@Kelownagurl I have no first hand experience, but have you looked at Nomador which is a French pet/housesitting site. There seem to be quite a number of sits in France, as well as Italy.
We, like you, are location driven. We travelled to Spain quite soon post Covid and while we had a fantastic 4 week sit over Christmas and New Years in Madrid, the remaining 4 weeks we travelled where we wanted, using Airbnb. We tried to find sits that would fit, but nothing aligned. We had wanted to visit Spain for some time, but did not want to deal with the massive crowds, especially in Barcelona. We took advantage of the timing and saw everything we wanted.