The Sedini Special

If you could move anywhere, where would it be? This used to be a question I’d ask myself or others at dinner parties or in fits of fancy, but two years ago, as new parents facing both the unsustainable costs of Bay Area life and the looming threat of middle-age atrophy, my husband, Ben, and I took to the internet in earnest with the notion of reinventing our lives somewhere new.

I’m afraid we were part of a trend. People throughout the country were doing the same, defecting from the United States in search of a dream life abroad. “Americans Head to Europe for the Good Life on the Cheap,” ran a 2023 headline in the New York Times. Spain became a popular destination, as did Greece and Portugal, where the number of Americans rose almost 250 percent between 2017 and 2022. So high is the demand for Americans to move to Europe that several companies have cropped up in recent years to help expat wannabes handle the particulars.

Where would we go? Our search had some general parameters: affordability, a natural landscape (I dreamed of cicadas, cypress trees), a place whose language we either already spoke or could learn easily enough so that we could participate in and contribute to the community. We’d both spent our careers working in schools and nonprofits with immigrant youth, and, however different it might look in a new country, we had no intention of leaving a life of service behind. Above all, though, what we wanted was an environment in which we could spend a lot of time writing and afford to do it. But Ben had another nonnegotiable of his own: proximity to surfing. This annoyed me, as it significantly limited our search, but I supposed it was reasonable enough to design a dream life according to one’s actual dreams.

“There’s surfing in Sardinia,” he said.

We’d heard about the infamous 1 Euro House program in which poor, depopulating towns put their abandoned or unused buildings up for sale. The “program,” I soon learned, was actually a loose collection of schemes that economically struggling towns used to lure outside investment and new residents. The campaigns seemed to me to have been largely successful—some towns had sold all their listed properties and shut the program down. I pored over dozens of news articles that had served as de facto 1 Euro House promotion over the years. By attracting international buyers to a house that “costs less than a cup of coffee,” as one piece put it, new life—and new euros (converted from dollars, or kroner, or won)—was circulating through some of Italy’s most remote towns. Many local officials had come to see 1 Euro House experiments as their potential salvation.

What was the catch? It seemed most municipalities required you to renovate the house within a couple of years of its purchase, and, due to high levels of interest, the houses often went to auction, ultimately selling for much more than a single euro. But what we wondered about were the ethical considerations—the classic tensions of gentrification, but on a global scale. What would it mean just to buy our way into a foreign place where we had no personal or historical connections and try to set up a home there?

Still, we kept looking. At the very least, dreaming of a new life bolstered our real one. There is a town in northern Sardinia called Sedini that was, according to Liliana Forina, a woman I got in touch with online, about to launch a 1 Euro House initiative of its own. A stylish woman in her sixties from Milan, she had recently moved to Sedini from the mainland. The town wasn’t far from the beach and, judging from the pictures and Liliana’s descriptions, seemed beautiful.

I arranged a meeting with Liliana over Zoom. She appeared on-screen from her office, a panorama of the Sardinian valley stretching behind her like a green screen. A few years ago, she explained, not so unlike I had, she and her new husband began scouring Italy for the perfect place to live. The couple had married in their fifties after she had been single for a long time, and both had worked demanding careers—her as a TV writer and director, him as a high-level IT account manager. Each weekend, they would visit a new region of Italy—everywhere but Sicily, which he worried was too infested with mafiosos—feeling out the vibe in remote villages and in coastal, golden-lit towns speckled with beaches and foreigners licking gelato. They drove along the sea, they coiled into the country’s interior, they took flights south. In each place, they tried to imagine a life.

It was relatively easy to cross places off their list: This town was too expensive; this one too full of tourists; this one lacked trees; the next a bit too removed from what they thought of as civilization. They wanted easy access to basic services like a hospital, a pharmacy, and police. They also wanted a view. But above all, they were looking for what Liliana called their dolce vita, their sweet life. Newly in love, they felt it was time to quit the rat race, slow down, leave Milan, and spend their twilight years together “wandering in nature and the original, ancestral way of life,” as she put it. La dolce vita was calling.

