The role of lifestyle in later-life and retirement migration

Although lifestyle migration does not feature as a ‘key concept’ in migration according to the otherwise comprehensive manual of Bartram et al. (Reference Bartram, Poros and Monforte2014), there is no doubt that the lifestyle approach has established itself as an important conceptual framework in assisting scholars to understand migrations which are not driven by economic rationales (as in the oft-quoted phrase ‘economic migrants’) or political forces (refugees, exiles, etc.). The last decade has seen a remarkable growth in the literature on lifestyle migration, much of it in association with later-life and retirement migration. This literature comprises edited collections (Benson and O'Reilly, Reference Benson and O'Reilly2009a; Benson and Osbaldiston, Reference Benson and Osbaldiston2014; Duncan et al., Reference Duncan, Cohen and Thulemark2014; Janoschka and Haas, Reference Janoschka and Haas2014; Torkington et al., Reference Torkington, David and Sardinha2015), state-of-the-art papers (Benson and O'Reilly, Reference Benson and O'Reilly2009b; Benson and Osbaldiston, Reference Benson and Osbaldiston2016) and innumerable case-study papers which use the lifestyle lens (as well as several chapters in the above-cited edited books see, inter alia, McIntyre, Reference McIntyre2009; Torkington, Reference Torkington2012; Åkerlund and Sandberg, Reference Åkerlund and Sandberg2015; Benson, Reference Benson2015; Cohen et al., Reference Cohen, Duncan and Thulemark2015; Kordel and Pohle, Reference Kordel and Pohle2018).

In their very useful overview paper on lifestyle migration, Benson and O'Reilly define and characterise the phenomenon as follows:

Bearing in mind that our study of the Marche limits itself to retirement and pre-retirement migrants, the above quote goes some way towards capturing the essence of our participants’ motivations and life perspectives, including both full-time and part-year residents. Regarding the ‘diverse destinations, desires and dreams’, the specific destination is rural Italy and the desires and dreams have to do with finding a characterful property in an idyllic location and fashioning a pleasant, enjoyable way of life that is ‘in tune’ with the local physical and social environment, and in contrast to the fast pace of life in crowded and sometimes ‘unsafe’ cities in their countries of origin.

Benson and O'Reilly (Reference Benson and O'Reilly2009b: 611–613) nominate three ‘ideal types’ of lifestyle migrant: residential tourists, rural idyllists and bourgeois bohemians. Residential tourists want to live the ‘holiday lifestyle’. A warm sunny climate and a coastal location are usually their main priorities; typically they are the well-researched international retirement migrants living in the Spanish Mediterranean coastal resorts and islands, the Algarve, Malta and Cyprus. Coastal lifestyle migration embodies relaxation, leisure and an escape from the cold North. On the one hand, this is ‘tourism as a way of life’ (Benson and O'Reilly, Reference Benson and O'Reilly2009b: 612); on the other hand, some permanent-resident retirees seek to physically distance and socially differentiate themselves from the mass of short-stay tourists who visit these same locations.Footnote ²

Lifestyle migrants seeking a rural idyll are found in a different set of geographical locations, including a variety of landscape-rich regions of France; in Italy especially Tuscany but extending more recently to Marche and other central-southern regions; in rural, ‘back-from-the-coast’ regions of southern Spain; and in several other scattered rural regions (Gaspar, Reference Gaspar, Torkington, David and Sardinha2015). Outside France (Buller and Hoggart, Reference Buller and Hoggart1994; Smallwood, Reference Smallwood, Geoffroy and Sibley2007; Benson, Reference Benson2011), Tuscany (King and Patterson, Reference King and Patterson1998) and central Portugal (Sardinha, Reference Sardinha, Torkington, David and Sardinha2015), the everyday lives of lifestyle and retirement migrants in these attractive rural spaces have been much less studied than the first group sketched above. From the studies that exist, the common collective narratives are about the ‘simple’ and ‘good’ country way of life, feeling part of a rural community, and the visual and material aspects of the rural idyll – the aesthetic properties of the landscape, the availability of inexpensive historic properties, the excellent local food and wine, and the perceived strength of the local culture.

