A €1 dream scheme sparks a wider homebuying trend in Sicily
Selling abandoned houses at low cost helps draw buyers from northern Italy and abroad to the island’s south
After moving back to her hometown of Cammarata, in Sicily, when Covid hit, Martina Giracello, a 30-year-old architect, has just bought her first home in its ancient centre. Or two houses, actually. She’ll live in one, which cost €7,000, with her boyfriend Gianluca Militello, a freelance designer, and they are going to knock down the next-door house, priced at €1,000, to create a private patio area.
“This was affordable for us, and we are now planning the renovations, which will cost us around €50,000,” says Giracello, who studied architecture in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, then lived in Spain and England before returning to remote, rural Cammarata, with its population of around 6,200. A few friends moved back at the same time and, like her, have decided to stay permanently.
“People are now realising how easy it is to live in small towns like this, where there are good train connections to the bigger cities, life is slow, cheap and of a far higher quality than in the city,” she says. “A good internet connection does the rest . . . This way to live gives much more time to spend on personal projects, relationships and just relaxing,” she adds
“South working” is the new buzzphrase to describe the movement of people from Italy’s northern cities to marginalised areas of the south. These are people who can work remotely from wherever they want — and that includes many Sicilians who have returned to the island since Covid.
Low-cost property is a helpful driver, of course. And if Giracello’s home purchase seems cheap, one of her personal projects has been to set up StreetTo, a non-profit that encourages buyers from overseas to invest in even cheaper houses locally — in many cases, for as little as €1. Cammarata is among several towns in Sicily to have joined the Case a 1 Euro (One Euro Houses) initiative, which began in Gangi and Salemi (both claim to be the first) in around 2010.
Since then, hundreds of abandoned privately owned houses have been sold for upwards of €1. Maurizio Berti, founder of casea1euro.it, a website that advises prospective buyers on how to find and restore these old village properties, thinks there are “tens of thousands of homes” in Sicily that could be part of this scheme. “It’s impossible to know how many are for sale as it’s hard to find the living heirs of abandoned houses.
Most were deserted in the 1960s and 1970s when people moved abroad or to Italian cities in search of work and didn’t return. Some may have died. Some [descendants] don’t realise they even have a house in Sicily, as they’ve inherited it,” says Berti, who also advises local mayors on how to make the scheme work in their towns.
Other houses were left after the 1968 Sicilian earthquake, he says. “Owners were given the opportunity to rebuild in newer parts of town, so the old properties have remained derelict.” These days, such homes are typically in small villages, sometimes with a shop and restaurants, “but maybe bad roads and just a bus twice a day”, Berti says: “People need to understand the reality.”
A typical €1 house will be around 50 sq m, with one or two rooms and small windows. “If you want to use it as a home, you’ll need to buy two,” Berti says. But these costs, naturally, are the tip of the iceberg km: buyers spend €400 to €1,500 per sq m on renovation, with most towns insisting that work is done within three years of purchase.
Most discounted-house buyers are foreigners, who see the romance in the endeavour. “[The] Italians’ view is: ‘Why would I want to live in a place where my grandfather lived 40 years ago?’ ” Berti says. Buyers from 18 nationalities have gravitated to Mussomeli, an ancient hilltop town of 11,000 inhabitants in central Sicily, including many from the US, Australia and China, says Olivia Lento, a Montreal-based project co-ordinator whose masters thesis focuses on how Italy’s €1 houses help save towns from abandonment.
The idea has become so popular that the BBC is about to air a new series in the UK called The Italian Job, which features presenters Amanda Holden and Alan Carr as they renovate two €1 houses in Salemi then sell them for charity. Among Mussomeli’s new inhabitants is Australian social media consultant Danny McCubbin. He paid €1 for a village house in the town in late 2019, but his plans to move there were thwarted by Covid. Then he struggled to find a builder as they were all too busy working on the Italian government’s post-lockdown “superbonus” green scheme. The initiative paid homeowners up to 110 per cent of the costs to undertake energy-efficient renovations, and has been widely criticised for triggering price rises and paying out to fraudulent claims.
