The Hipster Barber Quotient

Our town-hunting trip to Italy snuck up on us. Between college move-in, gainful employment, and wrapping up a cozy mystery manuscript, we hadn’t even discussed what we required in a new Italian hometown until we buckled into our United seats.

At which point Keith and I looked at each other...

...and burst out laughing.

We’re going to Italy.

We’ve been to Italy so many times that it shouldn’t feel revelatory. Yet here we were. For the first time since our scouting trip to Spello nearly twenty years ago, we were looking for a place we might actually live.

Unlike Spello, though, this wasn’t for a year.

This was forever.

Or at least as close to forever as anyone dares claim after living through a pandemic.

We solidified the specifications for a new home town that we’d bandied about in shorthand in the preceding months. “Clinking” our plastic cups of nondescript airline wine, we said cheers to our list.

Then tore up that list almost as soon as we landed.

Because on the drive to Saluzzo, a homebase that checked all the boxes, we stopped in Vercelli, a town that was nowhere on any checklist, other than a list of towns between Milan airport and Saluzzo that we could stop for lunch. A pit stop, if you will. The drive in was so uninspiring, I suggested we stop at an Autogrill instead so we could hurry onto the town of our dreams.

But we persisted, and pulled into a parking spot under trees. I stepped out of the car onto fallen chestnuts. We wandered toward the sound of church bells, stumbled upon an art museum in a former market hall, piazzas that materialized out of seeming nowhere, and just the right touch of grit. (I like a bit of grit in a city—otherwise it feels like Disneyland: sterile, unflappable, faintly fake.)

We didn’t reach Saluzzo until dusk because Vercelli kept tugging us around corners. Something about this city resonated at a level I couldn’t have predicted.

On the drive though, I quietly ruled out Vercelli, as a quick spot of research revealed how sweltering it gets, and one of the reasons we’re looking north is to break out of the heat prison that lands on much of Italy in the summer months.

I put my phone in my pocket and turned my eyes toward Saluzzo. I noted the charming tree-lined roads, the single lane bridge crossing the creek, the road winding up.

I got out of the car, ready to be delighted.

Instead, I felt...nothing.

But…Saluzzo answered every item of our list. Beautiful? Check. Active? Check. Piazzas lined with bars for aperitivo? Check. Grand churches? Check!

Then why did it fall flat?

The word “vibe” swam up into my consciousness. Something about the vibe of Saluzzo just didn’t land.

Over pizza, Keith confessed, “Saluzzo isn’t doing it for me.”

I practically sagged with relief. Can you imagine if he’d said, “I’m ready to move here,” and I’d had to explain that apparently we weren’t on the same real-estate listing?

“Same,” I admitted. “But...why?”

He shrugged. Took a bite. Shrugged again. “This is a very unsatisfying answer,” he said. “It just doesn’t have vibe.”

There are moments in a relationship where, even after three children and two transatlantic moves and years of joy with moments of heartbreak and then endless laundry and perpetual soccer games, you realize you exchanged rings with the right person.

This was one such moment.

As Keith poured wine into my glass, I remembered our arrival to Spello on our scouting trip almost two decades ago. It was the final Umbrian town on our list, and it followed one dead town after another. Spello surprised us with children running to the school bus, old men enjoying gelato under the trees in the piazza, and a general pleasing bustle.

We expected nothing from Spello. Or, now that we thought about it, Vercelli. So we were caught off guard with delight.

Maybe that’s what vibe really is: the spark that comes when a place shatters your expectations and leaves you with nothing but appreciation.

And then Saluzzo did something really annoying.

In our weeklong stay, we returned to the same coffee bar. We talked to the market vendors. We fell in love with a restaurant owner who brought us fried porcini mushrooms he’d collected that morning in the Maritime Alps, just because we said we liked mushrooms. They were not on our bill.

We found ourselves growing genuinely fond of Saluzzo.

Could vibe be a slow burn? Spello had been a thunderstrike. But maybe there are multiple routes towards connecting with place.

Over the next week, we attempted to reverse-engineer a feeling. In that process, I realized something absurd. Towns we resonated with, I passed at least one hipster barber shop.

I chalked up this realization to my mind that tends to spill in too many directions at once and didn’t bother mentioning it aloud.