Eventually, they found it in Sedini, this breezy, hilltop town in northern Sardinia where the bells of several churches ring at noontime, and, from a distance, the white-stone houses appeared stacked like antique toys upon a rickety shelf. A local realtor had found them a three-story house with rock-cut foundations and a vaulted ceiling perched on the edge of a rocky, south-facing outcropping. It was ideal: right in the historic town center with a view of the great green valley below. The house was livable but rather run-down and not to Liliana’s taste, so the couple set to work renovating it, adding an upstairs terrace, exposing old beams, bringing antique tiles to a new gleam, and knocking down several walls to allow more light.

Their dream life was indeed becoming a reality. Mostly. As beautiful as their home was, Liliana noted early on that many of the other houses in Sedini were in a state of complete abandon, little more than lifeless hunks of stone. This left the otherwise-picturesque, old-world town with a ghostly quality, like it was missing part of itself. The town was beautiful, but, in her estimation, it needed a glow-up. And it needed more people too—ideally people from outside Sardinia. She dreamed of more cosmopolitan neighbors, people more like her. There was no better place to live than Sedini, she had decided, and she wanted the rest of the world to know—and for many others to join her there. Might I be one of them?

Such depopulation is a primary struggle for many places throughout Italy’s “interior,” as the areas outside the main urban and touristic centers are known. Young people, especially, were leaving towns like Sedini. While Italy’s cities and coastal towns thrive, in smaller, rural, poorer regions, the elders are dying off and the youth are moving elsewhere for educational opportunities or for work. Historic towns like Sedini are littered with once-beautiful (or at least once-functional) buildings that now sit empty.

All these vacant houses with potential—surely something could be done. Liliana began researching the 1 Euro House program and brought the idea to Sedini’s town government. The mayor and his staff—all longtime residents whose families had lived there for generations—were easily convinced. This summer, they were going to introduce the idea to the rest of the locals.

“Come visit us in Sedini!” She told me on our call. “Stay in my home. You will love it here.”

If you could move anywhere, where would it be? It’s a question that gestures toward a life in some stage of calcification—the could speaking to constraint, limitations, the presumption that one simply cannot, in fact, up and move. At the same time, my version of the question conceals a fundamental freedom within it: Owing to the good luck of my passport and resources, the kinds of constraints I face—jobs, a mortgage, filial duties—are ones that can be bucked with some cash, logistical feats, and a bit of courage.

And the 1 Euro House program serves as the doorway for just this sort of yearning for something new. Hate your job? That the US government is assuming control of your reproductive rights? That you can’t afford a house in San Francisco, or Nashville, Boise? Worried about where you’ll retire, or how you’ll even manage to retire at all? Like the sounds of cicadas, the idea of health care that won’t bankrupt you, the prospect of buying fresh pasta each afternoon from the nonna down the road? What if a new home could change the circumstances of your life while also offering you the romance of the new and of the very old, all in one fell swoop? If you have the right passport and enough money, you can just find somewhere else to live—and, prices being what they are, why not make that place Italy?

In the summer of 2024, I decided to take Liliana up on her offer to visit Sedini and, while I was at it, a host of other depopulating towns throughout Italy too. My husband and I stuffed an inordinate amount of belongings into a preposterous number of bags and flew with our eleven-month-old to Italy for an adventure in pursuit of the possibility of a brand-new life.

It’s a trope: Foreigner cashes in everything and moves to Italy both to find and reinvent herself. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love renaissance begins in Italy, where, by making new friends and shoveling pasta into her mouth, she learns to love herself again. In her wildly popular 1996 memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes tells the story of searching for, then buying and renovating, a ramshackle old marvel in Tuscany. When she finally finds Bramasole, as the house is known, it was like “falling in love.”

“I immediately wanted to hang my summer clothes in an armadio and arrange my books under one of those windows overlooking the valley,” she wrote. “We’re dazzled by the remains of a Roman road over the hill covered with wildflowers…. Italians take such remains casually. That one is allowed to own such ancient things seems impossible to me.”