Once I moved here, I discovered that there is far more to this beautiful place than cheap houses
Last year, McCubbin featured in several press reports about the €1 scheme, describing it as too good an opportunity to miss. However, with costs rising and the state of his house deteriorating, he eventually gave up. “I sold my house back to the agency for €1 and have since bought a beautiful house in the town with a view for €8,000, and spent €5,000 on renovating it,” says McCubbin, who runs The Good Kitchen, a community kitchen in Mussomeli for the vulnerable and elderly.
“There aren’t many good €1 houses left here now, but many owners are selling houses that are liveable and don’t require major renovation.” The €1 scheme aside, there has been a sharp increase in buyer demand in rural Sicily since the end of Covid lockdowns. High-end estate agent Engel & Völkers reports that sales in 2021 were 24 per cent higher than in 2020; and in the first six months of this year, sales were up 20 per cent on the same period in 2021.
Prime property in the most desirable tourist areas such as Taormina, an ancient clifftop town on Sicily’s east coast, and Ortigia, an island joined to the Sicilian mainland at Syracuse, can cost around €3,000 per sq m, says Danilo Romolini at Romolini Immobiliare. Overall, though, Sicily’s house prices have fallen by 3-4 per cent since the start of the pandemic, with the market “flooded” with mid-range apartments, he says.
Antonio Carnazza, Engel & Völkers’ private office adviser in Sicily, says overseas buyers now account for 60 per cent of his sales. They typically have €1mn-€1.5mn to spend and are looking for “something with lovely sea views”, he says, ideally close to the city of Catania, for its nightlife and international airport.
“There is less work here, but if you can work remotely, then life is much better and cheaper.” Diletta Giorgolo, head of residential at Italy Sotheby’s International Realty, describes Sicily’s “environmental low-impact lifestyle” as a big draw for foreign buyers. Others have an eye on the investment opportunity — the largest, most luxurious villas can rent for up to €30,000 a week, she says.
The ambitions of big-budget buyers may seem worlds apart from those seeking €1 houses, but most start house-hunting in Sicily because they hear of the scheme, says Carnazza. “It’s a good promotional tool for the island.” While these old, some say “dying” villages may have come to the fore because of their abandoned houses, Salemi, for example, is “considered one of the most beautiful villages in Italy and it has some expensive properties”, says Giorgolo.
She says she recently sold an eight-bedroom, 16th-century property in the town centre for €620,000. McCubbin says he is among those for whom the €1 house scheme was “the catalyst” that drew him to Mussomeli. “But once I moved here,” he says, “I discovered that there is far more to this beautiful place than cheap houses.”
Apartment, Salina, €220,000 A one-bedroom apartment in Malfa, a commune on the island of Salina, off Sicily’s north coast. The property is on the first floor of a 19th-century house with a communal garden, and has a terrace with sea views towards Stromboli. On the market with Savills.
Apartment, Palermo, €420,000 A two-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment in the centre of Palermo, Sicily’s capital. Spread across three floors of a former monastery, the property has been fully renovated and furnished with custom-made pieces, many of which are included in the sale price. Listed with Savills.
Baglio, San Pietro Clarenza, €1.85mn An 18th-century baglio — a traditional Sicilian home built around a courtyard — near the foot of Mount Etna and 12km north-west of Catania. The restored house has 12 bedrooms including four suites, a pool and gardens with native planting. Available through Italy Sotheby’s International Realty.
Buying guide Asking prices across Sicily have been on a fairly steep downward trajectory since 2014 — though they have started to plateau. The average asking price in July was €1,120 per sq m, down 1 per cent on July 2021, according to Immobiliare.it.
Sicily is the birthplace of Italy’s One Euro House programme and has far more €1 houses than anywhere else in the country, with 24 municipalities in Sicily taking part. Buyers using the €1 scheme must guarantee to start renovation work within a specified timeframe (usually one year), pay all notary fees and apply for the relevant building permits. The works must also complete within a certain time (usually three years).
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In defence of people watching
I moved to London 11 years ago in search of some education. I arrived into Euston station one November evening on the Sail-Rail service from Dublin, which for around £50 takes you by ferry from the Irish capital to Holyhead in Wales, then by train to any mainline station in the UK.
