Openly Re-Opening

While still waiting impatiently, things do appear to be moving here.

On the 3rd of June, Italy will re-open to foreign tourists from the EU and Schengen Area. And, importantly, visitors won't need to self-quarantine.
Good news surely?
Well … sort of.

Italia aperta

 The problem is that just because Italy is beginning to open, it doesn't mean we’ll be allowed to enter. The holdup is here, as the UK government has no firm plans in place to allow international travel.
Yet.
Only a few weeks ago the Health Secretary reckoned it 'unlikely' Brits would be able to take foreign holidays at all this summer. Although this was later revealed to have been just his opinion.
But, as I said, things have begun moving.
Because, on the 29th of May, the government stated they were working on 'air corridors' linking the UK to low-risk destinations. With the first tentative date to for these to begin being the 29th of June.
The guidelines for safe travel, expected to be finalised within days, include having to wear facemasks throughout the flight, social distancing and temperature checks at airports, and contactless check-ins.
However, to confuse the matter even further, they’d earlier announced a two-week quarantine period for anyone (citizens included) arriving in the UK. Enforceable from the 8th of June, this would include any returning holiday-makers.
Such measures were being introduced to "Prevent a devastating second wave", according to the Home Secretary.
Stable doors and bolting horses spring to mind here.

Comparing Comparisons

One thing I did extensively research was the Sicilian cost of living.
Specifically concerning Ragusa, if possible, and when compared to our part of London (also if possible). All comparison websites cover the likes of housing, food, transportation, entertainment, etc.

Be aware when making comparisons

'Numbeo', one of the better ones, covered Ragusa, with a direct comparison to our London suburb.
For May, the differences are anywhere between 61% less for rent, consumer prices overall being 29% less, although groceries cost 7% more. Wages, at 46% less, won’t apply to us, of course.
The big winner was rentals, with the average 3-bed apartment, in the suburbs, listed at around £485.
Not even one-third of what we're currently paying!
Another useful site is 'Expatistan'.
Which, although not covering Ragusa, does cover Syracuse, 80km away.
It claims that, as at the 30th of May, the overall cost of living there was 32% cheaper than London.
With rental housing (at 53% cheaper) again being the big winner. In fact, the monthly rent for an 85 m2 furnished property, in a normal suburb, was just less than £500.
Again, one-third of what we pay.
'Travel Tables' doesn't allow direct comparisons, but does cover the cost of living in Ragusa.
The site lists the current prices of 54 goods and services, across 10 categories.
In May, the cost of living for two average consumers, without rent, was £915. With rent, I'm guessing that’d be around £1,400 then.
£100 less than we're paying here - just for rent.
Looking good then!

Why Sicily?

My wife has always raised the objection: 'Why Sicily?'
A valid argument.
Even if it wasn't, she's key to my happiness, so it's one I have to take into account!
Let's not sugar-coat it here, Sicily has its problems with its lack of work, low wages, corruption, and organised crime. So why live there?
While cost is top of my list, the answer can't only be that. As with anyone considering their 'forever home', it's also about climate, lifestyle, and culture.

The word here is: 'Diverse'

Climate-wise, it's pretty much guaranteed to get hot in July and August, with the average being in the mid-30’s Celsius.
Spring and winter can bring torrential rains, with temperatures sometimes falling below zero inland. Given the climate in the UK, we can put up with this!
So that's one tick.
Being Kiwis, we're more used to a 'laid-back' lifestyle.
And Sicily shouldn't see that threatened, as it's widely acknowledged the lifestyle is slow and relaxed. Maybe more so than the mainland.
Culturally, the word is: 'Diverse'.
The island has been colonised down the centuries by the Phoenicians, then Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Normans, Spanish and, finally, the Italians themselves. A veritable cornucopia of culture, especially considering history, art, and architecture.
Lack of work and low wages shouldn't affect us, although organised crime and corruption are a worry.
However, petty crime like pickpocketing is a more realistic threat than us inadvertently offending some mafia Don!
Of course, everywhere has its problems.
But I reckon we could put up with Sicily's!

Planning a Field Trip

Ever the voice of reason, my wife Alice pointed out the other day: We’ll have to visit before we can even think about buying.

While not as easy as it would’ve been just a few months ago, I was up for planning just that. Especially as I’d already made some notes.
Of course.

Not this type of field trip.

And I was entirely buoyed by the fact that, while still not anything like enthusiastic, she’d again not dissed the idea out of hand!
Now, if it’s ‘agreed’ it’s Ragusa and/or its surroundings, then the next consideration would be to list the essentials of any possible property. Arguably, next to budget, the most important concern of all?
Our ‘forever home’ needs are fairly straightforward: It should be single level; around 80 square metres (plus); and have at least two bedrooms.
While the ideal, and somewhat flexible, what isn’t is reasonable access to good public transport, shopping, and a local hospital. Oh, and a real summer! But that’s a given, yeah?
Next up, would this be an ‘exploratory’ visit or do we intend to buy?
A tough call right now. Under ‘normal’ circumstances, we’d likely already be there, undertaking this very exercise. But these aren’t that.
And time is against us. It’s a race between when the UK and Italy open their borders again ... and that Brexit deadline. The latter only seven short months away.
If these were those normal times, I’d say exploratory.
But it couldn’t be that now, could it?

Seeking in the Sun

Anyway, I’d already done some research on agenzie immobiliari (real estate agencies) that specialise in Ragusa and its surroundings.
It’s worth mentioning here that I’d restricted my search to those cities and towns with above 20,000 inhabitants.
Ragusa having around 74,000, through Vittoria, Modica, Comiso, and finally Scicli, with its 27,000. The other centres being dismissed as more ‘large villages’ than small towns.
My research led me to the names of a couple of agencies who fit the bill: The aptly named ‘The Dolce Vita’, actually based here in the UK; and the more local ‘Pisana Immobiliare’.