For the American foreigner who lives in a country that is relatively new and whose “ancient things” are largely the products of plunder, a property connoting many centuries of life is alluring. “Everyone wants a piece of history,” Giacomo Verrua, an Italian property developer, told me. “And in Italy, history is everywhere.” Within this cliché, a person can achieve both a life’s purpose and a sense of belonging through possession.

But Italy’s cheap real estate is only available to foreigners because, contrary to popular US mythology, Italian life isn’t pure romance and ease. Home to roughly 60 million people, the population is predicted to decline by two million by 2040 and by at least four million by 2050—one of the steepest depopulation rates in all of Europe. The is due to an aging citizenry (Italy also has one of the oldest populations in Europe) and also as a result of substantial poverty that sends poor and wealthy Italians alike packing in search of better opportunities. In 2023, 9.8 percent of Italians lived below the poverty line, up from 6.9 percent in 2014. In Sardinia, roughly 20 percent of people live in poverty. After a postwar mass migration toward the industrial centers in Italian cities, recent years have seen an annual drop in rural population of 1 to 2 percent. So dire is the population crisis that the country’s birth rate has hit all-time lows, and nearly 30 percent of its homes are unoccupied. Small Italian towns are experimenting with all sorts of financial incentives—tax breaks, actual cash—to bring Italians back to the countryside. In 2022, Sardinia offered a 15,000 euro bonus, with some strings attached, for moving to the island.

The 1 Euro House program has largely lured moneyed foreigners, not Italians, to struggling towns. Other places around this world of rapidly shifting demographies are experimenting with similar incentives. Estonia attempted an “e-residency” that would allow people to become a digital resident of the country in order to set up businesses within the European Union. Tulsa, Oklahoma, offers a $10,000 relocation grant to remote workers as well a membership at a downtown coworking space. Across Japan, abandoned homes sell for as little as zero dollars. There are special visas for UK and other non-EU citizens seeking to relocate to Spain: All they need to show is a certain amount of money in their bank account to qualify. Greece offers a “golden visa” to anyone who can invest at least 250,000 euros in a Greek property.

But no such initiative has quite captured the public imagination like the 1 Euro House scheme. “It’s a PR campaign,” explained Maurizio Berti, who runs 1eurohouses.com, a clearing-house website dedicated to tracking and promoting various 1 Euro House towns. And a wildly successful one at that. In October 2020, months into peak COVID, actress Lorraine Bracco of The Sopranos and Goodfellas fame hosted an HGTV show chronicling her giddy purchase and renovation of a 1 Euro House, along with a neighboring house that cost just $50,000 (she would ultimately knock down a wall to connect them). When the Bracco show aired, American media’s interest in the 1 Euro Houses boomed. And the American public’s interest in 1 Euro Houses spiked in the wake of the Stanley Tucci food show, an Italian real-estate lawyer told me; though it had nothing to do with real estate—for many of its viewers, Italy called.

The initial idea for the 1 Euro House project seems to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian art critic and TV-show-personality-turned-mayor of the small, rapidly depopulating town of Salemi, Sicily. Upon being elected in 2008, he began wondering whether he could draw investment into Salemi by offering up its empty, falling-toward-ruin buildings to foreigners for a token fee of one euro. The perfect blend of gimmick and pragmatism, the idea caught on. Outsiders scrambled to snatch up the dirt-cheap properties, the demand for local construction boomed, and Salemi’s emptied houses were once again filled.

Seeing this success, other Italian municipalities began launching their own 1 Euro House plans. According to 1eurohouses.com, there are now seventy-three towns that have launched or are in the process of adopting a version of the model. Berti explained that in reality, as I had found, most houses will sell for far more than one euro, but, as with any flash sale, listing them at the symbolic price generates a flood of interest. Each town organizes the operation slightly differently: Some oversee the property sales directly, while others merely connect interested buyers to sellers and hype the event to the press. But the key is that the town can place conditions on the sales. Generally, buyers are required to fix them up within a certain amount of time (and will often have to rely on local architects and artisans). Some towns also require buyers to maintain full-time residence, or to open a business.