I was carrying two suitcases, an overstuffed backpack and a clunky pre-smartphone Samsung. Growing up in Dublin had many benefits, chiefly the ease inherent in navigating a city of that size. By the time I left, I felt I knew exactly how the place worked, and there was some comfort in seeing the same streets, the same people, over and over. I had a lot to learn about the world and London, I decided, was the classroom for me. I was 22. The first thing you learn in a city like London is how to be a citizen of that city. You learn this in public, through a combination of observation and trial and error.
It’s the obvious stuff, the unwritten rules of the escalator, the “pretend you can’t see it” eyes-down approach to communal space. And you also realise, sooner or later, that even though it is through looking at each other that we figure these things out, we’re not really supposed to be looking.
I like to think I was a fast learner. On my early journeys to the university library and to my weekend job at a Chelsea furniture shop, it didn’t take long for me to develop the tough, armadillo-like exterior, the thousand-yard stare of the Tube commuter.
But I couldn’t help being curious about my fellow Londoners. I carried on looking. At the bar at the Royal Opera House, a young man in acid-wash double-denim and spiky bleached blonde hair orders three glasses of champagne. Disembarking a train on a Saturday evening, two women dressed to the nines and almost entirely matching in black body-con dresses and camel teddy-bear coats, Gucci handbags and black strappy sandals with Perspex heels.
Maybe the impulse to look is what makes new arrivals to big cities feel so out of place. People watching, an activity for which London is tailor-made, can be read as a morally dubious guilty pleasure, something more akin to voyeurism. This is partly because looking isn’t always a neutral action. It depends who’s looking, and what their intentions are. This year, the British Transport Police placed posters in Tube carriages warning against “intrusive staring”, which can be classed as sexual harassment and carry a fine or even a jail sentence.
So I can understand, sort of, why a Londoner might choose to keep their head down. Quite apart from not wanting to make someone uncomfortable by staring at them, minding one’s own business, I soon realised, is necessary for a smooth-running daily routine. This city is big, and the demands on one’s time are relentless. Attention is a valuable commodity in a place like this. You needn’t involve yourself in every tiny incident or drama on your way to work.
That would be exhausting. But at the same time, life here necessarily involves conceding some degree of privacy — more so than anywhere else I’ve lived. In all of the places I’ve rented in London, I have been able to hear the comings and goings of my neighbours. In the run-down Shoreditch maisonette I learnt that my neighbour liked to listen to Foreigner’s 1984 ballad “I Wanna Know What Love is” while cleaning. In the stuffy top-floor Camberwell flat I learnt what the brothers downstairs shouted when they were angry.
Sometimes I could smell what my neighbours were cooking for dinner: a roast chicken in the oven in Highgate, or a curry simmering in the pan in Tufnell Park. There is a siloing of the self that many Londoners tacitly agree to, a trade-off we make between clinging to the barest sliver of our own humanity and travelling in a fast-moving sardine can under the earth’s surface to get to work in the morning. At the very least, we’ll pretend we can’t see each other.
Noticing people in public – their flaws and irritations, their small, instinctive kindnesses – requires noticing their humanity, too This isn’t the only trade-off we make in order to take our place in the metropolis.
There is a strange, uneasy relationship between the defensive froideur of the typical Londoner and the palpable presence of surveillance in the city’s public spaces. When I arrived here, surveillance was a hot topic. In the aftermath of the London riots and the run-up to the 2012 Olympic Games, surveillance systems were ramped up on a grand scale, from biometric scanners around the Olympic Park to expanded CCTV across the public transport network. That year, police figures suggested that the average Briton was caught on CCTV 70 times a day.
This morning, on my way to the coffee shop where I sometimes work, I walked past my neighbours’ doorbell cameras. In the supermarket, I observed myself on the screen above the self-service checkout. On the 43 bus home, I caught myself gazing impassively at the carousel of video feeds of my fellow passengers. I suspect that number is now far higher than 70.
At the same time, attitudes towards surveillance have evolved. The appeal of smart video doorbells lies in arguments about increased safety and convenience, but these can obscure their more insidious effects. Freedom of information requests have shown that some UK police forces have partnered with manufacturers of video doorbells to build a network of neighbourhood surveillance since at least 2018.