Both of whom had a number of properties that appeared to meet our requirements.
But not all of them. A given, of course!

Unfortunately ... not an option!

For example, while all of those I looked at met most of our requirements, more especially those firm ones, all were of two or more levels. But then, that’s pretty much the norm in most Italian urban centres, unless you’re buying an apartment rather than a house, yeah?
And that’s something Alice was uber-firm about: No apartments!
Fair enough, too. We’d both had bad experiences with those in the past, and wouldn’t want one as a ‘forever home’ into the future.
Next off, of course, I should be contacting the agencies concerned. However, given the current situation, this point becomes somewhat moot.
As it’s very hard to plan a trip, exploratory or otherwise, when you can’t input any dates into your travel website of choice!
And: Damn!

The Sun Still Shines

Every cloud has a silver lining though.

And we received our first piece of good news last week: We’ve got our codici fiscali (tax codes)!

So very true...

The first baby step towards our (possible) new future. This code is mandatory for all sorts of things: Opening a bank account, getting a residence certificate and identity card, and registering with the Italian equivalent of the NHS.
While not so much ‘good’, at least for local vendors, another piece of recent news is it’s forecast house prices are likely to drop this year.
No surprise there, of course, as that’s likely to be the case here in the UK, too.
And then, of course, from Monday the 4th of May, Italy entered Phase 2 of its lockdown. Which included the reopening of parks, restaurants for takeaway meals, and some shops, as well as museums and cultural venues from mid-May.
What’s this mean for us?
While not something we’d usually celebrate, it does mean real estate agencies are open for business again!
To top this off, Italy’s Culture and Tourism Minister stated he’d: “Never talked, or ever thought, of closing Italian borders to tourists for 2020.”
With this in mind, another piece of good news is that the Sicilian authorities, attempting to lure tourists back, may subsidise holidays! Such plans include reduced rate accommodation (e.g. one night of a three-night trip free, two nights of a six-day trip, etc.).
Let’s not get too carried away though!
It’s still a ‘waiting game’.

The Axe is Falling?

The Coronavirus didn’t so much ‘hit’ as ‘sucker punch’ us all, yeah?

What began as an outbreak in late December 2019, within a few short weeks raced across the planet like a global tsunami of dread and disease.

Advice to heed!

 Until now I find myself updating this blog while in lockdown in London. And, while an optimist, it became increasingly difficult to remain so as the stats, and the body count, keep going only one way.
My ‘European Dream’? Well, that was very rapidly fading to black, overwhelmed under an avalanche of dreadful news.
However, the lockdown had one ‘advantage’: It gave me even more time for detailed research. So, I closed iPlayer, turned off Netflix, tuned out the tunes, and did just that.
My first conclusion was that Italian bureaucracy was indeed everything you’ve ever read about. That it required patience, long queues, patience, and reams of paperwork. Did I mention patience?
Although Dante didn’t coin his “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” specifically to describe entering any Italian state or local government office, he f’sure could’ve done!
Something I actually knew about because, many years ago, I’d applied for a permesso di soggiorno (residence permit) in Verona.
An exercise involving yards of red tape, worn shoes, much frustration and wine, and a mountain of official papers. The latter receiving more stamps than I ever got at primary school for being ‘a good boy’.
But, as I had nothing better to do right now, I persevered.

Cloudy with a Chance of No Meatballs

Samuel Johnson may've said: "Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance".
But it did require strength to keep going in the face of such adversity. There were (now) so many more uncertainties thrown into an already cloudy mix.
Not the least of which was not knowing when the UK's borders would open again? And then when the Italian government would allow foreigners to visit once more?
To confuse things even further, and of course, the UK government is still hell-bent on exiting the EU by December 2020, and regardless.

Nevertheless, I plastered on a stiff upper lip, and carried on carrying on.

Plenty of this...

I researched getting a tax code (codice fiscale), residence certificate (certificato di residenza), identity card (carta d’identita), and how to register with the Italian equivalent of the NHS (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale or SSN) to get a health insurance card (tessera sanitaria).
And that is just for starters, okay?
We'd also need to open Italian bank accounts, apply to the Ministry of Transport (Uffici della Motorizzazione Civile) and swap our UK driving licences for local ones, and don't get me started on the rigmarole of buying a car in Italy!
And then ... there was actually buying that 'forever home'.
Which involved, at least, finding a trusty lawyer (avvocato), a decent real estate agent (agente immobiliare), engaging a notary (notaio), and then a surveyor-come-architect hybrid (geometra).
Getting the idea now?
If we were to do this, it’d require strength and perseverance.

Some Small Advantages

However, even the big black cloud bearing such a blizzard of bureaucracy had a silver lining.
A faint one maybe, but one nevertheless.
Because, regardless of all of the above, we did have some advantages here.
For a start we would be going in with our eyes wide open. And not only thanks to my megabytes of research.

Always thinking of you

These advantages included: My wife having lived there for seven years; that together we'd visited many times; and had even attempted to settle once. Albeit many years ago, before I had a UK passport, and with a baby.
By far the biggest advantage we have though is that Alice is half Italian, and can speak the language fluently. Which certainly had to be in our favour.
So, we have all of the above in the ‘plus’ column.
Although, of course, given the current distressing situation, this was all moot at the minute.
What really mattered right now had to be our age, our okay mild medical complaints, and also that we have one son and partner in Montreal, and another with his wife in New York.
These are the things that should concern us. And they do.
Nevertheless, I remain optimistic that we'll all come through this. That we, and the world, would f’sure be changed, not always for the better, but come through it we would!
And my wife was slowly coming around to the idea that maybe … just maybe … I was actually making some sort of sense now?

More Soon…

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…