Advocates of the program insist that everyone stands to win: The town benefits economically with an increased tax base, more people to patronize local businesses, and a local building boom, while buyers gain the home—and the life—of their dreams. But its detractors worry that these flash sales risk turning these endangered Italian towns into mere curiosities, packing them with foreigners so that the culture all but disappears, or becomes a gimmick in and of itself.

The philosophical conundrum of these aging, depopulating towns is this: open a place up to newcomers and risk eroding its essential nature, or allow it to wither away and die?

Seen one way, the story of every place on Earth is that of migration and change: People arrive, people leave. Italy as a whole has always known seismic demographic shifts. Between 1880 and 1924, when the United States enacted a repressive law to limit immigration from anywhere other than Northern Europe, some four million Italians migrated to the United States. Today’s rural depopulation stems, in part, from that great out-migration, as well as from the post–World War II Marshall Plan industrialization that lured hordes of Italians to the factory from the farm. Sardinia, too, is a land of migration, having “belonged” to so many empires over the course of the last two millennia, only joining the mainland with Italian unification in 1861.

Meanwhile, in the past decade, some nine hundred thousand refugees have found their way to Italy—from Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, Eritrea, Guinea, Pakistan, and dozens of other countries, and the Italian government is working hard to seal up its borders to keep these newcomers out, while municipalities champion the migratory impulses of 1 Euro House gawkers like myself. The 1 Euro House scheme thus represents a new era of migration. A product of late capitalism, of industrialization and urbanization, and of globalization, too, it seeks to fill the gaps left in one place with willing, resourced travelers from another—those with some money in the bank, stable passports, and thus with other options. People, in other words, like me.

On the first leg of our trip, we’d arranged to join Ben’s dad, stepmother, and numerous members of his extended Italian–American family in Tuscany. They’d rented a magnificent, thirteenth-century, two-story stone villa that overlooked fields of sorghum and sunflowers. The floors were made of enormous tile, and in the afternoons, swallows crooned from inside the chimneys, filling the house with their music. This place was, it occurred to me, tailor-made for the wistful outsider, possessing enough of the quintessential Italian iconography (draping vines, sweeping views from shuttered windows, stone floors) and the new: an open floor plan (unthinkable in the thirteenth century), central air, and palatial private bathrooms off most bedrooms big enough for the travel crib.

Beneath the practicalities and the ethics, there was something else this town was lacking—that ineffable sense not of belonging, but of its possibility.

The villa belonged to a Belgian woman named Sabine who’d bought it about a decade prior from someone else who had purchased it in a state of disrepair and, owing to expenses and the red tape around construction, eventually gave up on the renovations. Sabine spent a few months a year there, but otherwise the villa was a rental managed by Yulia, a Ukrainian émigré in her thirties. One afternoon, Yulia came over to help us with the air-conditioning and brought her one-year-old, who joined my baby in crawling around the living-room floor.

“How much does childcare cost in California?” she asked. “Twenty-three hundred dollars a month,” I told her, shocking myself as I said the words. Yulia gasped. She had a daughter a few months older than ours and had been lamenting the Italian price tag of around three hundred euros a month. Fortunately, she reported, for some reason that I didn’t totally follow, something had changed and her childcare would soon be free. Free?! Considering that our childcare cost more than we spent on housing, it was fair and all too obvious to wonder yet again—what the fuck were we doing with our lives?

This is the question upon which the success of the 1 Euro House scheme stands. For though it has garnered remarkable attention among Italophiles and dreamers worldwide, the campaigns seem to have spoken to Americans above all. This is partially explained by the fact that so many trace roots to Italy (my husband is one of them) and thus harbor a romantic notion of homecoming, of return. The lure may also have something to do with the antidote that Italian daily life—or at least, its popular conception—seems to offer to the puritanical American grind. (Slow food! Lovely vistas! Artisanal merchants! Wine at lunch time!)

