If you could move anywhere, where would it be? This used to be a question I’d ask myself or others at dinner parties, but two years ago, as new parents facing the unsustainable costs of Bay Area life and the looming threat of middle-age atrophy, my husband, Ben, and I took to the internet in earnest with the notion of reinventing our lives somewhere new.
We were, of course, part of a widespread trend: seeking adventure and greener pastures elsewhere in the era of globalisation. Even so, the notion felt thrilling. Where would we go? Our search had some parameters: affordability, a natural landscape (I dreamed of cicadas, cypress trees), a place with a language we either already spoke or could learn easily enough so that we could contribute to the community. We’d spent our careers working in schools and nonprofits with young immigrants, and, however different it might look in a new country, we had no intention of leaving a life of service behind. Above all, though, what we wanted was an environment in which we could spend a lot of time writing and afford to do it. But Ben had another non-negotiable of his own: proximity to surfing. This annoyed me, as it significantly limited our search, but I supposed it was reasonable enough to design a dream life according to one’s actual dreams.
“There’s surfing in Sardinia,” he said.
We’d heard about the “€1 house” programme in which poor, depopulating towns put their abandoned or unused buildings up for sale. The programme, I soon learned, was actually a loose collection of schemes that economically struggling towns used to lure outside investment and new residents. The campaigns seemed to me to have been largely successful – some towns had sold all their listed properties. I pored over dozens of news articles that had served as €1 house promotion over the years. By attracting international buyers to a house that “costs less than a cup of coffee”, as one piece put it, some of Italy’s most remote towns now had new life circulating through them. Many local officials had come to see €1 house experiments as their potential salvation.
What was the catch? It seemed most municipalities required you to renovate the house within a couple of years of its purchase, and due to high levels of interest, the houses often went to auction, ultimately selling for much more than a single euro. But what we wondered about were the ethical considerations – the classic tensions of gentrification. What would it mean just to buy our way into a foreign place where we had no connections and try to set up a home there?
Still, we kept looking. There is a town in northern Sardinia called Sedini that was, according to Liliana Forina, a woman I got in touch with online, about to launch a €1 house initiative of its own. A stylish woman in her 60s from Milan, she had recently moved to Sedini from the mainland. The town wasn’t far from the beach and, judging by the pictures and Forina’s descriptions, seemed beautiful.
I arranged a meeting with her over Zoom. She appeared on-screen from her office, a Sardinian valley stretching behind her. A few years ago, she explained, she and her new husband began scouring Italy for the perfect place to live. Each weekend, they would visit a new region, feeling out the vibe in remote villages and golden-lit coastal towns speckled with beaches, in each place trying to imagine a life. It was relatively easy to cross options off their list: this town was too expensive; this one too was full of tourists; this one lacked trees. They wanted easy access to basic services such as a hospital, a pharmacy, a police station. They also wanted a view. But above all, they were looking for what Forina called their dolce vita, their sweet life. Eventually, they found it in Sedini, this breezy, hilltop town in northern Sardinia where the bells of several churches rang at noon, and, from a distance, the white-stone houses appeared stacked like antique toys on a rickety shelf. A local estate agent had found them a three-storey house right in the historic town centre with a view of the great green valley below. The house was livable but rather run-down and not to Forina’s taste, so the couple got to work renovating it, adding an upstairs terrace, exposing old beams, bringing antique tiles to a new gleam and knocking down walls to allow in more light.
Their dream life was indeed becoming a reality. Mostly. As beautiful as their home was, Forina noted early on that many of the other houses in Sedini were in a state of complete dilapidation. This left the otherwise picturesque old-world town with a ghostly quality. The town was stunning, but it needed more people – ideally people from outside Sardinia. She dreamed of more cosmopolitan neighbours, people more like her. Might I be one of them?
Depopulation is a primary struggle for many places throughout Italy’s interior. Young people, especially, are leaving towns such as Sedini, moving elsewhere for educational opportunities or for work. These historic settlements are littered with buildings that now sit empty.
