Accidental Expat: An Artist Stumbles on Padula, Italy

Name: Melinda Borysevicz
From: Savannah, GA
Living in: Padula, Italy

“The morning after arriving in southwest Italy,” Melinda Borysevicz says, “I walked onto the terrace and this sense of coming home. Of déjà vu.”

It’s difficult for foreigners to stumble across Vallo di Diano, a rural valley in the Campania region of Italy. The largest attraction here is the 14th-century Certosa di Padula, a Carthusian monastery containing the largest cloister in the world… a claim to fame that isn’t exactly a beacon for Americans.

But Melinda, of Savannah, Georgia, found herself here despite the odds.

A Fortunate Accident

“It was a total accident that I ended up in Italy,” Melinda recounts.

The previous year, Melinda had visited a friend’s cabin in North Carolina for some time to “just paint.” As a single parent of two teenagers, and the founder and lead instructor of The Studio School, Melinda often found it difficult to carve out time for herself. Inspired by the tranquility of her brief getaway, she intended to return that winter, but couldn’t find an available studio.

“I posted on Facebook that I was looking for a studio, and a friend reached out saying they knew someone in Italy who had an apartment in a town called Sant’Arsenio,” Melinda says. “I thought, ‘Why not?’”

Melinda sublet her rented house and bought a round-trip ticket to Naples for January of 2015.

Lunch (and Then Some) With a Shepherd

Melinda feels at home with the tranquility of southern Italy, even though it took some time to adjust to cultural differences.

“I’ll admit I was infuriated at times by the slow pace of life, but I was also kind of in love. Small conversations turned into invitations. Quick errands turned into all-day affairs.

“I mentioned to my friend Luigi that I wanted some really local cheese, so he invited me to come along the next time he went to pick up some cheese from a local shepherd. This errand turned into lunch. Then the shepherd invited friends, which turned into drinks. Now it’s too late to go back and cook, so why not stay for dinner?

“Entire days just disappeared,” she says. “And I realized I couldn’t measure things by minutes or days anymore. Here, they measure things in years and centuries.”

Originally, Melinda had intended to stay for only the three months her visa allowed. But once she settled in, she started looking for a path to residency.

After a conversation with a friend, Melinda found that she qualified for Italian citizenship through her great-grandparents. It took two years, from 2015 to 2017, to become an Italian citizen, and in those years of waiting, Melinda never went back to the U.S. Instead, she sold her art school and rented a two-bedroom apartment in Sant’Arsenio for €250 a month. And she picked up Italian at the Centro Italiano Napoli, too.

“When I arrived, I could say ciao and spaghetti and that was it,” she jokes. “Now I consider myself fairly fluent.”

And Melinda made one more big change.

Making Her Way Home

During the first wave of Covid-19, Melinda grew stir-crazy in Sant’Arsenio. “I’ll always have a fondness for Sant’Arsenio,” she explains. “But it’s in the shadow of the mountains and at two in the afternoon it loses light. I knew I liked Padula, where a local friend lived. It’s a mountain village but only 25 minutes away from my favorite beaches on the Cilento coast.”

Some two thousand feet above sea level, Padula is sparsely populated… but packed nonetheless with rough-hewn stone homes. Navigable only by steep streets and winding staircases, its one flat area is the piazza. This is where the town gathers when not taking their riposo, or daily nap.

Although Padula is off the beaten path, it’s only two hours away from the airport in Naples, and is serviced by three bus lines, with the possibility of catching a train in nearby Battipaglia. And while most shops close by 8 p.m., cafés stay open until midnight, especially in the piazza, allowing anyone to enjoy a latenight digestivo.

Living Well on Little

Melinda bought a two-story, three-bedroom house in Padula with an unattached parcel of land on the tree-dotted hills of Padula’s outskirts. This rang in at a grand total of €23,000 ($25,000).

Southern Italy’s low cost of living allows Melinda to live large. “It’s so much easier—and cheaper—to buy local produce and meat here than it was in Savannah. I can buy a month’s worth of groceries for €100 ($107),” Melinda says. Filling up the tank in her car costs around €60 ($64), and she pays an average of €300 ($320) a month for her gas, electric, water, and phone bills.

In-season vegetables typically cost €1–€3 ($1–3) a kilo, bread costs around €2 ($2) a kilo, and an espresso at a café will cost no more than €1 ($1). The only two restaurants, located in central Padula, are affordable, with a plate of pasta at the local trattoria (traditional restaurant) of Trecento going for €6 ($6). A similar dish comes closer to €10 ($11) at the upscale Cosilinum, a renovated Roman villa-turned-hotel and restaurant.

For a splurge, Melinda will go to Arenabianca, a nearby frazione (suburb), and enjoy a meal at Casa Cauli, a farm-to-table B&B and restaurant… or agriturismo, as it’s called in Italian. “No matter how much I eat or drink, the owner always charges €30 ($32),” Melinda says, laughing.

Prices across the board are reasonable. In Padula, reports Melinda, a couple could live comfortably on €1,200 ($1,300) a month. That includes rent, utilities, car maintenance, groceries, and going out to eat.

An Artists Retreat in Southern Italy

Today, Melinda’s returned to her artistic roots. She paints with inspiration from Padula’s religious history. And she’s opened an artist residency, Art Center Padula. It’s deeply fulfilling, she says, to introduce these global artists to her now-home.

“These are people who want meaningful contact with a medieval city and those who live here,” she says. “Padula is a truly special place.”