Had we not taken the wrong road down the mountain after viewing a small apartment in Coldirodi, well, our Ospedaletti adventure would never have begun.
We were on a trip with several apartment viewings in Ceriana, Perinaldo, Sanremo and, indeed, Coldirodi, and had more or less started preparing ourselves for the journey back to Denmark without having found "the apartment" in Italy. Then chance, assisted by a little luck, brought us to Ospedaletti, a town we knew very little about.
It should be said that from the moment we saw the apartment and experienced the town that Friday afternoon, we never had any doubt – that apartment had to be ours.
Not because 42 square metres is much to boast about, and had we been able to get three rooms and the same view for the same price, we would have chosen that instead. But we bought into the apartment and the town as one complete package. We both had the immediate feeling that this was the right place to experience Italy at close quarters.
And four years later, it turns out we were more than right.
Ospedaletti – everything in one town
When you sit at home in Denmark dreaming of a life in Italy, the same images tend to appear. Small, romantically winding streets between old houses in warm earth tones. Green shutters. Citrus trees heavy with fresh yellow lemons. A bar on a little square where the locals sit with an aperitif while evening slowly takes over. Mountains in the background and the sea just around the corner. A life among locals without (other) tourists.
The only problem is that these places rarely exist in the same place. The dream is usually a patchwork of all the wonderful places you've been.
If you want the classic mountain village, you generally have to head inland. If you want to live by the sea, you often have to accept that old lanes give way to promenades and apartment blocks. If you want the city, traffic, noise and parking problems usually come as part of the deal.
But Ospedaletti isn't like that. Here, rather inconveniently for the theory, almost every dream of romantic Italy has ended up in one town.
The old town still sits at its heart with narrow alleyways and old houses, while the rest of Ospedaletti has spread around it in small concentric rings. A few minutes' walk later, you're on the seafront looking across the Mediterranean, and if you turn around, the mountains rise almost directly behind the houses, which is why practically every apartment seems to come with a sea view.
Head east and you end up in Sanremo. Go west and France and Monaco are quickly within reach, and when we need the full authentic mountain-village experience, we head up to Coldirodi, perched above Ospedaletti.
40 km of uninterrupted cycle path from Ospedaletti to Diano Marina
Free beaches – and plenty of them
Just over an hour by train and bus from Nice Airport
The motorway close by, without being remotely annoying
Less than an hour's drive to Alpine skiing in Piedmont (once the Tende Tunnel is fully operational again)
And that isn't even the complete list
But that's far from everything
Ospedaletti also enjoys one of the mildest climates in Italy. Like so many places, the weather has become less predictable here too, but it never gets properly cold in winter and rarely gets properly hot in summer.
Surely there can't be much else that's good about Ospedaletti? You may be thinking. There is.
The town has everything we need for daily life, so we rarely use the car unless we're heading off on longer trips with the cameras or doing a serious grocery shop.
We walk down for breakfast bread.
We walk down for a coffee.
We walk down for a swim.
We walk down to do the shopping.
We walk down for an aperitif.
We just walk down.
And every time, we walk back up to our apartment again.
Before long we've done 10,000 steps – so apparently living in Ospedaletti is good for you too.
For many people, mountain villages are the dream, but we've visited plenty of small Italian mountain towns where a car is essential unless you're content with staying in your apartment and the little town itself. Those places have charm by the bucketload, but for us they also have a downside that perhaps becomes more obvious when holidays turn into everyday life.
Life happens in the streets and squares
In Ospedaletti, as in much of Italy, a large part of everyday life takes place outdoors. On the town squares and, in Ospedaletti's case, along the seafront and beaches, where there are ample opportunities to sit down and watch the town go about its business. Alongside everyone else who has also decided to sit down.
As the sign at the entrance to town says (see the photo right at the top), Ospedaletti has one of the mildest climates in Italy. When northern Italy is baking, with temperatures approaching 40 degrees across the Po Valley and in Genoa, it rarely gets much above 30 here. We've also sat outside in December in a T-shirt, at 16 degrees, drinking a glass of prosecco at Versillesi (a lovely restaurant on the beach). So the weather rarely provides a convincing excuse for staying indoors.
So we order a spritz, or a beer, or a Negroni, or ......!
