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Have you ever dreamt of turning your life upside down and running away to live in the European countryside?
I'm sure a lot of us have, but few of us actually ever do it.
The Palazzo is five stories tall, built onto the side of the mountain.
Views that overlook the Tiber Valley and the Tiber River, and a hillside covered in olive groves and grapevines.
Meet Kelly.
She lives outside of Rome in a palazzo, and she is very, very happy about it.
And so when we first came here, I was worried that people might see it as a plain town.
But they don't.
They see its beauty and its simplicity.
Kelly didn't always live in a palazzo.
In fact, Kelly's life before Italy was complicated, and to her, unpleasant.
She'd been struggling with depression for years, Her marriage had ended.
But in Italy, she found change.
From the Boston Globe, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
This season, we're asking the question, can people change?
People are telling us stories about how they've looked for change or how they actually made change.
Our goal is not to find one simple answer to the question, of course.
It's to learn what change means and if it's actually possible at all.
There's an old saying, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
And on a personal level, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
As we move through this season.
I'm going to explore why change is one of those things that we often try to do and, equally as often, fail miserably at.
Today we meet a woman who always wanted to change herself, her circumstances, her stars.
She believes that anyone can take control of their destiny and should if they're unhappy.
It sounds nice, but her story is not that simple.
Her belief that she could change that life wasn't good as is may have created some of the greatest conflicts of her life.
But I should let her tell the story.
It starts in a small town in the western part of Australia.
I grew up around a family that just, if they're interested in doing something, they just did it.
Kelly was born in 1963 in a tiny coastal town called Port Arlington.
Her childhood is unique because she basically grows up in a caravan park, meaning a place where people park recreational vehicles, usually while on holiday.
The caravan park runs along the coast with the sea at their front door.
Her family, her mom, dad, Uncle Tom, and her grandparents build it from scratch.
It's ambitious, and they do it simply because they want to.
I lived around that and I grew up, as a result of that, as a person who kind of believed that anything was possible.
I thought, and I still think, that I had one of the coolest childhoods of anyone I knew.
Right from the start, Kelly is surrounded by all sorts of people.
Because, whereas all of the other kids at school, for example, all of their friends were local kids in the town, because my family had the caravan park, every kid, Every holiday break, dozens of kids from elsewhere around Victoria would come down to the park and have holidays there.
And we had a big room in the caravan park that was full of like pool tables and pinball machines and jukeboxes.
And that was where I'd spend my holiday time and so on.
So, yeah, it was pretty cool.
Her young life is perfect, until it isn't.
When she's about 11, her grandparents decide to sell the caravan park for a good amount of money.
I was devastated.
I couldn't imagine a life without the park in it.
They bought a nice big beach house a couple of kilometers away from the park, and that was the end of that.
Losing the park was hard.
It's a bumpy few years and Kelly's parents' divorce.
Her mother pushes Kelly and her brother to take sides.
Kelly's brother does.
He chooses their mom's side.
But Kelly refuses.
She continues a relationship with her father and she says her mother held that against her for the rest of her life.
Fast forward a few years.
Kelly's parents' divorce haunts her.
Her relationship with her mother has gotten worse, she says.
Her parents' separation, along with her unique upbringing, has a strong impact on her personality and perspective of the world.
Kelly, in her own words, is a lot.
She knows what she wants, and she isn't afraid to go after it.
But she also feels destined to break out of Port Arlington.
Kelly shares that she spent a lot of time thinking about her future and how she could live an amazing life.
Her mind is full of fantasies about these big ideas European travels, designer fashion and Hollywood stars.
I asked her where that came from.
My mum used to read these books called Countess Angelique from when I was a tiny little girl.
So Countess Angelique was about this small town, countess who married this very important guy and ended up travelling all around the ancient palaces of Europe and what have you.
And my dad...
My dad was a Hollywood buff.
My dad used to sit and watch 1940s and 50s movies.
And I just grew up utterly surrounded by all of that.
But then, just before she turns 21, she finds out that she is pregnant.
Not the plan.
Her family, as nontraditional as they are, are not happy.
Her grandmother, in particular, tries to hide the pregnancy from other family members and neighbors.
