For our parents and grandparents the home was one of the certainties in their life, a benchmark, a place where they were supposed to spend most of their life, and in some cases their whole lives. Just think about your parents: most probably they have always lived in the same house since their wedding, a house that they have probably built with effort and sacrifices. And what about your grandparents? Unless they belonged to those people who had to move abroad or to richer regions, probably their house was not only the place where they lived after getting married, but the place where they lived all their lives, from birth to death. And probably that same house had been passed down from generation to generation, being inhabited by many members of the same family.
It is almost pleonastic to say that the situation in Italy – as well as in many other countries in the world - has changed; many young people move to another house after high school to go to the University; other people look for a job abroad and leave the house where they have grown, and in general many people move to a new home – and sometime to a new city city – before they reach a stable situation from the point of view of work and relationships. While in the past many people used to live in just two houses (that of their grandparents and their own), nowadays the number of people who move more often than that is increasing.
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A survey that has recently been carried out reveals that Italians have become a people of "mover": the survey, which was conducted on a sample of 5,000 people, tells us that each Italian move on the average 2,5 times in a lifetime, while 26% change to a new home over 4 times, and 13% do that 6 times – and sometimes even more often – in a lifetime.
A datum that should not be underestimated, especially if you consider that moving is never easy (think to move all of your things, furniture, books etc. for six times), and that most Italians do this hard work without the help of companies specialized in removals. 53%, to be precise, do not choose to pay a removal company, roll up their sleeves and ask only for the help of friends and relatives. It is not difficult to understand why they do that: asking for the help of a specialized company can be really very expensive, especially if the new house is far away from the old one (as often happens), and although it is undeniable that doing everything alone can be very difficult (47% of the people who have chosen the DIY solution claim to regret having done so), it is also true that people cannot always afford the luxury of paying for the professionalism of a specialized company.
What is certain is that, unlike our parents and grandparents, if we cannot – or maybe we do not want to – find a long-term accommodation, we are really likely to spend part of our life moving boxes from a house to another one!