Pinerolo and Ivrea seemed promising, with their lively flow. So charming, so much bustle, we had to pick our chins off the cobblestones. But in both of these towns, that energy only existed on the main thoroughfare. Once we ducked into sides trees, into the residential medieval center, it was like a curtain fell. I felt forced to library my voice.

In short, the sense of possibility evaporated.

Parallel to this process of articulating vibe, we realized we wanted a place tucked into the mountains. One, because of that heat problem which turns out besets much of Piedmont. Two, because we discovered via air quality notices on our weather app that Piedmont, and in fact, northern Italy in general, struggles with air pollution.

In drawing our fingers through the mountains where elevation flow meant cleaner air, our path stutter-started at ski resorts. We hadn’t even known there were ski resorts in the Maritime Alps.

Mountain, skiing, that could spell some serious possibility.

Learning literally nothing from previous town visits, we made a checklist and selected a mountain town.

Actually, we did learn one thing from our experience, we learned not to have expectations. But it turns out, my expectations are wild horses that will not be contained. As we ate lunch before setting out to what I’d already started calling our new hometown, I couldn’t keep my romantic flutterings quiet.

Keith scolded me and I waved away his protestations, saying “I’m keeping expectations in check! How amazing would it be to wander from one side of town to the other over an alpine river! I bet the river is that limestone blue color. What will our neighbors be like?”

In other words, I failed at the brief.

It didn’t matter, as even Keith, with his stabled expectations knew immediately that this wasn’t it. I described the town’s vibe as forbidding. Keith said depressed would be closer. I’m still going with forbidding. Drama be damned, I call it as I see it.

Over a sad little aperitivo, Keith pointed out the number of boarded up shops. Maybe vibe, for us, went with an increasing population.

The next day, almost on a whim, we popped into a little town with almost no online presence. But it’s proximity to skiing and elevation and increasing population suggested it deserved a stop by.

We parked the car. The town seemed a bit nondescript. We got out of the car. We strolled along, and I allowed the place to plink my inner tuning fork.

We looked at each other.

This could be it.

But…why? It checked almost none of the boxes of what we said we wanted! It wasn’t even particularly charming. It’s church was fine, I guess.

Nevertheless, kids played soccer in front of the church. People accumulated in the multiple butcher shops and bakeries. I need to stress the multiple. This town is about the same population as Spello, but with three times the butcher shops and bakeries.

We passed a barber shop. The sign made us pause. Not a normal barber shop. A hipster barber shop. Something about that tickled my mind. Then we passed another hipster barber shop. And another.

Three hipster barber shops.

In a town this size.

That seemed...statistically significant.

It hit me.

I gravitated to towns with hipster barber shops.

And though it sounds preposterous, it makes a weird kind of sense. After all, more hipster barber shops mean more young people. The more young people, the more bakeries, butchers, cafés, conversation, and general life happening on the streets. This is why I always prefer a college town.

Naturally, I responded as any reasonable person would. I invented a completely unscientific metric: The Hipster Barber Quotient.

I don’t know if any urban planners have written extensively on the HBQ phenomenon, but I am prepared to.

On one of our final Piedmont days, we headed through the mountains towards Chiappera, a town practically on the border of France (proximity to France was another Piedmont selling point). Google maps more or less gave up before we reached it. We continued because the closer we drew to this mountain shaped like a gnome’s hat (photo below), the more I wanted to run and frolic and generally behave like someone who’d had far too much espresso.

The slamming of our car doors reverberated into the clean mountain air. We walked through a little town, lined with canals, all with gardens and windows facing that curious mountain.

“Chiappera has vibe,” I announced.

Keith looked around.

“Too much vibe.”

True. And zero HBQ.

Which tracked: the only other people we saw was another tourist couple, as hungry as we were. Hungry bellies and nothing was open.

We left.

Since that trip to the Piedmont, I’ve realized the Hipster Barber Quotient isn’t really a housing metric.

It’s just our way of admitting we’re trying to quantify something fundamentally unquantifiable. Our attempt to sum up the frequency of a town that hums with openness and life and small things.

I’m just glad this is happening now. Twenty-five-year-old Michelle would have hated that answer. She liked measurable things. Checklists. Gold stars. She wanted proof she was making the right decision.

Somewhere along the way I’ve become much more interested in the little tuning fork inside me.

So, maybe the barber shops aren’t the point.

Maybe they’re just evidence that life is happening, the kind of life that resonates, reverberates in my heart.

And that’s the kind of place I want to call home.

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