Italy was in his blood. Proving it to the Italian government was another matter.
Sixty-five-year-old Glen P. Vecchione was done with the corporate world, but he wasn't ready for the "happy hour and pickleball" culture of San Diego. Restless, disconnected, and aching for his roots, he has a chance meeting with a tourist that sparks a radical idea: What if he swapped his retirement community for a village in Umbria?
Fire Exit: A Senior American's Search for a Better Life in Italy is the authentic, intensely personal, and often funny memoir of one man's quest to reclaim his heritage and find a new home in Europe. Following the trail of his Italian ancestry, Glen winds through the maze of applying for dual citizenship while attempting to buy a house in a small Italian village. It isn't the breezy cultural reset he imagined — it's an adventure filled with bureaucratic near-disasters, comic blunders, and the unlikely joys of a life reinvented.
Whether you're looking for a good read or are one of the many people seriously researching how to move to Europe, Fire Exit proves it's never too late to learn a new language, explore faraway places, and dance the Tarantella. Most importantly, it's proof that it's possible to find the courage to leave the familiar behind, try something different, and even find love in the most surprising of places — no matter how old you are.
Praise for Fire Exit
"Glen Vecchione offers the reader an exuberant, gracefully written account of a time when he stepped away from his life as an aging gay Italian man in a changing America and began the complex process of creating an eagerly anticipated future in Italy. He invites us to accompany him as he navigates the emotional, financial, practical, and linguistic labyrinth of details and choices that form the narrative bridge he elegantly constructs, then crosses to begin his new life. Bravo! Let these pages be an invitation for all of us who have the courage to imagine and manifest our next chapters."
—Sandra Butler, author of Leaving Home at 83 and Now What? Notes from the Frontlines of Old Age
"In his sixties, "a senior on the path to increasing seniority," Glen P. Vecchione set out, courageously and a bit naïvely, to start a new life in Italy. "First you explore, then you make friends, then you fall in love," an Italian friend told him. And fall in love, Vecchione did, as he vividly illustrates in this charming and beautifully written memoir. Buying a house in Umbria, the green heart of Italy, and seeking to get Italian citizenship embroiled him in a preposterous pile-up of bureaucratic regulations, red tape, and some hilarious linguistic blunders. With a cast of quirky, lovable characters, the memoir moves along with all the drama, incident and suspense of a novel. An utterly engaging story."
—Philip Gambone, author of the forthcoming Considerable Women: An Italian American Matriarchy