But potential buyers like us also understand Italy not just as a fantasy to run toward, but as a way to get out of Dodge. When Donald Trump was first elected to the presidency, an Italian real-estate firm strategically named “Italian Real Estate Lawyers” saw another spike in interest; the same thing happened once the pandemic hit, and then again after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Home prices have soared in recent decades and rents continue to rise, and all the while more and more people have jobs that allow them to work from anywhere with an internet connection.

“Let us know what you find,” Ben’s uncle Aldo told us over coffee one morning in our villa, seated beneath the grapevines looking out upon our swimming pool, rimmed by rolling hills. Aldo is a retired mechanic whose mom immigrated from Rome when she was in her teens. He married Ben’s aunt Jane, the baby of six half-Italian children whose grandfather, the youngest of seven boys from northeastern Sicily, smuggled his way to the US in the belly of a ship.

“If you find the right place, we’d go in on it with you,” Aldo said.

Our rental villa was just an hour and a half from the Tuscan town of Montieri, a hilltop settlement dating back to pre-Roman eras that had been one of the first to adopt a 1 Euro House model back in 2016. I left the family one day to visit the town, winding through fields of sunflowers and climbing a few thousand feet in elevation through cooling stands of forest. Montieri’s young mayor, Nicola Verruzzi, took me on a walking tour of the town, with its streets and narrow stone passages, which were almost entirely empty of people. “The heat,” he explained with a shrug.

Montieri had been a mining town since its founding around the year 1000—silver and copper, then pyrite and lead. But when the last mine closed in the 1990s, the long-prospering town was flung into a cycle of depopulation and abandonment. In the 1960s, Verruzzi said, roughly four thousand people lived here. In the two decades after the mines closed, Montieri lost three thousand people. Houses in the main squares were empty and falling to ruin, and businesses were on the brink of closure.

In 2014, Verruzzi announced his plan to sell its abandoned houses for one euro. It was just a whim, he told me, an idea that came from the sky. Unlike Sardinia and many other of Italy’s poorer regions, Tuscany already loomed large in the foreign imagination. The municipality’s inboxes were quickly crammed with interested buyers from all around the world—some four thousand in total.

In some ways, Montieri was the ideal candidate for the 1 Euro House experiment. The town had already been hard at work updating their energy and heating infrastructure and laying fiber internet cable. (Because they are situated in a geothermal region, their energy infrastructure now relies on renewable energy, thanks to EU grants.) And being in Tuscany, they were already something of a minor tourist destination, particularly for cyclists, mountain bikers, and hikers.

Still, the success of the program was remarkable. Verruzzi estimates that some thirty new businesses have opened in this small town as a result of the initiative, and tourism is booming. On our tour, I was fascinated to see just how many buildings in the dead-center of town had been renovated by foreigners in the past few years. “This house was an old prison,” he told me, pointing to a narrow two-story that had sold for 80,000 euros, its original stone covered, in places, by new stucco punctured by large, modern windows.

We turned a corner, passing through a narrow, cobbled pathway with a square stone house to our left and a small, empty stone room with a gleaming wooden floor to our right. This now belonged to a woman from Canada, who had purchased both buildings—the house and its former stable—for just 20,000 euros. The stable now served as her yoga studio, where she offered donation-based classes twice a week. Few people came, Nicola admitted, but it was a nice addition to the town nonetheless. We passed another house, a teetering three-story affair that looked like a miniature castle. This had sold for 9,000 euros and was now painted a bright, traffic-cone orange.

I asked Nicola if there were regulations on the design.

“There are regulations,” he said, shrugging. “But I am for freedom.”

He acknowledged that a good number of Montieri residents were initially against the program, seeing it as some kind of discount scheme that would, in turn, transform Montieri itself into a “discount town.” But he believes most people have since changed their minds. Since its launch, some seventy houses have sold. Many of them are used as vacation homes, but they were no longer empty and falling into ruin. New electrician businesses have opened to service the renovators, there are new restaurants and bars, and tourism revenue is up. Most importantly, however, Verruzzi explains, “thanks to this initiative there has been a relaunch of various sectors of the city’s economy.”

