When you are out in Italy do your calls back home, or more importantly calls from friends and family to you, cost a fortune as you are on a UK tarrif?

If so it is easy to get hold of a 'pay as you go' Italian sim card. For €40, plus your passport and fiscal code, you can get a sim card that should work in your UK phone. It could save you a fortune.

Its easy for us to organise for you and top ups can be done online, over the phone or in a large number of stores over here. You can even set your phone up so that the language used when topping up your credit is English.

A number of our clients have their own cars out here, which has over time saved them a great deal of money (and hassle) with hiring. The greatest downside though is what to do with your car when you are not in the country. You can always leave it at your house, but how do you get to the airport and then back to the house once you return?

We are able to provide a tailor made solution. We can, if you wish, arrange to meet you at the airport as you prepare to depart, take your car off you and then have it back waiting for you as you arrive (a traditional meet & greet service if you like). You car can then be taken back to your house and left on your drive – if you feel that this will act as a deterrent, or we can look after it for you. Of course we can also pick you up a your house and take you to the airport and vice versa.

For those of you who cannot live without a regular dose of English films, comedy programs and Bargain Hunt there is good news!

Whilst our own investigations into getting UK Sky out here turned up a blank (unless you do it illegally!), we have recently stumbled across a good half way house.

No you cannot get UK Sky but if you take out an Italian Sky package you can get a number of English speaking options. For example we took out a package that has the normal Sky channels (Sky news, CNN, Fox, Paramount as well as the Italian Channels), Sky Cinema (Italian – I will explain more later) and Sky Sports (only because it was cheaper to take this extra feature and get free installation).

We had heard that it was possible to change the language on a few films from the dubbed Italian into the language of the film. We were happy with this.

Well what a bonus! You can actually change the language on just about every film (and there are 6 or 7 channels), on sky sport you get English premiership matches (some live) and on the other channels you can change the language on a large number. You also get BBC Prime which shows programmes such as Casualty, Eastenders, No Going Back and so on.

Our package costs €38 a month without Sky Sport you can get Cinema and the normal channels for €30 a month.

Whilst we are not tour reps there have been a few occasions when we have had to take guests of our clients to the local accident & emergency department. Clearly part of our usefulness has been in a translation capacity, but we have also ended up liaising with insurance companies, organising the collection of medicines and have in one case even had to learn how to administer injections – the norm in Italy is to inject antibiotics rather than give tablets to be taken orally!!! Fortunately all of our visits have been for relatively minor things and all have lived to tell their tales.

Whilst I am sure that you all have travel and medical insurance when you come out can we also urge you to ensure that you also have a form E111 (fully completed and authorised) as well. It makes things far easier at this end.

A call from one of our clients asking us to investigate why they had been told by the Comune that they had a very large bill to pay led to a request from 90% of our clients to sort out the payment of a tax that they had never been told about. The Ichy tax (essentially a community charge type payment) is a tax, payable twice yearly, based on the size of your property. The charge is not high (if you pay it) but the penalty charges can make the bill go from €200-300 to over €2,000! The good news is that it is possible to make back payments without incurring the hefty fines. All in all we must have saved our clients approaching €30,000! If only we worked on commission!

As is quite often the case clients either rent their property out on a commercial basis or allow friends and family to use it when it is free.

This example is from the latter category.

Friends of our clients had been offered this villa for a week’s holiday in September. Our clients had given the builders all the details (in fact had told them that these friends would be arriving 2 days before they actually were) and had been promised that they would be gone and everything would be ready… famous last words as it turned out.

Lunchtime and our telephone rings. This family of four had turned up at the house to find not only the builders still there, but all of the floors covered in cardboard, the kitchen … well did not look like a kitchen and so on. They asked if we knew of an agritourismo they could stay at for the week.

Due to our network of clients we were able to go one better and find them a villa with a pool for them to stay in for the week. Pleasing for us to be able to find a solution for them and I think it would be fair to say that they were delighted with the end result… no holiday from hell.

Fortunately this does not happen all that often, but when it does it can cause a whole host of problems.

On one occasion we received a telephone call from clients of ours at about 7:30pm on a Sunday night. Their boiler had sprung a leak; they had no water and no heating.

Knowing the universal problem that there is in getting a plumber out at the best of times I have to admit that we did wonder how successful we would be and more importantly whether our clients would need to take out a second mortgage if we could get them out.

Rather surprisingly the plumbers met us and followed us to the house arriving at about 8:30pm. A couple of hours later having hacked some of the wall away to find the leak (the pipe had burst) a temporary solution was in place. They returned on Monday morning and dealt with the problem fully.

The most surprising thing about the whole thing was that they only wanted €50 for their troubles.  

One of our most frequent users of this service lives in Le Marche and works for one of the worlds largest technology companies. Consequently he spends a lot of time flying to one continent or another.

Originally he used to drive himself (and pay the parking – or expenses would!) or get a taxi. An urgent requirement last March where he needed to get to the airport quickly and, due to snow, needed a 4x4 to get to his house, was our first journey. There have been many more since.

He has told us that he is grateful for our service as he know we will be waiting for him at the airport as pre arranged, we know where we have to take him to and he can – if he does not want to catch up on business or have 40 winks – speak in English to us. His company are grateful as we cost less that a taxi journey would!

One of the many wonderful things about living in Italy in a rural spot is that your house will invariably come with a number of olive trees. Hopefully enough to enable you to have your own pressing of olive oil.

For this particular client, having sourced and bought all the necessary paraphernalia to actually pick olives (nets, rakes, poles, gloves, crates) we were asked to make arrangements for and oversee the pressing of their olive harvest. The 2004 olive harvest was blighted by poor weather and consequently our clients had been unable to pick as much as they had wanted to in time to get them pressed before their return flight to the UK.

5 or 6 large crates were delivered on the morning of their flights. We made the booking, saw the olives start the process and were there to watch them being pressed before the oil was produced. The crop yielded 12 or so litres which we held onto, delivering them to our clients in time for their next visit a couple of weeks later.

One of our clients asked us to source all of the white goods for their kitchen and laundry. This required taking a brief of the ‘sort’ of appliances etc they required and also working to some pre defined constraints (on sizes) placed upon us by the builders.

Not a big job, so we thought. That was until we sat down with 3 suppliers gave them the brief and were then swamped by potentials. Not only the make and model type issues but colour as well. Although our brief was clear in this respect – silver being the choice – did you now just how many types of ‘silver’ there actually are!!

Armed with our information we refined all of it and produced a list of options (with varying price levels) giving what we felt was best choice and value for money and all the dimensions of all the products.

Once the clients made their decisions (very promptly) the goods were ordered and delivery dates arranged between supplier and builders. All went to plan except for the fridge whose delivery date was too far away and alternative had to be found.

The following items were sourced: Electric fan oven, Gas hob, Cooker hood, dishwasher, washing machine, and fridge.

Italian Property Management is pleased to announce the introduction of its News Blog feature from 1st January 2005.

This new feature will provide a method for us to advise you of our past successes and achievements for our existing clients with homes in the Le Marche region, and keep you informed of new developments and projects.

This new service should supplement our website and provide much needed and updated information for you to assess whether you wish to use us to look after your property during your absence. 

Happy New Year to all our readers.

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Italian Property Management is pleased to announce the introduction of its News Blog feature from 1st January 2005.

This new feature will provide a method for us to advise you of our past successes and achievements for our existing clients with homes in the Le Marche region, and keep you informed of new developments and projects.

This new service should supplement our website and provide much needed and updated information for you to assess whether you wish to use us to look after your property during your absence.