And for Kelly, it puts a damper on her immediate dreams of a fantastic future.
But then the baby arrives.
Once I'd had my son, all of those earlier things, like my grandmother's attitude of her not wanting people to see her unmarried pregnant granddaughter, that kind of thing went out the window.
Everyone just fell in love with him.
And all of a sudden, everything was okay.
Nobody cared about what people thought.
So Kelly's learning how to be a mother.
And while she's content to raise her son on her own, her relatives decide she needs a husband.
It became important, I guess, to them as a practicality, that I hadn't been looking for a date for a boyfriend, for a husband, for an anything.
But to them, it became much more important that I find one anyway.
And so, yeah, they kind of put the pressure on me and were setting me up with lots of friends.
Her brother suggests someone she already knows, someone she knew before she got pregnant.
So our first date We went to a movie at the local drive-in cinema and after we went to a movie we went and sat at the beach in the car and talked the entire night.
And we were just that kind of close from the go-get.
According to Kelly, she feels like she's found someone she can relate to, someone who's lived an interesting life.
Jess was different.
His family had travelled all over country Australia and kind of encountered obstacles that most people don't have to deal with, travelling in the outback, thousands of miles away from anything.
We started dating when my son was about four, four and a half months old, and then I ended up moving in with him, probably only a couple of months later.
Things move quickly, and Kelly and Jess move into their own place.
Neither of them have had many serious relationships and for Jess especially, it's a really big change.
I was a grown-up.
I mean, something about having kids does that to you.
I was very much a grown-up and he was very much a young guy who'd gone from no serious relationships to being involved with someone with a child and
It was tough.
Over the next decade, Kelly and Jess have two more kids, both daughters.
They get married, and Jess is a doting husband, reserved, quiet, and respectful.
He treats Kelly very well.
He reveres her.
Those are her words, by the way.
I was this larger than life person who did all extreme stuff that other women certainly didn't.
And I was very self-sufficient.
And Jess was in awe of me from the go-get.
So he put me on this pedestal right from the word go.
Jess's love for her is a huge change.
Kelly has never experienced love like this before.
I went from living with a mother and stepfather who just criticized and pulled apart everything I ever did to suddenly finding myself in a relationship with this guy who literally thought that I was amazing.
And that was surreal to me.
Jess has never... really stop thinking I'm amazing.
And underneath it all, he has a lot of faith in, and always has had a lot of faith in, what I do and the ideas I have.
I was very determined to raise my kids in a certain way.
I wanted them to believe anything was possible.
I wanted to show them that you can change your stars.
It always irritated me that we're taught to believe right from when we're little that if we grow up in a poor family, for example, that's it.
That's where we're stuck.
And I believe that part of the reason we end up stuck there is because we're raised to believe we're going to end up stuck there.
So during this era of growing the family and parenting, when she has two kids...
Jess stays home with the children while she works four days a week at another caravan park.
But after having her third child, it is impossible to keep it up, and she has to stay home.
I became very depressed.
I think I was much more depressed with our life.
I didn't cope with being a sit-at-home mom.
It wasn't who I was.
She'd gone from living a non-traditional life to living a very traditional traditional life.
Her passions were on hold.
The kids were the focus.
It starts to get to her.
I would try and keep a certain amount of me going on in my life by earning an income doing things at home like craft stuff and what have you.
But I just couldn't maintain it with three kids.
And so life got, I kind of got swallowed.
I disappeared in our lives.
Kelly was still determined that her family would have a different life, an extraordinary life.
She didn't want to fade into the background.
And I went out and looked and kind of looked at all the different aspects of people who had amazing lives and what they got, what the elements of those amazing lives were.
And I went out and then found ways to achieve those elements for myself, my husband and my family.
The things Kelly wants for an amazing life are material in some ways, but it's more than that.
She wants to have money to afford a lifestyle, to be surrounded by beauty and culture.
To achieve that goal, she and Jess start to set up multiple businesses.
The first one was a furniture store.
The next focused on selling vintage designer wear.
I realized that vintage designer wear holds its value.
And obviously people with amazing lives wear designer wear.