Forina began researching the €1 house scheme and brought the idea to Sedini’s town government. The mayor and his staff – all longtime residents whose families had lived there for generations – were easily convinced. That summer, they were going to introduce the idea to the rest of the locals.
“Come visit us in Sedini!” she told me on our call. “Stay in my home. You will love it here.”
If you could move anywhere, where would it be? It’s a question that gestures toward a life in some stage of calcification – the could implying constraint, limitations, the presumption that one simply cannot, in fact, up and move. The €1 house programme serves as the doorway for just this sort of yearning for something new. Hate your job? Want to move but can’t afford a house? Worried about where you’ll retire, or how you’ll even manage to retire at all? If you have the right passport and enough money, you can find somewhere else to live. Why not make that place Italy?
Last summer, I decided to take Forina up on her offer to visit Sedini and, while I was at it, a host of other depopulating towns throughout Italy, too. My husband and I stuffed an inordinate amount of belongings into a preposterous number of bags and flew with our 11-month-old to Italy for an adventure in pursuit of the possibility of a brand-new life.
‘Everyone wants a piece of history,” Giacomo Verrua, an Italian property developer, told me. “And in Italy, history is everywhere.” Within this cliche, a person can achieve a life’s purpose and a sense of belonging through possession. But Italy’s cheap real estate is only available to foreigners because, contrary to popular mythology, Italian life isn’t pure romance and ease.
The country is home to roughly 60 million people, but that figure is predicted to decline by 2 million by 2040 and by at least 4 million by 2050 – one of the steepest depopulation rates in all of Europe. This is due to an ageing population, but it is also a result of lack of opportunity that sees poor and wealthy Italians alike moving in search of better opportunities. In 2023, 9.8% of Italians lived below the poverty line, up from 6.9% in 2014. In Sardinia, roughly 20% of people live in poverty. The country’s birthrate has hit all-time lows, and nearly 30% of its homes are unoccupied. Small Italian towns are experimenting with all sorts of financial incentives – tax breaks, even cash handouts – to bring Italians back to the countryside. In 2022, Sardinia offered a €15,000 bonus, with some strings attached, for moving to the island.
Other places are experimenting with similar incentives. Tulsa, Oklahoma, offers a $10,000 relocation grant to remote workers as well a membership at a downtown coworking space. Across Japan, abandoned homes sell for zero dollars. There are special visas for UK and other non-EU citizens seeking to relocate to Spain; all they need to show is a certain amount of money in their bank account to qualify. Greece offers a “golden visa” to anyone who can invest at least €250,000 in a Greek property.
But no such initiative has quite captured the public imagination as the €1 house scheme. “It’s a PR campaign,” said Maurizio Berti, who runs 1eurohouses.com, a website dedicated to tracking and promoting various €1 house towns. And it’s a wildly successful one at that.
The €1 house project seems to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian art critic and TV personality turned mayor of the small, rapidly depopulating town of Salemi, Sicily. On being elected in 2008, he began wondering whether he could draw investment into Salemi by offering up its empty, falling-toward-ruin buildings to foreigners for a token fee. Outsiders scrambled to snatch up the dirt-cheap properties, demand for local construction boomed and Salemi’s emptied houses were once again filled.
Seeing this success, other Italian municipalities began devising their own €1 house plans. According to 1eurohouses.com, there are now 73 towns that have launched or are in the process of adopting a version of the model. Each town organises the operation slightly differently: some oversee the property sales directly, while others merely connect interested buyers to sellers and hype the event to the press. But the key is that the town can place conditions on the sales. Generally, buyers are required to fix the houses up within a certain amount of time (and will often have to rely on local architects and artisans). Some towns also require buyers to maintain full-time residence, or to open a business.
Advocates of the scheme insist that everyone stands to win: the town benefits economically with an increased tax base, more people to patronise local businesses and a local building boom, while buyers gain the home – and the life – of their dreams. But its detractors worry that these flash sales risk turning these endangered Italian towns into mere curiosities, packing them with foreigners so that the culture all but disappears.
