Thread by @Telegraph

🍕 Fancy buying a house for less than a slice of pizza?

🔎 Tim Moore travelled to one of Italy’s poorest regions to find out why hundreds of houses were up for sale and how the radical solution has changed the landscape

telegraph.co.uk/travel/destina…

🌳Young Italians have been moving away from the countryside – to native cities or the wider world – for over a century.

Over the last two decades, a million small-town Italians have left their homes

It’s now 14 years since former MP Vittorio Sgarbi suggested a radical solution to Italy’s ratcheting rural decline.

🇮🇹 34 remote towns and villages are currently running €1 house schemes, scattered along the country’s full length

More than half of the €1 house towns are in Sicily.

📈This is one of Italy’s poorest regions, where youth unemployment runs at a barely credible 48.3%

Mussomeli – a settlement of 11,000 right in the middle of Sicily that has to date sold a table-topping 50 €1 houses in its centro storico to foreigners, with a further 100 currently on its books

‘Everybody is happy to have the foreigners,’ says Toti Nigrelli, Mussomeli’s deputy mayor

🗣️‘Why not? They bring new life to the centro storico, and of course they bring new business.’

‘The old town is such a beautiful place, but the people who live here maybe forget it.'

'It’s so good for us to see these buildings with the eyes of the foreigners, to appreciate it like they do, to see how lucky we are’ says Nigrelli

Danny McCubbin, a bright-eyed Australian pitched up in Mussomeli after almost two decades spent working for Jamie Oliver in London.

'Everyone thinks it must be too good to be true, but as long as you’re prepared to get stuck in with the locals, it absolutely isn’t’ he says

McCubbin’s own €1 house sets the template.

"A three-storey townhouse of smutted, weathered stone, whose upper French windows open on to little tiled balconies girdled with rusty iron railings"

"McCubbin is the antithesis of a holiday- homer"

As well as his rented community kitchen, he owns a €1 house and another he bought for €8,000.

🍽️The former is to be the base for a cookery school, where young chefs from across Europe will come to live and learn

➡️But thanks to the need for on-site attendance during renovations, local integration isn’t really a choice

"By happy accident, the €1 initiative will only ever attract the sort of foreigner who is willing and able to throw themselves into local life" writes Tim Moore

❓What's the catch?

The hidden costs of a €1 house include:

♦️Estate agent's commission
♦️Renovation costs
♦️Architect fee for renovation works
♦️Bills

See the full breakdown ⬇️
telegraph.co.uk/travel/destina…

🇮🇹Take a look at the other Italian villages that could be your next home – for just a euro ⬇️
telegraph.co.uk/travel/destina…