Nadia Scavuzzo, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Turin, left Malta in 1994 to pursue her big auditing dreams away from the small businesses she was used to on the island. She is the author's mother. 

Auditing in Malta was boring. I had studied accounting and auditing in Malta with interesting case studies. But when I started working on the island, our clients were all small businesses and I found it boring. 

I wasn’t getting the experience I longed for in Malta. So I decided to move to London and work in a big firm. The company where I worked, Grant Thornton, had started looking into me moving. That summer I met Romolo, my husband, and decided to go to Italy instead. 

My family took the news that I was leaving Malta very badly. I remember my mother telling me “I thought you were going to live towards Sliema, which is so far away, and you are going to Italy instead.” I think my father might have thought I was going to do something like this. 

My first job outside of Malta was what I had hoped for. I got an interview with Coopers and Lybrand, the company that merged with Price, Waterhouse & Co. into PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1998. The fact that I knew English so well helped me get the job. I started at the bottom but was already working on teams with big clients, like Iveco and Bacardi.

In the beginning, adjusting was tough. The working culture is different. In Malta I was used to having a 9-5 job, whereas in Italy everything is slower. For me that was difficult, I used to think “why can’t we just get on with it?” but then I realized that I wasn’t going to change Italy, so I might as well adapt. 

I was scared of driving in Italy. But after taking the bus for a few weeks, I decided that I had to get over my fears. We didn’t have any GPS systems, so I would get lost constantly. Romolo even bought me a compass. I used to leave hours in advanced to make sure that I would arrive on time at meetings. 

Being a woman in a man’s world was never easy. I got to where I am now thanks to determination, organisation, being very professional and never making promises I couldn’t keep. It was very difficult as a woman, in all of Italy, when I got promoted to senior partner, there were about ten female partners out of about 110.

I miss Malta, but I miss my family more than anything. I miss the sea and the smell of the sea. I would like to come back to Mata when I retire, but not full time. I think I would like to skip the summer months, it’s too chaotic and crowded in the summer. 

To people who are moving abroad, I say: don’t think that grass is always greener on the other side, because everything has positives and negatives. I hated that everybody knew everybody else and their business in Malta, but at the same time everybody is ready to help you if needed. When you go abroad, many times you are very much on your own and have to do things with your own resources. Although it sounds exciting, it can sometimes be very lonely. 

Are you a Maltese person living abroad? Contact malteseabroad@timesofmalta.com