So I got a wardrobe full of designer wear for all the family and I'd sell the stuff we didn't need.
Also, I realized that people with great lives had classic sports cars.
So I found out at what age you could get classic sports cars for a song.
And then Jess and I taught ourselves to restore classic sports cars.
And so we ended up driving around in classic Jaguars and with wardrobes full of vintage Tom Ford for Gucci and a house full of antique furniture.
Life has opened up.
Kelly, along with Jess, is building that wonderful life she had dreamed of.
They have nice things and work for themselves.
But people around them start to notice, and not in a good way.
In Australia, there's this thing, as I said, you may have heard of called the tall poppy syndrome.
The most un-Australian thing you can do is to want to be extraordinary.
You can't, your life can't be too quote unquote pretentious.
It immediately says that you think you're better than everybody else, which was never what it was about.
But that's the way it's perceived.
Is you think you're better than everyone else and you need knocking down a peg or two?
Even though Kelly and Jess get along pretty well as partners, parents and friends, they're different people.
Kelly is an alpha and makes most of the decisions in the family.
Jess, according to Kelly, is more passive and doesn't mind taking the back seat.
This is something else that people start to notice and take issue with.
Jess is very comfortable being a follower.
I would love us to be equal partners in decisions.
Even now, I'm that kind of person.
I like partnerships and everybody having joint input and so on.
But Jess, it's not who he is.
This dynamic works for a very long time.
But when you're a poppy growing taller around non-poppy people, the vibes around you and toward you change.
Gender dynamics are absolutely at play here, too.
People don't like that Kelly wants so much.
They also don't love that a woman is so powerful in her family, she says.
Keep in mind, this is Kelly's perspective and also happening like two decades ago.
To the outside world.
It meant that I was this dominating female who was not letting Jess have any say.
Who?
I was just perceived as this controlling woman.
Kelly says the locals, meaning people she grew up with, people her kids grew up with, taunted them.
I mean, people didn't even meet me and they hated me because the moment they knew that I had the final decision on what happened with what, it was just assumed that that was because I took that power away from Jess and the kids.
There was this term that they used to, that people used to throw up at Jess and my kids and that cut all of us really deeply, which was that they were just Kelly's cronies.
Kelly's cronies, like she's the main character and everybody else is trailing her.
Kelly says.
This perception of the family being controlled by the domineering, Kelly begins to tear at the fabric of the family.
She tries to find ways to change herself, to be less strident, less alpha, less poppy.
She tries, but nothing works.
She feels fated to end up unhappy and alienated in Australia.
But there is a dream, a dream that Kelly has always had, a dream that gives her hope and keeps her sane in the worst of times.
She'll explain after a short break.
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There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media.
It's season two of.
So back to Kelly Galloway, a woman who never planned to live her life within any box.
In fact, her ex-husband Jess often jokes that there is no box when it comes to his ex-wife.
Kelly and Jess pull themselves up by their bootstraps, eventually leading a life of vintage luxury in the west of Australia.
But Kelly feels ostracized in her small town.
Her neighbors have created a nickname to describe her family.
Kelly's cronies.
Her tall poppy syndrome and flamboyant lifestyle.
And her family that just tags along.
Add in working together and raising three kids.
It's a lot for Kelly and Jess.
Jess and I were already, our marriage was ugly by this point.
There was just a lot of resentment on both sides.
It was too hard.
Kelly is depressed, unhappy.
She's gained a lot of weight since having her kids.
So she starts taking pole fitness classes.
Pole fitness is basically pole dancing.
In 2010, it was a big exercise trend.
The pole fitness classes themselves had a remarkable personal effect on Kelly, she says.
It sparked changes in her personal health and happiness that she desperately needed.
In seven months, I lost 52 kilos twice.
And went from beginner level at Pole Fitness up to an advanced level.
I kind of became the poster child for what pole can do for you, because I'd lost all this weight and changed so much.
And that was when I finally said enough to Jess and that I wanted a divorce.
Kelly is in her late 40s at this point.
Kelly and Jess have been together for 26 years, but they decide to separate.
Losing over 100 pounds kickstarts something in Kelly.