Benson and O'Reilly's third type of lifestyle migrant, the bourgeois bohemians, comprise many rural idyllists who want to get close to the land and share communal ecological values; a variety of artistic types who seek inspiring places to develop their creative work; and ‘modern nomads’ whose lifestyle is embedded in their mobility to far-flung and mystical places (e.g. Korpela, Reference Korpela2010). Waldren's (Reference Waldren1996) study of the bohemian literary, artistic and musical personalities who settled in the Majorcan village of Deía is a classic if dated text on this genre of lifestyle migration. Kockel's (Reference Kockel and King1991) research on ‘countercultural migrants’ in the west of Ireland also partially fits this template, although his participants, most of whom are from Germany and the Netherlands, are arguably more bohemian than bourgeois. He denotes them as ‘hippy farmers and artisans’, ‘new agers’, ‘eco-freaks’ and ‘wandering poets’.

How do our Marche participants relate to Benson and O'Reilly's typology? To some extent, they are a combination of all three types, with an emphasis on the second and third types. They are certainly drawn to the beautiful landscape and rural way of life in this Italian region, and they have an environmental conscience too, for the most part. But some of them also say that the sunny climate and access to the coast are important, and several of the Dutch participants, and a few of the British, are engaged professionally in the rural tourism sector. We explore these personal characteristics and lifestyle preferences in more detail in the main empirical sections of the paper.

Unpacking the materialities of lifestyle migration

Our main focus in this paper is the material dimension of IRM in the Marche. We prioritise this angle partly because it is an under-researched aspect of later-life migration, and partly because these tangible aspects emerge as particularly relevant in this geographical context, where our participants repeatedly stressed the beauty of the landscape and the fact that it was an authentic ‘working countryside’, with a welcoming rural community, whose hospitality was built around ‘genuine’ food and wine. There is a clear parallel here with Benson's research on the British settlers, many of them retired, in the French department of Lot (Benson, Reference Benson2011: 136–152; Reference Benson2013). Benson's research informants sought, and claimed to have found and become part of, an ‘authentic’ rural lifestyle in a region not tainted by mass tourism, nor by the perceived wealthier, snobbier British who have settled in nearby Dordogne.Footnote ³ This comparison is closely analogous to that evinced by our participants, who constantly contrasted the Marche, cheaper and more authentic, with the neighbouring region of Tuscany, seen now as prohibitively expensive and ‘saturated’ with British, German and other settlers.

According to Dant (Reference Dant1999: 11), the material is ‘that which we can see, touch, smell [and perhaps taste] but which is not human or animal’. As our insertion of the bracketed phrase indicates, food, often important to lifestyle migrants in rural areas, occupies an ambivalent position as a ‘materiality’, since its origins lie in the non-material animal and plant world and, once eaten, it becomes part of its consumer. Nevertheless, it is seen as a ‘thing’ and, therefore, to that extent, as part of the material world – along with the landscape which ‘produces’ it and which has been intensely humanised over centuries by the artefacts of human settlement. In Italy and elsewhere in rural Southern Europe, this organic link between food, soil and landscape plays into a hoped-for rural revival based on principles of ecological and social sustainability (Agnoletti, Reference Agnoletti2014; Mundula and Spagnoli, Reference Mundula and Spagnoli2018).

