Hi there, it's Lale Aricoglu, and this is Women Who Travel.

Today, we have one of our listener dispatchers from around the world.

It's the story of how Barbara Boyle, an advertising executive, does the whole

under the Tuscan sun thing and retires the moves to Italy.

She doesn't reckon with the challenges ahead, but, well, she's going to reveal it all to us.

And she also describes her love affair with a remote town in her book that was recently published

called Pinch Me.

This story isn't like a handbook for how people should move to the Piedmont and buy an old house and fix it up because that was our story.

The story is more if you have a dream, be open to it, listen, kind of tiptoe into it, you know, follow your heart.

Here's my story. Basically, I'll tell you today about how we found it, what we love,

and why we are so in love with this special place. We found it when we were on our honeymoon. It was a second marriage, so we weren't

children. We got married in December and by March we decided we should take a two-week honeymoon.

We picked a really nice place in the south of France, more burgundy than Provence, but I always loved that area.

That was beautiful. And then we drove

over to Northern Italy, mostly because it was convenient to where we were going in and out of,

which was Geneva, not because I had a clue about what I was doing. So as we come driving from

gorgeous, lush, elegant France into Northern Italy, it was cold, it was rainy, it was March 31st,

it was getting kind of snowy, foggy. And I'm thinking, oh dear, what have I done? This may not be the

end of my honeymoon that I'd hoped for. And it was sort of flat. There was a lot of kind of manufacturing.

There were freeways. It just wasn't the charming honeymoon I pictured until the last 45 minutes

to an hour. And suddenly the whole topography changed, the landscape changed, and little hills

were appearing. And on the hills were little castles and churches and stone

...