Italy has a lot of very old houses which are often in faraway villages with no much services and no jobs to be found. This means taht there are a bunch of villages with very little population that is declining in numbers because honestly why living in a 150 people little village that has no jobs, no GP, no groceries, no weekly market, no fast internet, and also very lousy cell phone connection?! Yet, buildings that are older than 100 years are usually under a constraint: they have become part of the local scenery and can’t just be destroyed because they are part of the reasons why tourists come to Italy to see all of the semi-abandoned villages with very old houses, and that’s money flowing in.
And there is another factor: many of those buildings. Families don’t really want to keep funding the upkeeping of these old family homes in really remote parts of Italy where nobody goes anymore. So, there is a trick with which the last heirs can just renounce the heritage. Let’s say the old house belongs to granny, but she actually moved to the city some 30 years before and even herself things that the old house is just a money sink. So, she just donates all of her belongings to her three children except the house and her modest bank account (where she carefully never leaves more than a few thousand euro, the rest being in alternative investments that benefit her children directly if she dies, like an insurance). When she dies, all of the children and the Grandchildren go to a notary and write a document in which they renounce the heredity, and all that’s left goes to the local administration. So you get a bunch of towns which have these tiny villages under their administration as “frazioni”, and in the small villages (and sometimes in the main town too) there are a bunch of very olf buildings that nobody wants. But the town administration is by law bound to provide essential upkeeping, and it costs a lot!
So, some 20 year ago someone came up with this nifty scheme. He3 had the idea of starting to sell the houses for 1 euro, a symbolic figure. You can invest 1 euro and buy a really run-down property in the middle of nowhere. The administration will give it to you for really cheap. Go ahead, buy it! Except there is one caveat. You don’t really buy the property, you buy the right to fully restore the property and to do it according to the highest standards and also in observance of the constraints that safeguard out scenery. And you end up with a piece of crap like the house up there that you have purchased for one euro but you also have esesntially promised the local adminsitration you will spend lavishly to restore, and you have to do it within 2–3 years, because if you don’t complete the works within this term (or if you start works that compromise the looks of the building) it will be takken away and you will have to pay a substantial fee. On tops, you can’t restore these houses to put them up for sale or to use as a bed and breakfast or hotel. It’s not allowed: you actually have to move into the house full time or for at least several months a year.
Now mind you: the constraint doesn’t mean that you can’t install heating, connect the house to the sewers or to electricity etc. Indeed, some of these houses turned out pretty spectacular. Look up the gallery at the bottom of this article (nevermind about reading Italian, just scroll down to the images) for a one euro house that’s been restored into a luxury home. But no, it’s not a cheap solution.
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