ITS Journal, where we look at Italy, Italians abroad, foreigners in Italy, and the many ways people build lives across borders. There is Esco quando voglio - literally, I Leave Whenever I Want - my (meaning, it’s me Matteo Cerri) personal corner of the house, for thoughts that do not always sit politely inside a category. There is Nomag Media, for digital nomads and for those who know that working from anywhere is not quite the same thing as collecting passport stamps or placing a laptop near a palm tree. There is Smart Working Magazine, for the Italian world of remote work, hybrid work, HR and workplace transformation. There is Azienda Top, where we look at companies, leadership, innovation and the business culture changing around us. There are the publications we curate, like We the Italians and Startup-News. And soon there will also be ITALIC, dedicated to what Italian journalists abroad and international journalists in Italy see, write and understand when Italy is no longer just a country, but a point of view.

And then there are other rooms we are preparing. The Guest Journal, coming soon (now collecting experiences and stories from our contributors with boots and ciabatte on the ground), will be dedicated to real hospitality experiences rather than commercial reviews, especially in the Italy of scattered villages, small places and diffused hospitality. And because we are Italians, of course we are the publishers of Design Courier, a reference point for the world of hospitality and residential design, written with and for people who actually make spaces work, not just look good in a photograph.

So yes, we have something for almost every taste. Too many rooms, probably too many keys, absolutely no chance of us being minimalist about it.

Proudly fully remote, proudly Italian, and not particularly interested in the idea that being Italian should be reduced to geography.

That is why we are very happy to show up at Home Abroad’s housewarming. Casually dressed, suspiciously elegant, possibly carrying too much food, and definitely asking questions that are simple only until you try to answer them.

So, from our little Italian editorial house to theirs: happy first birthday, Home Abroad.

And to our readers: go and sign the wall. Or else… ☠️

Tell them where in the world you are building your life.

And, if nobody has made espresso yet, please do the decent thing.