Admittedly, much of the evidence for the success of the 1 Euro House programs more broadly remains anecdotal, and most of it comes from town leaders themselves. But what little data does exist suggests the initiatives’ remarkable economic promise. Since announcing a 1 Euro House campaign in 2017, the 10,000-person town of Mussomeli, Sicily, for instance, has seen more than 125 houses sold. The mayor’s office calculated that this brought 7 million euros to the local economy, including builders, tradespeople, restaurants, and hotels. The economic boon wasn’t just a result of the house sales; they estimated that roughly 6,000 people visited Mussomeli just to look at houses in 2018 and 2019, bringing some 720,000 euros to local restaurants and 900,000 to hotels.

However thin the data around the actual economic benefit for local populations, there is certainly plenty of profit being made on the fringes of the 1 Euro House craze. New real-estate agent collectives are forming to try to garner attention for projects in their towns and regions. In addition to tracking the various 1 Euro House programs, Maurizio Berti’s 1eurohouses.com also offers his guidebook and you can hire him to help you navigate the process.

Nicola put me in touch with Paolo, a Tuscan architect who married a Canadian woman, the two of whom now comprise the in-demand design team of Montieri’s new, foreign class. (Their almost farcical European meetcute: Lina, who had always dreamed of moving to Italy, was on vacation in Portugal, standing on a bridge, when a large wave knocked her over and into the arms of nearby Paolo.)

As an architect, Paolo sees it as his job to figure out how to restore houses with a balance of the very old and the contemporary—cleaning up old tiles, for instance, or only plastering over parts of the wall to keep some of the original stone exposed.

“The goal is to keep it in the time, the beauty, the luster, of what this house was,” Lorraine Bracco explained of her Sicilian renovation, while also insisting that the bottom floor, a flood-prone basement which was once an animal stable, be transformed into a “ping-pong room” for her grandchildren, with a table she shipped from New York City.

Though enchanted by the notional history of the place they are buying, Paolo explained that many buyers have a poor historical sense of just what it is they’ve purchased. He and his wife told me, with a smile and a slight eye roll, that Americans “are always looking for frescoes.” “They read these articles about renovations where people find these frescoes under the walls,” Lina said. But Paolo explained that the houses in Montieri “were poor houses in the past,” largely belonging to mining families. Still, clients are hopeful. “When I suggest to remove the plaster, they say, “Okay, but be careful!’”

But the trickiest part about the 1 Euro House scheme, he explains, is that it was a gamble—for inspections on old homes like this can only glean so much information, making it hard to know what, in truth, you were buying and how much work it would need. That was also part of the fun. He recalls that one house in Montieri took years to sell because a menacing crack ran down a central wall. Perhaps the whole building would need retrofitting—or to be built anew. When it finally sold, the buyers hired Paolo, whose team carefully removed the plaster on the damaged wall only to find a beautiful stone chimney behind it. This was what had caused the plaster to buckle. What had seemed like a liability was merely a stunning relic of the old house, now liberated, ready to become something new.

We spent the week languishing like lizards in Tuscany, guzzling the quiet and the natural light and availing ourselves of the free local childcare (the grandparents). Then early one morning, Ben, the baby, and I loaded up the car and drove to the ferry, which delivered us to the eastern side of Sardinia, where we went looking for a beach with surfable waves. We headed westward, crossing through the mountains and the town of Montresta, which has also jumped on the 1 Euro House bandwagon. It was settled in the eighteenth century by Greeks fleeing the Ottoman Empire. Now, the place and its people were firmly Italian, weighing whether to usher in the next brood of people from far away. Would that be its salvation or its death knell? It was hot and empty, like Montieri had been, and all its businesses were closed. We didn’t see a soul. It was hard to picture living there for practical reasons. We’d spent over a week straight with our baby, with the help of grandparents. If we moved here, even if surrounded by people, we’d be, at first anyway, all on our own. Was that the life we wanted? A person can buy a house, in other words, but home, a concept that speaks to a sense of rootedness, connection, and belonging, is something that seems to require more than money—the currency of relationships and time.