Most research on material culture focuses on the home and its immediate environs (see the overviews of Miller, Reference Miller1998, Reference Miller2001; Dant, Reference Dant1999; Reimer and Leslie, Reference Reimer and Leslie2004). This generalisation also applies to the rich stream of research on migrants’ home-making practices, with examples drawn from a wide range of geographical contexts, reflecting in turn the huge variety of migratory phenomena around the world (for some examples, see Meijering and Lager, Reference Meijering and Lager2014; Tolia-Kelly, Reference Tolia-Kelly2004; Walsh, Reference Walsh2006, Reference Walsh2018; and the many case-study chapters on older-age migrants and home in Walsh and Näre, Reference Walsh and Näre2014). Whilst we do not ignore the ‘home scale’ in the research reported in this paper, we deliberately broaden our scoping of materialities in two directions. In doing so, we endorse Blunt and Dowling's (Reference Blunt and Dowling2006: 26–29) idea of home as porous and multi-scalar, enlarging beyond home as a purely ‘private’ space, and taking on board the setting of home as simultaneously material, imaginative and social (Walsh, Reference Walsh2018: 476).

The first elaboration is to increase the scale to encompass place and landscape. We follow Andrews and Phillips (Reference Andrews and Phillips2005: 1) when they write that ‘place very much impacts … older people's quality of life and the opportunities for them to achieve goals such as successful and active ageing’, except that we loosen their conceptualisation of place to include location, space and landscape. Also, following Joseph and Cloutier-Fisher (Reference Joseph, Cloutier-Fisher, Andrews and Phillips2005: 135), we espouse a view of place, and its associated spatial referents, not just as a passive container in which human activities such as migration, ageing and day-to-day life occur, but as an operational, living, material and social construct inhabited by dynamic and multi-layered communities. Both coastal and rural regions can be regarded as ‘therapeutic landscapes’, attractive, on the one hand, for their physical, aesthetic and climate characteristics, but also for their imputed social advantages – as ‘healthy’ or ‘relaxing’ or ‘stimulating’ places to be in later life (Kearns and Andrews, Reference Kearns, Andrews, Andrews and Phillips2005: 21–22).

The second dimension that we explore, both within and beyond the spatial confines of the home, is the consumption patterns of later-life migrants in the Marche. Like Benson's (Reference Benson2011) British lifestyle migrants in the Lot, our British, Dutch and German participants in the Marche aspired to live a more ‘genuine’ way of life, marked by the consumption of local produce sourced from their own land and from neighbours and local markets. They saw themselves as part of a movement to reinvigorate the rural economy, including growing their own food and patronising local agriturismo establishments where farmers provide meals and other products based on their own produce. According to Mundula and Spagnoli (Reference Mundula and Spagnoli2018), a process of ‘rewriting’ rural space is currently under way in Italy, based on the ever-present connection between landscape and agriculture. According to these authors, agriculture has begun to express a new, different and more ‘conscious’ meaning, based not only on its capacity to produce food for consumption but also on its potential to fashion new values, new territorial identities, enhanced connections between producers and consumers, and new business and local development models. The Marche, along with certain other Italian regions which have both a strong regional identity based on a distinct landscape and farming pattern, and an evident appeal to rural tourists and foreign settlers, such as Tuscany and Umbria in central Italy, Trentino-Alto Adige in the north and Apulia in the south, is at the forefront of this new relationality between landscape, farming and local consumer appreciation (Mundula and Spagnoli, Reference Mundula and Spagnoli2018: 64).

In focusing on the Marche, we spotlight a ‘new geographical frontier’ for later-life and retirement migration in Europe, following earlier rounds of lifestyle settlement in the adjacent regions of Tuscany and Umbria (see King and Patterson, Reference King and Patterson1998; King et al., Reference King, Warnes and Williams2000). Official data on foreign older residents reveal that the Marche has increased its share of these groups, especially the three largest ‘expat’ groups of British, Germans and Dutch, faster than any other region in recent years (King et al., Reference King, Cela, Morettini and Fokkema2019: 3–4). In tune with the overarching themes of this special issue, we explore at both a theoretical and empirical level new dimensions of the ageing–migration nexus through an examination of the narrated lives of our research participants. We challenge the ‘vulnerability trope’ (King et al., Reference King, Lulle, Sampaio and Vullnetari2017) of older-age migrants by describing their experiences as a group of retired and pre-retirement migrants who attribute a positive value to later life and who develop new and imaginative residential choices and environmentally attuned lifestyles.

