How I arrived at Meraviglia

It was June 2023 when I drove to Italy to find a renovation project.

I had sold my house in the Netherlands two years earlier and still didn’t know where I wanted to live. I had no clear vision of what I was looking for either. One day I imagined an old grand villa, the next a tiny house overlooking the sea.

After two weeks of searching through Liguria and northern Tuscany, I returned to Moncalvo, a quiet little town where I had spent my first night in Piemonte. Something about it felt authentic, calm, and strangely inviting.

I stayed at a small B&B outside town. Mesmerized by the landscape, I viewed a few more properties nearby, but again, nothing truly felt right.

Then everything suddenly changed.

Just after posting on Facebook that I was giving up the search and leaving it to life to show me the way, the cousin of the B&B owner walked into the courtyard. We connected instantly and within half an hour he showed me a house he had bought a year earlier, but never touched, in the same street.

“Do you want to buy this house?” he asked.

It wasn’t what I thought I was looking for. No elegant details. No high ceilings. But the view over the Alps was breathtaking, the position on top of the hill felt special, and the house carried an immediate sense of possibility.

As an interior designer, I could instantly feel its potential.

And for the first time during the entire search, something inside me became quiet.

That evening, on my final night before returning to the Netherlands, I shared my doubts with Francesca, the owner of the B&B.

“I love this opportunity,” I told her, “but I’m not sure if life here might feel too small or too far away from culture and creativity.”

She laughed.
“Oh, but don’t you know Orsolina28? There may even be a performance tonight.”

Half an hour later we were in the car on our way to see Restart by choreographer Jonas Jacobsson. The performance moved me deeply. It felt almost symbolic, as if life itself was quietly inviting me to begin again here.

Three months later, I signed the papers.

Before deciding, the owner generously allowed us to stay in the empty house during summer. With only two beds inside, we lived there for a few weeks, slowly feeling into the space, the rhythm, the silence, and the life around it.

The house felt like a clear yes.

What followed were the real decisions:

Do I move to Italy permanently?
Do I create a second home?
What about my children, all young adults building their own lives in the Netherlands?

We spoke openly about it together. They supported the move, although none of us fully realized yet how much it would change our daily lives.

I moved to Italy.

It then took another two years to design, rethink, budget, make mistakes, find the right people, and slowly begin the large renovation. And it still isn’t finished.

But now, the house is coming alive.

My children regularly return here with friends to rest, reflect, reconnect, or rethink their own next steps in life. I love the stillness of this small hamlet when I’m alone just as much as I love the energy when the house is full of young people, conversation, music, and possibility.

Over the years before arriving here, life had already changed me deeply.

Since 2012, I had gone through years of inner questioning, rebuilding, learning, letting go, and slowly redefining what truly matters to me. Much of what once felt important gradually fell away. What remained was something far simpler and more honest: the importance of feeling at home within yourself, living in alignment with who you are, and creating spaces where people can slow down enough to hear themselves again.

Looking back now, I can see that everything I experienced quietly prepared me for this place.

Meraviglia is not just a house to me.
It is my home, our family home and a place meant to be shared.

When people join one of the programmes here, they are not stepping into a polished retreat business separated from daily life. They are being welcomed into a real home. One that has been slowly rebuilt, lived in, questioned in, and filled with life again.

Maybe that is also why people tend to settle in so quickly here.

Because nothing about this place was created from a business plan alone. It grew from lived experience, real change, and the desire to create a space where people can breathe, reflect, and reconnect with themselves in an honest way.

And perhaps that is what this place taught me most:

Real change rarely begins with a perfect plan.

It begins with something that quietly feels like a deep inner yes, ànd, the willingness to take the first step before seeing the whole path.