Leave, Come Back, Log In, Look Around: The Remote-Work Renaissance delivered
From the Series Remote Workers for Remote Villages (Ep. 7)
There’s a moment every remote worker knows well: you close your laptop, look around, and suddenly realise you could be anywhere.
A terrace in Lisbon? Sure.
A beach bar in Bali? Tempting.
A borgo in Sicily you’d never heard of until five minutes ago? Even better.
And sometimes, in that same moment, someone who once left that borgo decides it’s time to come back (to look forward in life).
That’s the energy at the heart of the latest episode of Remote Workers for Remote Villages, where we connect with Chiara Lo Zito from Palazzolo Acreide — a baroque gem perched in the Sicilian hills, the kind of place that makes digital nomads spontaneously rethink their life choices.
Chiara left young, wandered the world, studied, worked, reinvented herself, lived several “lives” abroad… and then did the most unexpected thing in the global-mobility playbook: she returned.
Not for nostalgia.
But because remote work suddenly turned “impossible” into “why not?”
The New Nomads Don’t All Move Away
Remote work has done something subtle and revolutionary: it has loosened the geography of ambition.
People still travel, explore, relocate, test-drive new continents. Digital nomads will always be the joyful chaos of airports and coworking passes.
But another movement is growing quietly: the returners.
Those who spent years abroad, gained skills, absorbed ideas, and now feel that bringing it all “home” is not a regression — it’s an upgrade.
Chiara is one of them.
She came back to Palazzolo and built Da Giù, an e-commerce supporting small Southern Italian producers — the kind of people who turn tomatoes into a religion and olive oil into a philosophy.
Then she launched a crowdfunding campaign to reopen a venue in the oldest part of the village.
Here, a single shutter reopening can shift the atmosphere of an entire neighbourhood.
This isn’t nostalgia.
It’s strategy, community, and a touch of local rebellion.
Why This Matters for Remote Workers and Nomads
Because whether you stay six months, six years, or six days, small places react to your presence.
They absorb energy, ideas, conversations, laptop stickers, and the international vocabulary of “let’s grab a coffee, I’m on a call at five.”
Local people start seeing new possibilities.
The returners reconnect dots that were never supposed to meet.
Nomads bring curiosity; residents bring roots; together they produce something better than tourism and smarter than relocation.
This is not the “move to Europe for vibes” trend.
This is place-based innovation — one video call at a time.
An Invitation to Visit, Stay, or Simply Pay Attention
If you’re travelling through Italy, add Palazzolo Acreide to your list.
Walk the alleys, meet the people, sit down for a granita and pretend you understand the dialect.
Let yourself be contaminated by small-town life — the good kind of contagion.
And if you’re far away?
That’s fine too.
Remote life teaches us that proximity is optional, curiosity is portable, and community travels surprisingly well through Wi-Fi.
Worst case, you can still participate the old-fashioned way:
ask someone to send you a “pacco da giù.”
It won’t fix your life decisions, but it will make them tastier.
And if you are now feeling tempted to look at the entire interview (sorry guys, it’s in Italian)…