The philosophical conundrum of these ageing, depopulating towns is this: open a place up to newcomers and risk eroding its essential nature, or allow it to wither away and die?
Seen one way, the story of every place on Earth is that of migration and change. Between 1880 and 1924, somemore than 4 million Italians migrated to the United States. Meanwhile, in the past decade, about 900,000 refugees have found their way to Italy – from Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, Eritrea, Guinea, Pakistan and dozens of other countries. The Italian government is working hard to seal up its borders to keep these migrants out, while municipalities invite the €1 house gawkers. The €1 house scheme represents a new era of migration. A product of late capitalism, it seeks to fill the gaps left in one place with willing, resourced travellers from another – those with some money in the bank, stable passports and thus with other options. People, in other words, like me.
On the first leg of our trip, we’d arranged to join Ben’s dad, stepmother and numerous members of his extended Italian American family in Tuscany. They’d rented a magnificent 13th century, two-storey stone villa that overlooked fields of sorghum and sunflowers. This place was, it occurred to me, tailor-made for the wistful outsider, possessing enough of the quintessential Italian iconography (draping vines, sweeping views from shuttered windows, stone floors) and the new: an open floor plan, air conditioning and palatial private bathrooms off most bedrooms.
The villa was managed by Yulia, a Ukrainian émigré in her 30s. One afternoon, she came over to help us with the air conditioning and brought her one-year-old, who joined my baby in crawling around the living-room floor.
“How much does childcare cost in California?” she asked. “$2,300 dollars a month,” I told her, shocking myself as I said the words. Yulia gasped. She had a daughter a few months older than ours and had been lamenting the Italian price tag of around €300 a month. Considering that our childcare cost more than we spent on housing, it was all too obvious to wonder yet again – what the fuck were we doing with our lives? House prices have soared in recent decades and rents continue to rise, and all the while more and more people have jobs that allow them to work from anywhere with an internet connection.
“If you find the right place, we’d go in on it with you,” Ben’s uncle Aldo said. Our rental villa was just an hour and a half from the Tuscan town of Montieri, a hilltop settlement dating back to pre-Roman times that had been one of the first to adopt a €1 house model back in 2016. I left the family one day to visit the town, winding through fields of sunflowers and climbing a few thousand feet in elevation through cooling stands of forest. Montieri’s young mayor, Nicola Verruzzi, took me on a walking tour of the town, with its streets and narrow stone passages, which were almost entirely empty of people. “The heat,” he said with a shrug.
Montieri had been a mining town since its founding around the year 1000 – silver and copper, then pyrite and lead. But when the last mine closed in the 1990s, the town was flung into a cycle of depopulation and abandonment. In the 1960s, Verruzzi said, roughly 4,000 people lived here. In the two decades after the mines closed, Montieri lost 3,000. Houses in the main squares were empty and falling to ruin, and businesses were on the brink of closure.
In 2014, Verruzzi announced his plan to sell its abandoned houses for €1. It was just a whim, he told me. Unlike Sardinia and many of Italy’s poorer regions, Tuscany already loomed large in the foreign imagination. The municipality’s inboxes were quickly crammed with interested buyers from all around the world.
In some ways, Montieri was the ideal candidate for the €1 house experiment. The town had already been hard at work updating its energy and heating infrastructure and laying fibre internet cable. And Tuscany is already a tourist destination, particularly for cyclists, mountain bikers and hikers.
Still, the success of its €1 house scheme was remarkable. Verruzzi estimates that 30 new businesses have opened in this small town as a result of the initiative. On our tour, I was fascinated to see just how many buildings in the dead-centre of town had been renovated by foreigners in the past few years. “This house was an old prison,” he told me, pointing to a narrow two-storey that had sold for €80,000, its original stone covered in places by new stucco punctured by large, modern windows.
Since the launch, some 70 houses have sold. Many of them are used as vacation homes, but they were no longer empty and falling into ruin. New electrician businesses have opened to service the renovators, there are new restaurants and bars, and tourism revenue is up.
