What greater gift than the love of a cat?

— Charles Dickens.

Since moving to beautiful Abruzzo, Italy, I have been struck by the worsening situation of the street cats here. Luckily, there are people trying to help, but it’s not easy.

In typical Italian style, bureaucracy makes life difficult and there isn’t the widespread animal-loving attitude that many of us Brits, Americans or Australians are used to. Volunteers work hard, year in year out, to sterilise as many street cats as possible and rehome the kittens, but there are no public catteries here and the help the councils provide is very limited – they won’t even neuter male cats, just females. Every year, kittens outnumber the amount of people wanting to adopt them. Many are left on the streets as there is simply no place to put them (even our bathrooms are full!), while others get lucky and are adopted by families in the North of Italy, in places such as Turin, where volunteers pay from their own pockets to transport them.

So, in a bid to raise awareness among expats and foreign friends alike, of not only the hard-working volunteers in the area but the stories that they see on a daily basis, I have decided to write this English medium blog, narrating some of the situations that happen here as a regular occurrence. I’ll be sharing my own stories and experiences, as well as those of others.