But beneath the practicalities and the ethics, there was something else this town was lacking—that ineffable sense not of belonging, but of possibility. I’d felt it in other places, but so far nowhere on this trip: that subterranean beckon of a place that, like a siren’s call, says, Here.

Plus, surfing was an hour away.

“Let’s get going,” Ben said, and we pressed on toward the coast, where, at long last, we found waves big enough to surf and a place to lay our heads.

The next day, I was due in Sedini, where I’d meet Liliana and attend the launch event for the town’s 1 Euro House initiative. Sedini was no closer to surfing, but maybe I’d hear something of the call. That morning, as I was preparing to leave, Liliana sent me a clipping from a local newspaper headlined, in Italian: “Sedini: ‘One Euro Houses’ Convening Today in Piazza Deffenu.” The writer opined that a historic center like Sedini’s is the “soul of a city and our region.” The story, to my amusement and embarrassment, also announced that I, a journalist interested in the town’s plans, would be in attendance and quoted the town’s mayor saying that the meeting would “offer an opportunity to welcome her and at the same time provide her with the information needed to raise awareness” outside Italy about the town’s 1 Euro House plans.

I arrived in Sedini just as the evening’s setup was beginning.

“We’re a town of old people,” Sebastiano Finá, one of Sedini’s town councilors, told me with a shrug as he dragged chairs into a large meeting room in the center of town. A lean, handsome man in his sixties, Finá was sporting shorts and a tan and had just stubbed out a cigarette in the entryway. In just a few short hours, the hall would be packed with townspeople for the formal announcement of the new housing plan that Liliana had helped to draft, hoping to convince the owners of Sedini’s old, abandoned houses. Some had moved away. Others lived nearby and simply couldn’t afford—or didn’t want to bother with—the upkeep. And some of the homes were shared by so many descendants of the original owners that they hadn’t figured how to split the costs of the renovations or make a cogent decision about the building’s future. To ruin these homes all went. Under the new proposal, the town authorities would connect with these owners to convince them to sell while hyping the project to international buyers, creating the necessary tax structures and offering tax incentives to both buyers and sellers in addition to channeling interested parties directly to the Sedini residents putting their old tumbledowns up for sale. This was part of a larger initiative called “Sedini for Rebirth.”

While Finá finished unstacking chairs, Liliana stood at the front of the room, clad in a chic purple pantsuit and fiddling with a projector. “How do I make this connect?” she groaned with frustration. “A town of old people!” Finá repeated, pointing to Liliana with a laugh. “This is why we need this program!”

We still had some time before the event began, so Liliana offered to show me around town. Southern Europe was in the midst of an unholy heat wave. It was around 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Sedini, the air so thick that it was unpleasant to breathe. The asphalt and centuries-old stone emitted a heat haze that made everything appear warped, as if viewed through smudged glass. We decided to keep the tour mostly indoors. Liliana brought me to Café Agorá, one of the town’s four bars. It was a low-ceilinged joint with lighting that cast the space, and its patrons, in shades of blue. Four elderly men sat licking packaged ice creams, illuminated with fluorescent blue lights that made it feel as though we were inside an aquarium. So this would be one of the places we’d frequent if we lived here. By the door, the air conditioners burbled and two police officers leaned against a pair of glowing slot machines, watching a soccer game on the screens above the bar. A patron motioned for the waitress to fetch us some drinks—a local builder, it turned out, who had helped Liliana transform her place from house to home.

From there, we drove to the coast to behold the nearby beach—pristine and near-deserted. “All of this could be your back yard,” said Liliana. We returned on a winding road through fields of artichokes and wheat. One ancient Sardinian artichoke variety yields five euros a head at specialty shops in Milan, Liliana told me with pride. “Wouldn’t you like to live here?” She gestured to the artichokes on the horizon. It wasn’t precisely the paradise I had pictured for myself, because, I realized once I’d arrived in Sedini, I wasn’t actually all that interested in living in the center of a town but more in the remote ramble of the countryside—which wasn’t what the 1 Euro House program was generally selling. But, susceptible to the call of cheap real estate, PR, and the yearning for a full reinvention of self and life, I had at that very moment she asked been wondering the same thing.