Shortly afterwards, a plate appears with crisps, olives, focaccia and assorted little snacks. In Italy, drinks don't arrive without something to eat. It simply appears. For those of us accustomed to paying 30–40 Danish kroner for a bowl of peanuts back home, it remains an almost childlike pleasure. And yes – we know exactly which bar serves which snacks ;)
Our task, then, is simply to relax completely and do absolutely nothing except enjoy the extraordinary stroke of luck we had when we took the wrong road down the mountain back in April 2023.
We've even been lucky enough to make several friends and acquaintances in town, which means we often have a date with "the friends" at around five in the afternoon. We meet over a beer or a drink, discuss the state of the local world and, little by little, become slightly wiser about Italian culture.
Italian warmth
It isn't only the weather in Italy that feels warmer than in the Nordic countries. We encounter the other kind of Italian warmth every day, because Italians are, by nature, remarkably welcoming and warm-hearted.
The fact that we've settled in a small town with only around 3,500 permanent residents is naturally part of the reason we're greeted everywhere in Ospedaletti with a "salve" or "buongiorno", but it starts with that Italian openness.
One afternoon a couple of years ago, near Santuario Madonna delle Porrine, we were standing by the road admiring and photographing a beautiful lemon tree. After a while, the owner came out – the sweetest nonna imaginable – and started talking to us. At the time our Italian was virtually non-existent and English wasn't part of her repertoire, so we managed with gestures. When our little "conversation" was over, she walked over to the tree, picked two enormous, bright yellow ripe lemons and gave us one each. Quite possibly the two best lemons ever to find their way into our Campari.
Tourists or residents?
One of the interesting things about establishing a second home somewhere else in the world is wondering how everyone around you sees you. Can we fit in, or will we forever be regarded as tourists?
We allow ourselves to think we're something more than tourists – whatever that actually means.
We pay property tax and waste charges, we have an address in town and an Italian phone number – but when exactly do you stop being a tourist and become part of the place?
We can't know for certain, but we have the feeling that we're gradually being regarded as part of the town. We know from a reliable source that quite a few people recognise us – probably because my red hair is fairly difficult to overlook in a small Italian town. And when we walk into several of the town's bars, we're greeted with a warm ciao – even if it's been a couple of months since we were last there.
One sign that we've moved from being tourists to becoming part of the town is that the urge to photograph the old quarter and visit the sights has been replaced by curiosity about, for example, a waiter moving from one bar to another. Has the bar been sold? Has he found a better job? Has something happened? It is completely useless information, but it tells us we're no longer simply observing the town from the outside. We're following its everyday life.
We don't know for certain how the locals see us, but amusingly, we increasingly find ourselves joining conversations about how lovely it will be in autumn, once all the summer tourists have gone home and calm settles over the town again.
July fills up with French visitors, and in August the Italians arrive. Ospedaletti is a favourite with French tourists in July. The border isn't far away, it's inexpensive by French standards, and Ospedaletti is simply so much better than Ventimiglia. Then in August, the town becomes a magnet for Italians, mainly from northern Italy. It's excellent news for the town's bars and restaurants, but it does put a slightly stressful damper on the lazy atmosphere that otherwise defines Ospedaletti's afternoons.
The happy accident
With the benefit of hindsight, we're beginning to realise that through sheer dumb luck we landed in what is, for us, the perfect town in which to live out our Italian dream.
And perhaps it's only now that we're properly realising it. We have the Mediterranean in front of the town and the mountains behind it. We can walk to Coldirodi if we feel like disappearing into narrow medieval streets for a couple of hours, then a few minutes later sit with our feet at the water's edge. Sanremo is just around the corner when we miss city life and luxury shops, and France is close enough for lunch across the border to be an entirely spontaneous decision. When winter arrives, the ski resorts of Piedmont are less than an hour away, and for the rest of the year the nature park in the Argentina Valley mountains begins almost where the town ends.
For some people, Ospedaletti will probably induce a yawn. Ospedaletti has pebble beaches, no luxury shops and a pace that can seem almost provocatively slow if you're looking for action. But for us, it turned out to contain almost everything we'd hoped to find in Italy. We just didn't know it that Friday when we took the wrong road.
And by now, we're getting rather good at the discipline of sitting at a bar, squinting into the afternoon sun, drink in hand and a plate of snacks on the table, watching life unfold directly in front of us.
Now we just need to master looking relaxed when we take selfies to prove how relaxed we are ;)
