California Couple with Part-Time Italian Life
By Bill Spring
If home is where the heart is, how much heart must a person have to live in two homes?
Having resided in Los Angeles for 15 years, Douglas Gayeton and Ombretta Capecchi recently decided to move to a small town in Italy and make it their second home for roughly half the year. It's a lifestyle that would drive some people to distraction but is perfectly suited to Gayeton and Capecchi's creative sensibilities.
Ombretta Capecchi was born and raised in Pistoia, a small Italian town about 30 miles northwest of Florence. Growing up in the 1960s and '70s, she loved the natural beauty of Tuscany, but as she got older she began to long for more excitement.
"I started to dream about traveling all over the world," she says.
Unable to journey except in her imagination, young Capecchi spent hours looking at maps, reading about other cultures and wondering when she would break free.
Half a world away, Gayeton was growing up in Marin County, Calif., north of San Francisco. In contrast to Capecchi's rather sheltered childhood, Gayeton's was worldly.
"My mother is Spanish," he explains, "so I spent every summer until the age of 15 in Spain." He also has an Italian grandmother and felt a special affinity for the Old World. "I've always gravitated toward Europe," he explains.
Capecchi's chance to travel came when she was in her mid-twenties. In 1987 a friend and she landed in Los Angeles, where she met Gayeton, who was working as a music video director. "I met them at the airport," he remembers. "They were friends of friends."
Intending to crash at his L.A. home for a few days, she ended up staying for a month. "We connected immediately," Capecchi says of Gayeton. Romance blossomed, and Capecchi agreed to move to Los Angeles to be with Gayeton. In 1990, the two were married.
Luckily, Capecchi had very little trouble adjusting to her new life in Los Angeles. "The energy of the people and the city was exactly what I've always had in mind," she says.
The optimism and artistic spirit of the city inspired her creative side. She studied photography and spent several years running her own successful hat-making business. She also worked as a tour guide, introducing Italian tourists to her new city.
The '90s brought Gayeton happiness and success as well. He directed projects for Propaganda Films in the early part of the decade, then for the rest of the '90s his career was a unique blend of creative and high-tech pursuits, with Gayeton writing, directing and creating everything from documentaries and graphic novels to interactive CD-ROMs and online communities.
But by early 2000 he was feeling burned out and was prescient enough to understand that the overvalued bubble of Web-based media was about to burst. At the same time, Capecchi was missing her family and hometown in Tuscany.
Having set aside a "war chest" of money, the two decided it was time for a new adventure and set their sights on a 300-year old apartment in Pistoia.
For the next two years they set their careers aside, and the renovation of the apartment became their primary focus. There were countless frustrations as well as wonderful surprises.
"We found beautiful frescoes underneath the walls that had been painted over," says Gayeton.
By the time the apartment was finished in late 2002, Gayeton and Capecchi no longer considered it a vacation property — it was a second home, and they wanted to spend at least half the year living there.
Back in Los Angeles in the winter of 2002, they found friends to look after their house, said a tearful temporary goodbye to Capecchi's three beloved cats and moved to Italy.
For Gayeton, much of the joy of living in Pistoia is about immersing himself in the culture and experiencing the world in which his wife grew up. "I finally have the chance to really understand where she came from," he says.
Capecchi is also learning new things about her native land. "When I left, I was a little rebel, but now is the prefect moment for me to understand how lucky I was to grow up here," she says.
The differences between Pistoia and Los Angeles are striking to both of them. The pace is unhurried, the people more connected to each other and the concerns mostly local and personal. Gayeton and Capecchi know the men and women who bake their bread, sell them their meat and vegetables and serve their espresso.
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