Whomever you are I want to thank all of you for the tremendous amount of work you do for us, the lovers of Italia. I wish we could have an awards ceremony where each of you would stand up so we could applaud your hard work. Grazie.

Thanks for the question, Steve.
I started developing the domain in 2002 Life in Italy 1.0 was only a website with links to other Italian websites, not very interesting.
In 2004 I started lifeinitaly 2.0 adding a bunch of content to the main website ( lifeinitaly.com ) - At that time several collaborators started helping like Justin Demetri who is the content editor - in 2007 I finally added a decent forum to the website this vbulletin that you are using at this time lets call it Lifeinitaly 2.2

Now it is an exiting time because we are designing life in Italy 3.0 - We will be moving from windows to Linux and integrate the main website with articles with the forum in a much tighter
environment - The website will be completely new from the code point of view and will hopefully look much more like an online magazine - I also want to add an Italian section to the main website and a section here on the forum for Italian expats so that we will have more integration between Italian and English speaking -

The new website will not be ready till September I think. If somebody has any suggestions on new features etc I would appreciate -

I would like to make the website a lot better but we have financial limitations. While the Italian government for example financed with 45 Million Euro a terrible website ( italia.it ) - now closed never gave this site 1 Euro so all the financing comes from Google advertising. The challenge for me is to make the best with the available limited finances.

Life in Italy team is at the moment:
Paolo Nascimbeni programmer and fact totum,
Justin Demetri English editor.
Dan Lora graphic designer who will be leaving us to move to live on an Island off Columbia ( seriously ...)
Guido Gangi will take over Dan duties as a photoshop guru ...and forum 'animator' :-)

Plus there are many people who participate with content Like Jacqueline Rinaldi who is a US citizen who lives near Rome, Jonathan Radford who is an English man who lives on Mount Amiata and gave free of charge many gardening article to the website - Pasquale Comegna gave thousands of Italian images for website use, Damyanti collaborates from wherever she happens to be in the world ( she seem to move around a lot ) etc etc

At this point I have to thank all this collaborators since many did it just to help and I am really looking forward to Lifeinitaly 3.0

May I extend the warmest of thank you's, too? You've created such a wonderful world here that has helped me connect with la mia famiglia ed il mio patrimonio. Grazie mille, tutti!

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"Tremate, tremate, le streghe sono tornate!" - Italian feminist slogan

I too thank you Paolo for all of your hard work. And thanks to Steve for asking the question which precipitated the very informative answer from Paolo. Thanks to Justin and Dan. I'm sure Guido will do a great job on graphics.
And I also am very glad to have this web-site to visit. I have learned so much and feel as though all who contribute to the forum are friends.