The idea is that streets with enough of them are safer (though statistics released by police forces in the US and analysed by tech publication CNET in 2020 revealed no change to the usual fluctuating rates of property crime). Maybe it’s that smart doorbells offer peace of mind, a feeling of safety and control. But the price paid for this is a softer boundary between citizen and police.
There’s another danger, too, that by fortifying our private property in this way, we shore up the lines that separate us from our neighbours. What was once a mutual enterprise, something based on relationships between members of a community, risks being contracted out to tech companies with no knowledge or interest in the social fabric of a place.
Is this really a way to live together? A postman with the tanned shins of a man who spends the whole year outside, pausing in the generous shade of a plane tree near London Fields. Two Mohawked punks in Dr Martens and black leather jackets sitting on the pavement on Camden High Street, with a cardboard sign reading “Help Punks Get Drunk”.
The New York urbanist Jane Jacobs posited an alternative model for city life in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs, an activist and writer living in Greenwich Village in the 1950s, was opposed to the fashionable modes of city planning of the time, as seen in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City concept with its rows of utopian tower blocks. She was in favour of another form: the mixed-use block, like her own on Hudson Street, where the residents lived, shopped and sometimes worked alongside each other.
This model, she said, positioned the street as the essential part of the city, a ground-level shared space where neighbours brushed up against each other and, in a way, watched over each other. She referred to the goings-on on her block as the “intricate sidewalk ballet” of the city. If the pavements were constantly in use, she argued, there were “eyes on the street”, to make it safer for everyone. Noticing people in public — their flaws and irritations, their small, instinctive kindnesses — requires noticing their humanity, too This kind of informal surveillance is not only a bulwark against urban danger. According to Jacobs, it’s also a way to strengthen the fabric of a community. Let’s call it “people watching”.
For different people in a city, people watching has different functions. For me, a renter who works from home, it gives me a much-needed reminder that I am connected to the rest of London. For the man who works in my local newsagent, by talking to the people who come and go he gathers information about us. and in doing so his shop becomes a focal point in the neighbourhood. I’ve lived near it for three years now and I go there not only to buy my newspapers but also to be seen by him. Doing so demonstrates to myself that I’m part of this community, too. It’s a good feeling. Having moved home six times in 10 years, I’m all too aware of the isolation and loneliness that peripatetic urban living can engender. But people watching has been a constant for me throughout that time: a small, daily activity that gives me a sense of rootedness. It reminds me how human we all are, and how connected I am to those strangers who pass through the same streets as me.
At the British Museum, a sunburnt man in a faded yellow sou’wester peers over his glasses at a pair of Assyrian tablets. A group of women in floral dresses and white sneakers set up a circle of camping chairs, picnic rugs and sweating bottles of rosé in the shade of a cedar tree in Regent’s Park. It’s summer again and London’s communal spaces have come into their own, as they do every year.
A patch of grass that barely gets a second look in winter becomes a site for first dates and birthday parties. A park bench becomes the bleachers from which to watch an unusually heated game of boules unfold. Flat windows are opened and drivers wind their windows down, making the city’s private spaces a little more porous than before.
On a hot day, I end up treating my local park like an extension of my own home. I bring a rug and a book and maybe a cold can of supermarket lager, without much care for what my fellow Londoners think of me. After all, they’re doing the same thing, too.
Can people watching make me a better Londoner? Certainly it helps scratch the itch I’ve had since I first moved here, the looping curiosity about what the people around me are up to. In that way, it reminds me why I came here in the first place: for economic opportunity, sure, but also to become part of the teeming swell of civilisation that makes up a metropolis like this one.
To take up a little bit of space in the dense network of human connection. It feels good to remember this. But I suspect it has a moral value, too. Noticing people in public — their flaws and irritations, their small, instinctive kindnesses — requires noticing their humanity, too. And if we are all going to share London’s tangled circuit board, then noticing them means I have a choice to make.
Here I can either be a node or a terminal: I can choose to keep the current of human connection going, or I can let it slip. But I’ve always known what my decision is. I’ll keep my eyes open. Ana Kinsella is the author of “Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City” (Daunt Books Publishing)