Admittedly, much of the evidence for the success of the €1 house programme more broadly remains anecdotal, and most of it comes from town leaders themselves. But what little data does exist suggests the initiatives’ remarkable economic promise. Since announcing a €1 house campaign in 2017, the 10,000-strong town of Mussomeli, Sicily, for instance, has seen more than 125 houses sold. The mayor’s office calculated that this brought €7m to the local economy, including builders, tradespeople, restaurants and hotels. The economic boom wasn’t just a result of the house sales: it estimated that roughly 6,000 people visited Mussomeli just to look at houses in 2018 and 2019, bringing income to local restaurants and hotels.
In Montieri, Verruzzi put me in touch with Paolo, a Tuscan architect who married a Canadian woman; the two of them now comprise the in-demand design team of Montieri’s new, foreign class.
Though enchanted by the notional history of the place they are buying, many buyers have a poor historical sense of just what it is they’ve bought, Paolo said. He and his wife told me, with a smile and a slight eye-roll, that American visitors “are always looking for frescoes”.
The trickiest part about the €1 house scheme for buyers, Paolo explained, is that it is a gamble: inspections on old homes such as this can only glean so much information, making it hard to know what, in truth, you’re buying and how much work it will need. That’s also part of the fun. He recalled that one house in Montieri took years to sell because a menacing crack ran down a central wall. Perhaps the whole building would need retrofitting – or to be built anew. When it finally sold, the buyers hired Paolo, whose team carefully removed the plaster on the damaged wall only to find a beautiful stone chimney behind it. This was what had caused the plaster to buckle. What had seemed like a liability was in fact a stunning relic of the old house.
We spent the week sprawled like lizards in Tuscany, enjoying the quiet and the natural light and availing ourselves of the free local childcare (the grandparents). Then early one morning, Ben, the baby and I got in the car and drove to the ferry, which delivered us to the eastern side of Sardinia, where we went looking for a beach with surfable waves. We headed westward, crossing through the mountains and the town of Montresta, which has also jumped on the €1 house bandwagon. It was settled in the 18th century by Greeks fleeing the Ottoman empire. Now, the place and its people were weighing whether to usher in the next wave of people from far away.
It was hot and empty, like Montieri had been, and all its businesses were closed. We didn’t see a soul. It was hard to picture living there for practical reasons. We’d spent over a week straight enjoying the help of grandparents in looking after our baby. If we moved here – even if surrounded by people – we’d be, at first anyway, all on our own. Was that the life we wanted? A person can buy a house, in other words, but home is something that seems to require more than money: the currency of relationships and time.
The next day, I was due in Sedini, where I’d meet Forina and attend the launch event for the town’s €1 house initiative. I arrived just as the evening’s setup was beginning.
“We’re a town of old people,” Sebastiano Finá, one of Sedini’s town councillors, told me with a shrug as he dragged chairs into a large meeting room in the centre of town. A lean, handsome man in his 60s, Finá was sporting shorts and a tan and had just stubbed out a cigarette in the entryway. In just a few short hours, the hall would be full of townspeople for the formal announcement of the new housing plan that Forina had helped to draft, hoping to convince the owners of Sedini’s old, abandoned houses. Some had moved away. Others lived nearby and simply couldn’t afford – or didn’t want to bother with – the upkeep. And some of the homes were shared by so many descendants of the original owners that they hadn’t figured how to split the costs of the renovations or make a cogent decision about the building’s future. Under the new proposal, the town authorities would create the necessary tax structures and offer tax incentives to both buyers and sellers, in addition to channelling interested parties directly to the Sedini residents selling their old tumbledowns. This was part of a larger initiative called “Sedini per la rinascita” (Sedini for Rebirth).
While Finá finished unstacking chairs, Forina stood at the front of the room, clad in a chic purple pantsuit and fiddling with a projector. “How do I make this connect?” she groaned with frustration. “A town of old people!” Finá repeated, pointing to Forina with a laugh. “This is why we need this programme!”
