Inside Kate Langbroek’s new life in Italy
Radio host Kate Langbroek has given her first glimpse into her new home town in the Tuscan city of Bologna after moving there with her husband and their four children earlier this year.
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Asked how her family’s relocation to Italy is going, Kate Langbroek confidently sings out her reply. “Tutti bella! Tutti bella!” she declares. It’s as if she has already learnt the native tongue.
Then her voice wavers. “I think that means ‘everything’s good’,” she says, admitting that the greeting was all false bravado, and she is in fact struggling with the language barrier. “Nobody speaks English here, absolutely nobody. I have to accept that I speak like a toddler and it’s very — I’m gonna say humbling. But in reality, it’s humiliating.”
The first few intensive language classes she took went well enough, but now Langbroek has hit a major roadblock.
“I never learnt grammar at school and suddenly I have to learn it in Italian,” the formerly Melbourne-based radio host explains.
“I find it very complicated — I don’t understand why some things are boys and some things are girls.”
Langbroek’s husband Peter Allen Lewis, who is also on the line with Stellar from their new home in Bologna, interjects: “You mean masculine and feminine.”
“Yes,” Langbroek huffs in response. “Pizza is a girl and wine — vino — is a boy. I don’t know why they get wine.”
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Language barrier aside, the life that Langbroek, 53, Lewis, 44, and their children Lewis, 15, Sunday, 14, Artie, 12, and Jan, nine, have led for the past four months in Bologna has been pretty dolce, as photos from their cover shoot with Stellar can attest.
“Italians are very relaxed people,” she says. “Life revolves around having something nice to eat, having a rest, enjoying what you’re doing, your family, and enjoying the beauty around you. That’s really it.”
The move may have seemed abrupt to listeners of the Hit Network radio show, Hughesy & Kate, that she co-hosts with Dave Hughes, but Langbroek says the family had in fact been considering a move for several years.
“Peter and I got serious about it around 18 months ago and the kids have been fantastic,” she says, explaining that any resistance from their children would have been futile. They weren’t asked if they wanted to move across the globe — they were told.
She says that’s “the way we operate as a family — the children calling the shots doesn’t really happen. There’s so many of us we can’t afford to do that.”
If the kids didn’t challenge the move, Hughes certainly did. Langbroek handed in her resignation, expecting little more than a few tears and a farewell party.
Instead Hughes told her he wasn’t having a bar of it — and convinced her to stay on as co-host, with the radio network setting up a studio in Bologna.
Co-hosting from Italy has proved relatively easy, although the time difference means Langbroek is working the drive show at breakfast radio hours.
“It’s not so bad now because of daylight savings — when I first got here I had to get up at half past four. Now I get up at half past six. And that’s fine.”
Regular listeners may recall Hughes blowing up over technical difficulties last August while broadcasting from Canada, but Langbroek hasn’t experienced any such issues.
“I was worried there might be a slight lag on the line, but there isn’t,” she says, adding that she does not feel the physical distance when they’re on air — unless she’s using it to her advantage.
“It’s really like we’re in the room together,” she says. “The only thing he can’t do is pass me something. But the upside is, if he’s annoying me I just pretend I can’t hear him.”
Langbroek and Lewis are yet to quite nail the whole Under The Tuscan Sun vibe of their new life — for one thing, the weather hasn’t been warm enough, and for another, they’re currently living in very close quarters as they wait for their permanent home to become available.
“There are six of us living in a three-bedroom apartment,” explains Langbroek. “Our eldest two, Sunday and Lewis, are sharing a bedroom, which is like putting a lion and tiger together. The little boys share, and then Peter and I share a room.
“I don’t know if that’s traditional in Australia, that a married couple share a room. I don’t know what your societal norms are,” she jokes. “But in Italy, we call it... matrimonia.”
The family will move to their five-bedroom house soon, but Langbroek and Lewis lament that “soon” is very definitely on Italian time, as the date keeps getting pushed back.
Asked why they landed on Bologna when choosing where to live in Italy, Langbroek jokingly responds that Lewis hoodwinked her.
They took a reconnaissance trip there last year, also stopping in Florence and Verona. They immediately decided Florence was too busy. They liked Verona but ultimately opted for Bologna, which Langbroek has since discovered may have been more purposeful than she realised.
“I thought by leaving Australia we were leaving the ludicrous amount of children’s basketball commitments behind, but Peter had a secret plan that we would not only keep them, we’d add to them. It turns out Bologna is known as Basket City, because it’s the home of basketball in Italy. I didn’t know, and I think I’ve been played for what we would call in Australia a fool.”
Weeknights are now taken up with basketball practice and there are no leisurely Saturday sleep-ins or lingering weekend breakfasts over espressos at the local cafe.
Instead, Langbroek and Lewis often go in different directions for games with the kids. “This weekend I’m going to Turin with Artie and Kate’s going to Florence with Jannie,” says Lewis.
“Exactly,” Langbroek interjects. “They’re not even in the same cities. They’re all over the place!”
Still, she concedes it is a good way to see their adopted home country. “I have to admit, it’s more exciting going to Florence than Geelong,” she quips.
The school pick-up is not as fraught as it was back in Melbourne, and there’s no soccer-mum car required since the international school is a leisurely 800-metre walk from home.
“We walk through ancient lanes, under porticos and past bustling cafes, to get to school,” says Lewis. “It’s pretty lovely.”
Adds Langbroek, “On a good day, the kids get to stop at the gelato or the crepe shop. They’re working their way through all the gelato flavours.
“I think I’ve lifted my wardrobe game here a bit, because the Italians are very sharp. You can see they know that we’re not Italian, even when we’re really making an effort. We don’t have that crisp look.”
Langbroek asked a local friend if their attempt at polishing their wardrobe was working. “Peter and I were looking at each other — I’ve got a scarf tied around my head, and he’s wearing his clothes that he found in the gutter.
“She looked at me and said, ‘You? They will think you are artists.’ And I said, ‘Oh, well that’s all right.’ Then she said, ‘It’s not a compliment.’”
The family has committed to staying for a year, and Langbroek and Lewis are hesitant to nominate a return date.
For now, Lewis says, they are just happy to be there. And Langbroek says anybody seriously considering a change like theirs should just go for it.
One of the most surprising things about the move, she explains, was the reactions from people they knew.
Many were positive, but some were baffled as to why they would make the choice. Even she isn’t quite sure how to explain it.
“I really don’t know,” says Langbroek. “Other than [our son] Lewis was very sick when he was little and he could’ve died. [He battled leukaemia for three and a half years before being given the all-clear in 2013.]
“Maybe that makes you feel differently about the opportunities you have in life, and the biggest opportunity is the life itself that you have.”
So despite looking like starving artists, speaking like toddlers and being squashed into a three-bedroom apartment like uni students in a share house, Langbroek and Lewis remain thrilled with the decision they have made.
“I would urge anyone who has the tiniest chink of opportunity to put a spanner in there and prise it in there to make it happen,” says Langbroek. “We have no regrets at this point.”
After a beat, she adds with a laugh: “Wait ’til you check back in with us in a few months and my husband and I are embroiled in a nasty Italian divorce. You know that basketball will be involved.”
Hughesy & Kate airs 4.30pm weekdays on the Hit Network.
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Originally published as Inside Kate Langbroek’s new life in Italy
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