It's not just a divorce that she wants.
She's ready to go after all of her deepest desires.
And there's that old dream, which comes racing to the forefront after her divorce.
Moving to Europe.
I had dreamt of moving to France since I was a little girl.
I learned French at school, in primary school, for several years, and so I was going to move to France.
Kelly starts looking at properties in 2013.
I talked about it for many years beforehand and looked at the occasional place, but it was only then that I got really serious about it.
But even though the houses or villas in France looked nice and were affordable, they didn't appeal to Kelly.
She didn't feel a connection.
She starts to wonder if there might be somewhere else in Europe that's a better fit for her dream.
I had read a book in the late 90s called The Tuscan Cookbook.
And then, of course, like everybody else, I'd watched Under the Tuscan Sun four million times.
And when I couldn't find anywhere, I... grabbed me in France.
My next step, of course, was to start looking at villas in Tuscany and the rest of Italy.
As Kelly peruses local Italian sites for properties, something clicks.
It just felt like home the moment I started to look.
I realized all these connections that I'd grown up around a lot of Italian people.
I loved Italian... Well, I'd sold Italian designer wear for a I loved Italian sports cars.
I loved Italian antiques and so on.
And so it became really obvious pretty quickly that Italy was where I should be.
By the end of 2019, Kelly is ready to make an offer on something.
But the first place she likes doesn't work out.
The pandemic arrives and Australia locks down.
She can't travel to the property anymore. so she cancels and loses her deposit.
She decides to look for another place.
She feels like she'll know it when she sees it.
I wanted to wake up every day in that authentic, ancient Italian atmosphere.
And even though the movies all portray that as meaning a villa in the country, it actually isn't.
It's this.
It's waking up in some little medieval town.
That's where you're confronted by it every minute.
Whereas a place in the country, you could almost be anywhere when you open your window.
I looked all over the country, but I didn't limit myself to a particular area, because what mattered to me most was I was going to see the right building and fall in love with it.
Kelly doesn't want to wait anymore.
After canceling her deposit on the first place, she decides to just go to Italy and look.
And then she does something else.
She invites her ex-husband.
Yes, you heard that right.
Kelly and Jess have been living separate lives after their divorce, but they still care about each other.
And I said to him, look, why don't you come over to Italy with me for a few months?
You can help me settle in.
And I said, I have a hunch you're going to love it over here.
I just think it's going to fit you because Australia was very stressy.
And, as I said, they'd never fully accepted either of us, and I felt Italy was gonna be a good fit for him.
So I said we'll get you a return ticket and you can either come back if you decide you don't love it over there, or otherwise you can always stay.
So that was what happened.
We had to get special approval to leave Australia and to come to Italy and we did.
We're still at the point in the pandemic where they have to quarantine for two weeks after arriving.
But on that very first day out they get in a rental car and drive about an hour north of Rome to have a look at a palazzo in the hills of a place called Stimigliano.
The first day, we just saw the place from outside.
The second day, the agent met us here and walked us through the place.
Jess had already had a really good feeling about this palazzo.
And the moment we walked through the door, we both fell in love with the place.
And that was it.
They live in Italy now literally the most romantic country in the world, in a brand new and yet very old palazzo, an inarguably romantic setting.
So I asked Kelly, are you back together as a couple?
I'll tell you that we're still platonic, but we sleep in the same bed.
We sleep in the same bed because it's convenient and because...
We're not young, young anymore.
I'm 60 and he's 62 and we're in that age bracket where something could happen.
One of us could have a heart attack in the middle of the night.
One of us could fall, these sorts of things.
And we kind of we joked about it a bit in the beginning that what did it matter?
Because by this point lots of couples aren't doing anything anyway.
All they're doing in bed is sleeping anyway.
So So, yeah, we're still platonic.
I need to stress that.
I would assume we always will be, but that's okay.
He still makes me really angry.
He's still – I'd still like him to share the road with me.
You know, share the responsibility with me instead of just follow.
So Jess is still Jess, and I'm still Kel.
I'm still this – this powerhouse and he's still this.
Would prefer to help than you know.
Side by side.