We still had some time before the event began, so Forina offered to show me around town. Southern Europe was in the midst of a heatwave. It was about 38C (100F) in Sedini, the air so thick that it was unpleasant to breathe. The asphalt and centuries-old stone emitted a heat haze that made everything appear warped, as if viewed through smudged glass.
It wasn’t precisely the paradise I had pictured for myself, because, I realised once I’d arrived in Sedini, I wasn’t actually all that interested in living in the centre of a town but more in the remote ramble of the countryside – which wasn’t what the €1 house programme was generally selling. But, susceptible to the call of cheap real estate and the yearning for a full reinvention of self and life, I had at that very moment been wondering what exactly it was selling.
By six, we were back at the meeting hall where people were taking their seats. Some 40-odd people had turned out – not a bad showing given the heat. Much to my discomfort, I was seated at the front facing the crowd, along with Forina; Salvatore Carta, the gravel-voiced mayor; and Angela Fresi, the town’s buoyant deputy mayor, dressed in a fitted pantsuit of bright green.
“Welcome,” Carta bid the crowd in Italian. Not to worry, he assured the audience: the “€1 euro” price was just a starting point. Sellers could list for much as they wanted. “The municipality is only the facilitator of the sale,” he said. It would be the job of the mayor’s office to attract buyers.
When it was Forina’s turn to speak, she implored the crowd and the owners of an abandoned or uninhabited house to “understand the importance of handing it over to those who can and want to renovate and live in it. Otherwise, there will be double damage: the owner will end up with a pile of broken bricks of no value and the degradation of the village will be progressive and irreversible.”
A Dutch couple who were renovating their recently bought Sedini home took the stage. The husband, a white-haired gentleman with a slight swagger, spoke at length in decent Italian about his fondness for the town. His wife, a trim woman with short auburn hair, apologised for her lack of Italian.
“Thank you for the warm welcome to your country and to your town,” she said. “I find this place very authentic. I feel the future here.” After a pause, she added, “And I see the future here for us.”
‘A country,” writes Paolo Pileri, an Italian professor of urban design and an outspoken critic of the €1 house model, “is a complex artefact of architecture, streets, alleys and houses, combined with a web of relationships, experiences and interrelated social practices, and it therefore cannot be reduced to a mere confused sum of houses.”
And yet houses are what are for sale. The worry is that, as with all forms of gentrification, a sudden influx of moneyed outsiders will change the culture of a place – erode its customs, turn its values on their head, change its fundamental essence.
Fresi, Sedini’s deputy mayor, had spoken to me at length about the food festival the town held each autumn, in which families opened up their wine cellars, and farmers their barns and living rooms, so that people could share their harvests with one another. This was a point of pride for the locals and a matter of community connection. It also was a lure for buyers. Such events wouldn’t vanish with the mere presence of outsiders, but the detractors of the €1 house scheme seemed to fear that such events would become less of a genuine cultural tradition and more of a show – these towns becoming Disneyfied villages to be fetishised, even by their inhabitants.
Marco Pizzi, a sociologist who has conducted extensive research into the impacts of the €1 house campaigns in Umbria, told me that though he was sceptical when he began his research, he’s come to see the programme as an innovative local approach to economic redevelopment. The foreign investment may, in fact, be what allows some of these towns to survive – and the very fact of their survival would allow their traditions to continue. Almost everyone I spoke with in Italy with first-hand experience of €1 house initiatives agreed: these schemes were a form of revival and had drawn people from abroad who were curious to learn about and participate in local ways of life.
I spoke to Jennifer Fortune, a veterinarian from the Florida panhandle who started researching Italian real estate during a 2022 family vacation. She’d heard of the €1 house scheme, but soon figured out that there were lots of cheap houses for sale all over Italy that lacked some of the €1 house competition and red tape. On the real-estate site idealista.it, she found a handsome three-storey house not far from where she was staying in northern Italy. After failing to reach the real-estate agent, she snuck inside to take a look. The place was even more enchanting than she’d imagined. A stone house with brick ceilings and tiled floors, overlooking the Alps and a hazelnut grove, it was, she said, the stuff of dreams.
