In my recent People & Blogs interview, I offered to share my experience with anyone who wanted to reach out. Someone took me up on it, and asked some really good questions about what it's like to live and run a business in Florence. It's funny, you often don't even realize what might be interesting about your own life to someone else. These felt like mundane things to me, things I barely think about anymore. But of course, from the outside, they're not mundane at all.

So, what's it like?

It's not that different from most Italian cities, honestly. There are very few Italian tech companies, even fewer internationally successful SaaS products. And the intersection of companies that are both successful and bootstrapped (no funding rounds, no investors, no equity games, less than 15 people) is practically empty.

You feel a bit alone. Very little exchange of ideas with the outside world, at least at a local level.

Over time, I've learned not to suffer too much from this lack of "kindred spirits". We do our thing, the way we like it, hoping we're not getting it too wrong. It was much harder in the early days, when we didn't have the strong confirmation that our numbers and our customers now give us. Back then, we even explored and talked to a few incubators and VCs in Milan and elsewhere in Italy. But it was like speaking a completely different language.

Our company is also fully remote. We're scattered across Italy, Europe, and America. So we don't even have a strong tie to Florence as a city. I could be anywhere, and nothing would change, and I didn't even really choose Florence. I moved here for family reasons. I had other plans, and for a long time, I resented it. But now, in my forties, I'm starting to appreciate this city in a way I never expected.

What does make Florence different is its overwhelmingly touristic nature. The city has around 360,000 residents and receives somewhere between 10 and 16 MILLION visitors a year — most of them crammed into a historic center you can walk across in twenty minutes.

We have an office right in the center, three minutes on foot from the Duomo, the epicenter of the madness. Eating out nearby costs absurd money, unless you know a few tiny spots still frequented only by locals, which I will not be sharing here. You routinely have to wade through a human wall just to get a coffee.

But you also live inside the absurdly beautiful. Your morning coffee is surrounded by six centuries of architecture that changed the world. People pay good money for this. I just get it on a Tuesday morning.

From a certain point of view, though, it's a bloodbath. These tourists are truly hit-and-run. The historic center has been invaded by Airbnbs, and the social fabric that once held it together has been crumbling for years now. And it's only getting worse, step by step.

I've been in Florence for over fifteen years, and even back then, tourism levels were already massive compared to the size of the old city. So I never really got to experience what neighborhood life here could feel like. But when you visit other cities — Bologna, for example — you notice the difference immediately. And you miss it. A city lived by its own inhabitants, not a theme park.

To answer the last question from Toronto (it's kind of hilarious that this is known on the other side of the world) yes, there is a huge Chinese community here. Not exactly in Florence, but in Prato, a neighboring city just 20 minutes away.

Roughly a quarter of Prato's population is Chinese, making it the largest Chinese community in Italy and one of the largest in Europe. A few decades ago, the Chinese presence there was practically nonexistent. Today, around 50,000.

They run thousands of factories, mostly textile and fast fashion, and the working conditions inside many of them are notoriously brutal — twelve-hour shifts, workers sleeping on-site, very little visibility from the outside. Almost a parallel economy. It's also a very closed community. There isn't much exchange or sharing from that side, nor from ours. A real shame.

So yeah, Florence: a beautiful, complicated, lonely kind of place to build a tech company.