Front Cover

Back cover

Read my Book!

Two Years in Italy is a book about my experiences living in Italy with my late husband, photographer Bob Connelly.

In Italy, I wrote the blog Live Cheap & Make Art – Rosemary & Bob’s Italian Adventure. I've taken those blog entries and edited them, eliminated extraneous details, sharpened others, and cleaned up my “stream of consciousness writing.”

With over 60 color photographs and watercolors, it is the story of how Bob and I retired, sold our home in Phoenix, put our things in storage, got a visa and went to live in Italy on a firefighter’s pension. We lived cheaply and simply, renting small furnished apartments in four different regions.

Not completely fluent in Italian, we studied hard and were able to communicate and make friends. We drank cheap wine; ate fresh cheeses, pastas, and pizzas. I sought out my Italian roots and found ancestors dating back centuries.

We discovered markets, cooked in tiny kitchens, attended festivals. We traveled by car, bus, train, plane, and ferry, exploring every region with enthusiasm and a willingness to say yes to what each day brought.



This book is written in journal format, describing our adventures in detail, sometimes looking forward, sometimes looking back, but always with excitement, joy, some frustration, and a little heartache.

Published by Live Cheap and Make Art Studios, “Two Years in Italy” is available on Amazon.com in paperback and as a Kindle eBook.

Click here to order the book.

Click here for a reading of exerpts from the book on YouTube.

Click here for my interview on Delaware Public Media.