The property was in rough shape and would need a lot of work, but she was undeterred. In fact, the work seemed like fun. She hired Italian property lawyers to help sort out the purchase. But even with their help, the process involved seemingly endless paperwork. And then came the renovations. It could feel like a full-time job, she told me – not just because of all the choices one has to make for such a big project, but due to the bureaucratic logjams.
It didn’t help that she doesn’t speak Italian. “But I am really friendly,” she told me, “and I laugh a lot. And I have a credit card – that helps, too.”
Purchasing a property in Italy, in other words, is not for the faint of heart. This seems to be baked into the €1 house model: the barriers to a foreigner buying property in Italy ensure that only the most committed buyers make it to the finish line – those who really want to make a life in the town and have the funds to do it.
Some €1 house municipalities are now so crammed with foreigners that one wonders what – beyond historical curiosity – the original town still has, or will soon become. The Sicilian town of Sambuca di Sicilia, as CNN reports, has been so successful in luring €1 housers that it’s now considered the Sicilian “Little America”. It’s not clear whether Italian residents of the region mind.
Pileri’s argument against the €1 house model makes perfect sense to me when levelled against moneyed outsiders, but it also verges on the kind of nativism that seeks to keep refugees and poor immigrants out of Italy. What is an “original” place, anyway, when every place is the product of migration upon migration, change after change? And is a town really better off if half emptied?
What of Sedini’s dreams of rebirth? Now, nearly two years later, Forina says only a handful of Sedini residents have committed to selling their homes in the historic centre of town – some for the token €1 price, and others for a starting price of closer to €5,000. She remains somewhat at the helm. She has teamed up with Maurizio Berti and a tourist outfit to offer a “grand tour” of the area this coming summer in hopes of attracting international buyers and, for the tour operator and Berti, of perhaps making some money along the way.
I asked Fresi, the mayor, why she thought so few had yet signed over their houses to sell. She wasn’t sure. She admitted there was already a “lack of trust” between the town’s longtime residents and the few newcomers who had recently moved into town. All this effort to sell their town to outsiders, and so quickly, felt suspicious to some. Yes, they wanted the town to survive. But many liked things how they were.
One of the fundamental purposes of the €1 house programme, according to Sedini’s official guidelines, “is the revitalisation of the historic part of the town, restoring it to its historic function of the driving force of life, culture and activity”. A town needs people, Fresi and the rest of the town leaders knew. It needs patrons of its restaurants and bars and grocers; it needs people to tend its streets and take away its garbage; it needs people to help make its decisions, build its houses, teach its children, care for its elders and dress its people’s wounds. It needs people to have its children and bury its dead. The question, really, is who these people will be.
By the time we got back home to California from our own grand tour, we weren’t so sure any longer about the Sardinia plan. It was far; it was hot; living all by ourselves in the countryside with a small baby might be a really excellent way to lose our minds.
But while en route home, I’d received an email from a couple who were trying to attract buyers to a small hamlet called Bozzolo in the northern region of Liguria. The email was over the top in its evocation of paradise, but it had an effect. Had we given up too quickly? Maybe there was a dream place for us in Italy and we just hadn’t found it yet. Or maybe what we needed to be happy was not to defect from our lives, but hold the possibility of defection forever in our back pocket, taking it out and turning it over in our hands from time to time, because doing so revealed that the life we already had was actually, blessedly, pretty damn good.
I often recall a bike trip we took one afternoon from our Tuscan villa, arriving, sweating and panting, at the top of a hill where a house, boarded up and overgrown with scrub brush, sat quietly in the sweltering heat. One window remained open, and an old curtain, just a scrap of cloth, now, billowed with breeze – a suggestion of life. Every now and then, convincing myself it’s just for research, I’ll poke around on the internet to see if it’s for sale.
This is an edited version of a story that first appeared in VQR