Marche: the geographical setting

Situated on the eastern flank of the Italian peninsula, facing the Adriatic Sea, the Marche is both environmentally varied, ranging from coastal plans to the high Apennines, and also diversified historically, evolving out of numerous small feudal territories, each one a ‘marca’. The region's name, ‘Le Marche’ (‘The Marches’) – the only Italian region currently to have a plural denomination – reflects this heterogeneity.

The region comprises three physical zones. A narrow coastal strip concentrates much of the region's population in a series of linear settlements devoted to a mixture of light industry, fishing, services and seaside tourism. Two-thirds of the region's area is occupied by its most characteristic landscape of rolling hills, cut into sections by parallel valleys draining to the coast. Scattered across the hills are numerous medieval fortified towns and villages, many of them perched on prominent ridges. Towards the region's interior, the mountainous Apennine chain contains the high peaks of the Sibillini mountains, exceeding 2,200 metres. Along the coast and adjacent low hills, the climate is typically Mediterranean, with hot dry summers and mild to cool rainy winters. However, the interior hills and mountains are colder, with abundant snowfalls at higher altitudes.

Compared to the rest of Italy, the Marche has a less-dense and more-ageing population, due above all to the depopulation of the hill and mountain regions, driven by a combination of outmigration and sub-replacement fertility (Cela and Moretti, Reference Cela and Moretti2019). These processes are common throughout rural Italy, but in the Marche they have been closely related to the demise of the mezzadria share-tenancy system, an agrarian regime which has left an indelible stamp on the region's human landscape. Whilst the landowners lived in palazzi, large villas, the mezzadri, the share tenants, lived in rural farmhouses scattered throughout the countryside. They worked the land in a semi-subsistence, semi-commercial mixed agriculture of field crops, orchards and livestock, giving half the produce to the landowner. Fundamentally exploitative of rural labour, the share-tenancies were at least stable and heritable, surviving intact until the system's collapse allied to the process of outmigration which started in the 1960s (King and Took, Reference King and Took1983). The demise of the mezzadria system, with its myriad scatter of farmhouses and cottages, led to the abandonment of these rural properties, whilst the farmland was consolidated into larger holdings. But much of the landscape legacy remains in the form of an attractive and varied patchwork of small fields, vineyards, orchards, pastures and woodland, spread across the hilly topography interspersed with ancient hilltop villages. Figures 1 and 2 are an attempt to capture the essence of the Marche setting: a typical landscape shot, and a large farmhouse-villa, in the handsome yet austere style of the region, and now owned and occupied by a Northern European retirement migrant.

Figure 1.

Typical Marche landscape: a rolling patchwork of fields under mixed farming dotted with dispersed rural dwellings.

Figure 2.

Substantial historic villa, formerly the property of a landowner-farmer, now lived in by an international retirement migrant from a Northern European country.

Regional landscape and environment

At the macro scale, a first level of materiality consists of the regional environment of the Marche, and in particular the aesthetic quality of its rural landscape. Such visual perceptions on the part of the research participants are inevitably a subjective appreciation, but they were remarkably consistent in the characteristics that were emphasised.

When referring to the scenic and environmental attributes of their chosen region of settlement, participants highlighted three things: the innate beauty of the landscape; the ‘authentic’ nature of the farming society that they perceived as still holding sway in the region; and the fact that, unlike Tuscany, a frequent reference point, the Marche was not overrun by tourists and wealthy foreign settlers. These three themes were often interwoven in the interviewees’ accounts, as the following examples show:

Several participants elaborated on the non-touristic nature of the region and, as a result, what they regarded as the genuine welcome from the family-oriented local communities, again with Tuscany as a comparison:

