Home Sweet 300 sq. ft. Home

The day after we visited Milan, we were able to FINALLY move into what would be our home for the next 6 months.  The first day we had arrived in Italy, Luke and I decided we'd go into Novara, the city we'd be living in, for dinner.  We followed road signs that pointed towards Novara until they began to seem like they were all pointing in different directions and we found ourselves in a small little Italian town.  We had heard that Novara had a historic city center, a large park, and lots of great restaurants to choose from.  To us it didn't SEEM that big, but who were we to judge?  We parked the car next to a (very tiny) park we found and tried to figure out if it was possibly the one we had seen on maps of Novara (which had appeared to span for blocks).  We then walked towards the "city center" which was, of course, a very old cathedral.  It didn't SEEM like the foot-traffic only historic center of Novara we had heard about, but again, what did we know?  We then set about looking for a restaurant and found... just about nothing.  Maybe our eyes weren't trained correctly yet, but all we seemed to stumble upon were very small cafes with groups of old men sitting outside, drinking wine, and staring very pointedly at us.  After wandering "our city" for about half an hour, we decided we were too hungry and would just eat at the hotel (where we had an awesome meal, including delicious filets cooked on blocks of salt, something we had only seen done on Food Network!).
Now, fast-forward to us meeting Marco, who works in Meritor's H.R. department, on Tuesday morning so that he can take us to our flat in Novara.  We pull out of Luke's office and Marco immediately turns the opposite way from which we believed our Novara was.  He then lead us through winding side-streets, another town, and a million one-ways, which we eventually assumed was his way of delaying going back to work.  Finally, we emerged in a huge city that we soon learned was the REAL Novara.  Apparently we had visited a small town on the outskirts - oops.  Needless to say, we were pleasantly surprised with our beautiful new home (surprise that was only slightly dampened by the fact that we can not drive to our apartment door since it is in the aforementioned foot-traffic only Historic City Center, and thus had to carry all of our suitcases the 5 blocks from where we were parked and up three flights of stairs to our door).
Our apartment is in one of the oldest buildings in Novara, and right in the center of all of the shopping, restaurants, and cafes.  It is, as the title of this post gives away, quite small; even calling it an apartment doesn't feel quite right.  It's more of a studio where everything possible is marble (floors, countertops, our entire bathroom...).  Aside from the frustrations that incur when trying to cook in a "kitchen area" that has approximately 24 sq. inches of counterspace, we're settling in to our new space fairly nicely.  We made sure to document our first meal in our new home:

Our "kitchen area" (view from the formal dining room)

 Cooking while "sharing" a bottle of wine

 Success!  Meal #1 turned out pret-ty good!