Zeneba & Matt's Italy Work Visa Story on CNN
/We are really happy to see this piece that came out recently on CNN (link below this article), covering our story of getting work visas and moving to Italy in 2019. It's not a How-To article exactly, but it has some good info about the process (at least as it stood in 2019).
And despite a couple of minor inaccuracies (see below), the piece communicates what we thought was the most important point for us, which is that we're incredibly grateful to get to live and work here in Italia.
We have been getting a lot of feedback - positive and negative - since the article broke... A couple of people wrote to us who had decided it would be great if we'd help them buy a €1 house in Sicily and organize everything for them to move here. (Spoiler alert: We can't do that!)
Others have written to us privately, expressing confusion – at the time the story came out, we were in Scotland; had we moved? (We didn’t; we live and perform in Italy but we were on a research trip in Scotland. We plan trips in Ireland and Italy, and we're in the process of expanding our travel to include Scotland.)
We've talked to a lot of press over the years, for both travel and music, and we know mistakes can happen. This article was no exception, and there were a few inaccuracies here and there.
For instance:
We didn't move to Italy with just our cats and our violin and cello; we also brought things like keepsakes, cat toys, a guitar... and even underwear! (Definitely underwear. Can you imagine replacing every single item? We're crazy, but not that crazy.)
We are not - and we didn't say - that we were the only American expats in Soriano (there are several others).
More importantly to us, our travel consulting didn't start after we moved here; Little Roads Europe was a well-established business long before we took the leap.
But we think the most important thing certainly came across in the article: how grateful we are to live in Soriano, and the general idea that it is indeed possible to completely change your life, even if you are not "George Clooney rich".
Read the article on CNN’s page here:
www.cnn.com/travel/italy-self-employment-visa-musicians-nashville