Other aspects of the geography of the Marche which are important to the participants are its transport links, both within and external to the region. Movement laterally within the region, between the sea and the mountains, is relatively easy because of the roads which follow the alignment of the river valleys. Away from the coast, with its motorway and railway, travel in the other direction, longitudinally north–south, is more challenging because of the lie of the land and the winding, hilly roads. International travel connections with the home countries are reliant on economy flights to Ancona (the regional capital) and to other airports – Bologna for northern Marche, Pescara for southern Marche and Perugia for the western part of the region. For the German and Dutch participants, the continuous motorway links northwards from the coast offer the possibility of a one-day driving trip. This latter point was important for Alex and Guido, from the Netherlands:

Jack, who was from the United Kingdom (UK), expanded on the same theme, with more details on how his view of ‘active ageing’ – swimming, walking, skiing – could be nicely catered for by his locational choice. For later-life migrants moving to the Marche, visiting family and friends was an important part of this lifestyle-migration decision, and this too was mentioned by Jack and most other participants:

Although participants acknowledged that the Marche could not claim magnificent (but tourist-overrun) cities like Florence or Siena, with their spectacular monumental architecture and artistic treasures, they were appreciative of the still-impressive architectural patrimony of the smaller, lesser-known historic towns of the Marche, including their ‘hidden’ artistic finds. Lucy and Tom (British) elaborated on this theme in their account of how they ‘discovered’ the Marche:

Lucy and Tom's account illustrates another common theme in the participants’ decision-making – serendipity. Moving to the Marche was usually not the result of a long-term evaluation of the region's appeal based on repeated visits, but rather a kind of ‘discovery’ followed by instant attraction. The ingredients of this were both the tangible, material aspects and the ‘atmosphere’ of the place – the combination of cheap property prices, accessibility, the aesthetics of landscape, and a welcoming rural society which has not been ‘tainted’ by over-tourism and which ‘respects’ older people.

In sum, the Marche region offers a ‘therapeutic landscape’ (Kearns and Andrews, Reference Kearns, Andrews, Andrews and Phillips2005) in which the participants’ individualised ideas of active ageing can be successfully pursued. The region provides a physical and social space which is free of the constraints of the lives left behind – governed by the stress of excessive work, crowded cities and standardised routines.

House, home and the rural ‘good life’

Our second thematic focus is on participants’ ‘home-making’ and the materialities of establishing a new life in a property which is likely to be quite different from their prior residential experience. Many interviewees expressed the desire for a historic property, with some land – readily available in the Marche. As noted above, there is a division between those who are permanent residents, most of whom have sold their house in the ‘home’ country in order to purchase the house in Marche, and part-time residents, who still have a house in their country of origin. However, this distinction is by no means clear-cut. Some permanent residents have kept a place in the home country (often downsizing to a flat), thinking that they will not end their days in the Marche. The home-country property serves as a pied-à-terre, a safety-net and also as a source of income if rented out. The part-time residents, who for the purposes of this research had to be living in the Marche for at least six months of the year, were more likely to be younger, Dutch and still working, including several who ran small businesses. The temporary residents are not, however, the conventional ‘snowbirds’ who fly south to escape the northern winter, well documented in the cases of North American retirees who over-winter in Florida or Nordic migrants who spend the winter months in southern Spain or the Canary Islands (Myklebost, Reference Myklebost1989; Warnes, Reference Warnes1991; Gustafson, Reference Gustafson2002; Breuer, Reference Breuer2005). If anything they follow an opposite calendar, since they operate their tourism enterprises which are at their peak during the summer and are closed for winter.