We're still very much the same people, but we're happier.
So that's the first thing.
We're both free to be ourselves in a way that neither of us have ever been in our lives before.
It occurs to me that throughout so much of your life, the people around you were implying that you had to change that, that your interest in bettering your life, that your interest in new things was not embraced, that your interest in fancy things was not embraced, that you were supposed to be under the radar.
And rather than changing to meet the expectations of others, you have changed what's around you.
That by going to this place, that by going to this place, I mean I think about it.
I've actually never been to Italy, which I hope to rectify soon, but this idea that you're suddenly in a place that embraces all of these things you value, you get to be a different person there.
Can you talk about how changing your surroundings changes how you feel about yourself and all of these values that were so different from the people before?
First of all, I'll tell you, I suffered from severe depression for every day of my life until I moved to Italy.
Apart from two months, a couple of years earlier, that I spent in Italy.
And to a degree that I was on antidepressants for on and off for many years.
I haven't had an unhappy day since I moved to this country.
I have a theory and I don't know how right it is, but it certainly was very right in my case.
And that is that most people, or at least many people, are depressed because they are not living their authentic lives.
The moment that we came here, it was like We were able to come out of the closet about who we were.
For want of a better word.
Suddenly I could just open my mouth and speak.
I could just be utterly free to be me.
Kelly is happy now, but it wasn't deep internal work that helped.
It's messy.
Because when I think about Kelly's conflicts with people in her life, I know I'm only getting one side of the story.
She is a huge personality, one that might have made others feel smaller.
And then there's her side of things, where the options were be too much and alienate people, or try to be less and wind up depressed.
What I can say is that with this Italy move, it was a massive change in geography that changed Kelly's experience in life.
She didn't change who she was.
But this new place made her feel like she could be herself.
I believe it's an immensely healthy thing to be able to start with a clean slate.
But I also believe that if the clean slate involves the same life, you're only going to end up in the same place.
They say you have to be comfortable with yourself to be really happy.
And maybe there is something to that.
But maybe it helps to be around people who are comfortable with you, who like your way of thinking.
Maybe changing your place in the world literally geographically, can change the way you feel about yourself inside.
In Italy, Kelly not only gets this rich life, she wants.
The fact that she has it means she can finally rest.
She spent so much time trying to make things better, bigger, more in line with her dreams.
But now she's living her dreams.
She can relax.
Coming here made me slow down.
And because Jess is more passionate than he's ever been about anything, it made him be more enthusiastic about doing work, like he willingly does work on the Pilates.
So he's never done that before.
It's always what he had to do.
So we have changed to a degree by virtue of this building has changed us and this life has changed us.
But we're also still the same, if that makes any sense.
Because we're in that forever place in this life.
We adore the difference between us in who we are.
The gap has got smaller.
After a life full of changes, Kelly feels she's finally found For the record.
Kelly said Jess was fine with her going on the podcast and saying all of this stuff, but he did not want to be recorded himself.
I'll also admit to you that I would have never thought that moving countries would bring true change.
Because it's superficial, right?
Most of us carry our baggage wherever we go.
But perhaps it's one way to get a new perspective, especially if that perspective is seen from the windows of an Italian palazzo.
I mean, it can't hurt.
So I'm wondering, did our first two guests this season actually change?
What's the difference between big change and small change, internal and external change?
What does change even mean?
Next episode we're talking to a brain scientist from the Broad Institute who will help us understand if our brains can actually change and how much.
If you want to see pictures of Kelly's Palazzo Menichelli, head to the Love Letters Instagram.
See you next time.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe.
Our producer is Christina Honitou.
Our executive producer is Kristen Nelson.
Uzair Ahmed does our audio mixing and mastering.
Sound design by Christine Ahanatu.
Maddie Mortel is our audience engagement manager.
Special thanks to Nancy Barnes and Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send any questions about dating divorce marriage singlehood whatever, to loveletters at bostoncom.
And if you like this show, please leave us a review.
Learn more at loveletters.show.
All of the people I know who are are happy here and live these beautiful fairytale lives are the ones who came to Italy because they felt more at home in Italy than they did where they came from.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
