The Race Begins

You may’ve noted that one argument I’d put to my wife during my (failed) effort to persuade her that €1 homes were a viable option, had been Brexit.

That (and still) most divisive of words here in the UK.

One failed argument

 Why would I do that then? When the UK government signed the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement in January 2020, hadn’t that driven a stake right into the heart of my ‘European Dream’ argument?
Well no actually: Yes, they had signed, of course; but no, it wasn’t in place.
Not yet, anyways!
Because the agreement contained a ‘transition period‘. Which meant that if we’d settled in Italy before the 31st of December 2020, we could still apply for residency before the end of June 2021.
With the caveat that it’d be way better to apply before that December deadline. Because afterwards, while it’d still be legally possible to get residency, we could expect way more hurdles, y’see?
The Withdrawal Agreement also stated that all existing entitlements to healthcare would continue. For settled residents. And that UK retirees would continue to receive yearly cost-of-living increases to their State Pension payments. Again, only if we were settled residents.
Therefore - and for a short time only, folks! - things wouldn’t change much.
Timing was everything, of course. Knowing this, ever the optimist and still undeterred, as I’d mentioned, I resolved to change direction slightly, and redouble my efforts.
So I’d be looking for cheap prices now, rather than giveaway ones.

Location, Location, Location

Alrighty then!
But where? I mean, at nearly 10,000 square miles or 26,000 square kilometres, Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean.
Here I turned to my ‘Living in Italy’ folder. And my research told me I should worry about the infrastructure in the west and centre of the island. The south coast, while f’sure beautiful, suffered much the same fate.
Palermo on the north coast didn’t appeal. Only because I didn’t want to live in or around any large city, despite some obvious advantages.
Given this, it had to be somewhere in the east of the island.

Well worth a watch, I reckon!

A decision bolstered by the fact that the locals had given every other Sicilian town and city the thumbs down in a recent Italy-wide survey carried out by the Italian financial newspaper “Il Sole 24 Ore”.
Choosing to ignore, of course, the fact that living in places ranking somewhere in the 80’s out of a list of 107 places rated for quality of life may not be considered, by some naysayers anyways, much of a recommendation.
Needless to say, this particular fact wouldn’t be making it into any future discussion with my wife!
But the question still remained: Where?
The answer came, as it so often does, from a most unlikely source. In my case, the BBC iPlayer, an internet streaming and catchup TV service here in the UK.
Not a travel show, as you might expect, but an Italian police procedural series called “Inspector Montalbano” (“Il Commissario Montalbano” in Italian).

Researching an Imaginary Town

The English subtitled “Inspector Montalbano” dated back to 1999, is still going strong, and every one of the 34 programmes was online.
It was something I’d wanted to begin watching months back, way before any of this.
So I began binge-watching the 100-minute shows, at a rate of around two-per-night.
Now I’m sure the reason Alice wasn’t so interested in watching with me had nothing to do with the endless stream of gorgeous Italian actresses, often wearing next to - if not - nothing, parading across the screen?

But what does watching a short, bald, and frankly bow-legged detective doing his thing in the endless sunshine have to do with refining my search? Well, the programme is set in the imaginary town of Vigata.

In Sicily.
And mostly shot in and around the towns of Ragusa and Scicli, in a municipal area also called Ragusa, sitting near the southern tip of the east coast of the island.
See where this is going?
I’d decided that living somewhere around that imaginary town was the ‘where’ I’d been seeking!
That’s good and all, but were there any ‘cheap’ houses for sale there? Scicli was out, being too close to the coast, which equals pricey in Sicily.
Ragusa and its immediate environs was, however, affordable. With over 20-odd properties costing less than €50,000 on offer, and 60-plus at less than €100,000. And that was just on one property website. At last things were falling into place!
And then the Coronavirus hit…

More Soon…

In the Beginning

If, like me, you have any sort of interest in Italy at all, then you f’sure would’ve picked up on all those €1 homes for sale there?

Pro-Brexit "The Sun" unwilling to even mention 1 euro

The ads started popping up on most mainstream press sites a year or three ago. And even the most cursory glance over the first few paragraphs would’ve told you these were predominantly for sale in many emptying rural villages in the south of the country, and the island of Sicily.

Some might say a novel solution to a problem only too common right now, and one faced right across Europe, as the young leave rural areas for the cities … at a time when birth rates are at historic lows.

You can’t blame the kids of course and, while urban drift isn’t a new phenomenon, this could be one possible solution, couldn’t it? ‘Restocking’ (for want of a better word!) these semi-abandoned villages with people seeking their own particular version of “la Dolce Vita”.

If you follow up on these stories, it appears many of those actually moving to such places appear to be middle aged, and looking to either retire or semi-retire themselves, with a few braver younger couples thrown into the mix.

These villages and towns are sited in areas you’d be hard pressed not to label as being ‘deprived’ and/or ‘poor’. Dwindling communities that have seen not years but often decades of decline, and perhaps even neglect.

This ‘homes for €1’ trend has now been picked up by the likes of Spain and France, of course.

Initial Research

As I’ve already said: If you have any sort of interest in Italy, then surely your interest was piqued?

Now I’m a little annaly retentive, y’see. If there’s any sort of a decision to be made: Fire up a Word document and/or Excel spreadsheet. In my defence here, the end result of over three decades in IT. Sorry!

Once I’d firmly established that this wasn’t any sort of scam, I looked for ‘catches’. Because there had to be some, right?

And, of course, there were. Although these seemed entirely reasonable. To me anyways.

"Doer-upper" or "crumbling ruin"? Mussomeli, Sicily

First off, the majority of these houses were in that state estate agents used to call “a handyman’s dream”, “a doer-upper” or “needs some TLC...” That’s because they’d been abandoned. Sometimes for decades.

Secondly, around two or three years was allowed for said renovations and, afterwards, you were expected to live in them at least semi-permanently, and maybe even needed to set up a functioning local business.

The actual requirements varied from place to place.

Following this initial research, I bit the bullet, and mentioned my interest to Alice, my long-suffering wife.

Who, to my great surprise, didn’t diss the idea out of hand.

Regardless of whether this was because she wasn’t paying attention to my babblings, or whether she was genuinely interested, with this outright and assumed permission, I charged ahead with even more detailed research.

Further Research Needed

Creating a file imaginatively named ‘Living in Italy’, I began downloading all sorts of websites and documents dedicated to €1 homes.

In Sicily only.

Because we’d visited some years ago, it was the only place in southern Italy we’d been as a family, and we adults had loved the climate, its people, and the cannoli, of course!

For and against...

Now armed with this much more detailed research, I got Alice off her iPhone, and delivered my now more detailed dissertation. Outlining what I saw as the possible pros and hurdles, folding in our current financial situation, and even mentioning the dreaded ‘B-word’: Brexit!

Ending it all with what I hoped was a winning smile.

This time, however, my effort was met with a, let’s just say, somewhat more muted response.

In my defence, I’m not one of those who gets a bee in their bonnet, and charges off toward the horizon waving their arms about all enthusiastically.

Not at all!

Undeterred, I resolved to change direction slightly. And redouble my efforts.

Especially since, during my research, I’d noted how some foreigners who’d visited Italy to buy their homes had f’sure ended up buying locally.

But not the €1 homes.

Instead they’d ended up with still uber-cheap local homes in rather better states of repair. We’re talking liveable now homes costing in the range of tens of thousands of euros only.

More on the down-low now, I’d present a more ‘balanced’ and ‘considered’ argument next time.

Optimistically assuming there would be one, of course!

More Soon…