Based on our observations of the houses we visited to carry out the interviews, and what our participants and key informants said, we can draw some generalisations, and also contrasts, about the housing choices of the three participant groups. These generalisations can also be read against the background information of the three groups provided in Table 1. The Germans aim above all for a quiet life, ‘off the beaten track’. This usually means that they live in rather hidden locations on valley slopes along or at the end of strade bianche (non-asphalted ‘white roads’ with gravel surfaces). They tend to live in more modest houses, often with a dark and rustic interior design. None of them has a swimming pool, for environmental reasons. As they are the longest established group in the region, they are our oldest participants, and some are widowed and living on their own. The British prioritise a combination of characterful properties and ridge-top locations so that they can enjoy far-reaching views over the landscape. They care about the ‘authentic’ restoration of farmhouses, and interior design features which respect the history of the property. They may have a small swimming pool for themselves and visitors’ use. Like the Germans, they value peace and quiet but do not necessarily seek out isolated locations. Finally, the Dutch, who tend to be younger and more recently settled, with many of them running small tourist-linked concerns, live in valley or hillside locations; they avoid positions which are too remote and inaccessible, for business reasons. For the same purpose, the interior design of their restored properties is usually lighter with more modern furniture, and they have a swimming pool for themselves and their guests.

For those who wanted to be close to the coast, the location of the house had to be carefully selected, to avoid views of larger urban settlements or of the small industries that have sprouted along the valleys close to the coast. Iris and Floris, a Dutch couple living close to one of the main seaside towns, explained how they made their choice:

Fresh air, extensive views, and no ‘pollution’ from urbanisation, industry, noise or even light pollution (the reference to ‘lamp posts’), are critical elements guiding the selection of location and property, which itself should be old and ‘characterful’. Grace (British) articulated well some of these essential criteria:

Daan and Marie, a Dutch couple, stressed the need to be ‘not overlooked’ in order to be able to practise their meditation outdoors:

For other participants, complete remoteness was not so attractive, since it was important to be able to feel part of a ‘community’ – for instance by being within walking distance of a village with its shops, bars and other services:

Participants were also enthusiastic to talk about the ‘discovery’ of their property, the state it was in, the convoluted and often mysterious negotiations over prices and agents’ fees, and the painstaking renovations that ensued. On the positive side, the price of older rural properties in the Marche was much lower than Tuscany, where some participants had property-searched beforehand, only to be put off by the extremely high prices, even for a ruin. As a result of decades of rural depopulation in the Marche, there was no shortage of houses available, of varying sizes and states of dilapidation versus modernisation, except that much of the ‘modernisation’ was out of keeping with the original character of the property and had to be ‘undone’ to preserve architectural authenticity. On the downside, participants were surprised at the expense of renovating their properties and at the unclear way the work was costed. Here are three typical accounts, one from each national group. The first illustrates a do-it-yourself strategy, the second describes how the money originally estimated and set aside was quickly swallowed up, and the third is a story about how determination to negotiate and ‘do one's homework’ eventually paid off:

Part of the search for an authentic house in the Marche is the idea of contributing to the preservation and restoration of the vernacular built environment, and also becoming part of the social landscape of family farming and rural community solidarity. Below are extracts from the accounts of two British participants which illustrate the positive interaction with ‘locals’ – in the first case a neighbouring farmer and in the second case an attempt to revive a local community tradition:

The bucolic scenes enacted in the above two quotes must be tempered by the difficulties in communication and interaction with the local population. The language barrier prevents a fuller ‘integration’. Learning a new language, either from scratch or from a rudimentary base perhaps acquired from evening classes, is a challenge for later-life individuals whose initial enthusiasm to learn becomes tempered by the realisation that, at their stage of life, they will probably not achieve fluency in Italian, let alone understand the heavy local dialect. Moreover, there are marked social differences between the mainly middle-class, well-educated and liberal or ‘alternative’ backgrounds of the lifestyle migrants and the more ‘traditional’, socially conservative, less-educated locals:

Some participants bemoaned the lack of young, educated people in the local towns and villages, selective depopulation leaving behind mostly less-educated older people with a farming background who, as noted above, speak local dialect not ‘standard Italian’:

The Dutch participants, on the whole younger and more outspoken than their British and German counterparts, were especially vocal about gender relations amongst the local people:

