I’m not too sure how many of these I’ve read, including our own over and over again before posting it. It is almost exactly our original idea to do, apart from the renting, which we ditched almost immediately after finding so many counterproductive posts. BUT before I put you off, none of it stopped us going ahead and we have absolutely no regrets, even with almost everything, apart from the veg, being different.
I’ll leave it to others to jump in regards “doing a place up”.
You can press your own olives, but we know of no one here that does, they all take their olive to the mill (frantoio), its hard work from start to finish, but well worth it in our opinion, then again we have no olives, we simply help others. The oil we have as a result (circa 30l at the moment) is superb and we have never had such as it ever in the UK.
We have around 1ha of land, wanted 2ha to start with and oh boy do we wish we only had 5000sqm! Okay a lot of ours is a bit hilly and that makes it much more difficult to deal with. But we’ve dug out two veg plots roughly totalling 40sqm and have other fruit areas. These take us almost all of our time from April to say around September when the work is more harvesting. There is so much to say on this I could not really do it justice. So importantly; you need water, not as daft as it sounds, particularly that far south. You will need equipment rotorvator , strimmer and possibly a chainsaw and these all will need to be maintained. If you intend to leave the place to visit the UK, then you will need someone to water or have a watering system in place. All of these things are different problems to what they would have been in the UK….
Enough of the detail, I would suggest you read as many old posts about the things you want to do, things you come across when reading them and get a cheap book on buying and living in Italy. Then put these in order of your perceived importance and do so searches to get as much information as possible on them. Anything, or as an alternative, post them on here asking the questions.
We found it all a wonderful experience and can’t thank enough people of this and other forums that spent their time giving us the answers we asked for. However we still ended up doing a lot of things wrongly because we either did not want to listen to what people were trying to tell us OR simply because there was no way they could get over to us what was involved.
We took 2 years to buy here and first off rented for 6-7 months. Just wish we had actually rented longer, but were too enthusiastic to get buying…. A wonderful time ahead for you, wish you the best of luck in getting there…