The Italian towns selling houses for €1

Summary

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 t...