Our research evidence in this section supports the notion of home as multi-scalar and multi-layered (e.g. Walsh, Reference Walsh2006, Reference Walsh2018). Home is a physical, material ‘container’ for life with certain pre-defined features (historic building, usually with land); it is also a social space to host visitors and a wider community space (the hamlet, the rural neighbourhood) for interacting with ‘the locals’; and it is an imaginative space indicating how the participants envision life in the Marche as a retired or pre-retired older person. The imaginaries of their new home are not without their disappointments however: higher than anticipated renovation costs, language barriers and tensions over gender roles. On the whole, these tensions and disappointments were seen as challenges to be overcome or adapted to, rather than as insurmountable obstacles which threatened their ability to stay on.

Lifestyle and consumption

Whereas the general thrust of the literature on lifestyle and retirement migrations focuses on leisure, relaxation, warm weather and scenic attractiveness (Benson and O'Reilly, Reference Benson and O'Reilly2009a, Reference Benson and O'Reilly2009b; Benson, Reference Benson2011; Janoschka and Haas, Reference Janoschka and Haas2014; Benson and Osbaldiston, Reference Benson and Osbaldiston2016), the evidence from our participants in the Marche indicated a further dimension, related especially to active ageing, environmental sustainability and responsibility, the enhancement of local culture and linkages to the local economy. Many participants had land surrounding their rural houses, on which they grew flowers, vegetables and fruit; some, as noted earlier and also again below, had small vineyards and olive groves. Their consumption practices also reflected these broad principles of environmental concern, and so they preferred to shop for fresh produce in local markets, eat in local restaurants, visit local museums, and attend local cultural events such as festivals and concerts. The fact that this could be construed as a somewhat romanticised vision of active later life was acknowledged by some of the interviewees, such as Heidi (German):

Whilst for Heidi it was olives and oil, for Jack (British) it was vineyards and wine:

The creative instinct of restoring the landscape, contributing to the local agricultural economy and building something new was expressed in a very literal sense by Ernst (German), whose retirement from a sedentary job coincided with a desire to take up some physical work:

Taken in the round, these environmental and lifestyle factors are part of what the later-life settlers are looking for and find in the Marche: a relaxed pace of life in tune with nature, seen as typical of the Mediterranean region; good value for money in terms of property prices and eating out; and an atmosphere redolent of their idealised memories of how the past ‘used to be’ (but is no more) in their home country (cf. Benson, Reference Benson2011). Whilst part of all this is related to the physical beauty of the landscape, another important part is the social environment and the quality of human relations and interactions – put simply, the friendliness and helpfulness of the local population. Some combination of these ‘way of life’ factors and experiences was present in all of the interviews; here are two typical examples:

For most of the participants, the materiality and symbolism of food stood out prominently in their narratives, both in terms of a general admiration for the food and wine of the region, and with reference to specific experiences of generosity and exchange. In the previous section we referred to instances of grape harvesting, wine-making and the cheese festival. Here are some other examples, illustrative of the importance of food, both to the local rural population with its heritage of semi-subsistence farming and to the lifestyle-oriented settlers, as well as its symbolic value as an item of sociality. Pieter (Dutch) was a member of the slow-food movement and in his interview described how, every month, the local branch organises visits to farms, vegetable producers and cantine (wine cellars), and to a slow-food restaurant. The interview conversation extract below, with Erik and Helga (also Dutch), gives a more detailed and rather touching account.

This type of anecdote resonated throughout our interview evidence, but the embedding in locally sourced food exchanges and purchases was not absolute. For non-local produce participants admitted shopping in chain supermarkets and discount stores, and some craved non-local food products which they had long been accustomed to and did not want to give up – examples mentioned were peanut butter, muesli and curry powder. Likewise, their relationship with local restaurants was more nuanced. After a while, they regarded the dishes of some local hostelries as ‘narrow’ and ‘monotonous’, and so they sought out establishments with more varied, fusion-oriented menus.