Back in town, Liliana showed me her own house. She pointed up to her beautiful terrace and then to the Domus de Janas—a house that once belonged to the town’s witch and is now a museum—just down the street. It was, quite fittingly, built into a crag of rock that jutted out atop a cliff in the shape of a great, hooked nose. How beautiful it was, I said: her house, the Domus de Janas, the birds nesting in the rock in the center of town, the whole landscape, Sedini.

By six, we were back at the meeting hall where people were taking their seats. Some forty-odd people had turned out—not a bad showing given the heat. The meeting was to be conducted entirely in Italian. Much to my discomfort, I was seated up front facing the crowd, along with Liliana; Salvatore Carta, the gravelly-voiced mayor; and Angela Fresi, the town’s buoyant deputy mayor who focuses heavily on tourism efforts, dressed in a fitted pantsuit of bright green.

“Welcome,” Carta bid the crowd in Italian. Not to worry, he assured the audience. The “one-euro” price was just a starting point. Sellers could list for much as they wanted and even drive up the bids if they saw fit. In other towns, he noted, some 1 Euro Houses had gone for much higher.

“The municipality is only the facilitator of the sale,” he explained. It would be the job of the mayor’s office to attract buyers. Sellers were free to do as they pleased.

Carta passed the microphone to Fresi, a Sedini local who was now raising her two young children here. “People don’t know our town,” she said to the crowd. “They know Rome, Milan, Florence, or Venice, but not little towns, and even less the little towns in Sardinia.” She turned to me. “Welcome,” she said. “I hope you love it.” A few members of the crowd issued polite applause.

What is an “original” place, anyway, when every place is the product of migration upon migration, change after change?

When it was Liliana’s turn to speak, she implored the crowd and the owners of an abandoned or uninhabited house to “understand the importance of handing it over to those who can and want to renovate and live in it. Otherwise, there will be double damage: The owner will end up with a pile of broken bricks of no value and the degradation of the village will be progressive and irreversible.” The purpose of the meeting seemed, in fact, to convince the people to put their houses on the market once and for all.

Liliana had arranged for Maurizio Berti, the founder of 1eurohouses.com, to patch in via video. “Our country is known for its history,” he said from the large screen at the front of the room, “as well as for our food and wine.” But given the rapid demographic changes in Italy’s “interior,”—shorthand for the poorer regions of the country that, perplexingly, often includes the islands of Sardinia and Sicily—it was imperative that Italians in towns like this focus not just on the past, but also think about tomorrow.

Finally, before it was time to break for a municipally sponsored buffet of local wine and cheese, a Dutch couple who were renovating their recently purchased Sedini home took the stage. The husband, a white-haired gentleman with excellent posture and a slight swagger, spoke at length in decent Italian about his fondness for the town. His wife, a trim woman with short auburn hair, apologized for her lack of Italian.

“Thank you for the warm welcome to your country and to your town,” she said. “I find this place very authentic. I feel the future here.” Whether she meant her own future, or that of the town, or some better future for all mankind secured by reviving the old ways of living, wasn’t clear. After a pause, she added, “And I see the future here for us.”

“A country,” writes Paolo Pileri, an Italian professor of architecture and an outspoken critic against the 1 Euro House model, in an article roughly translated here from the Italian, “is a complex artifact of architecture, streets, alleys, and houses, combined with a web of relationships, experiences, and interrelated social practices, and it therefore cannot be reduced to a mere confused sum of houses.”

And yet houses, dressed up with the allure of defection toward a new life, are what are for sale. And it’s what the buyers are looking for: houses as commodities, with the nice, commodified backdrop of the Italian countryside and its “culture.” The worry is that, like with all forms of gentrification, a sudden influx of moneyed outsiders will change the culture of a place—erode its customs, turn its values on its head, change its fundamental essence. The trouble is that culture is such a large umbrella that the word can cease to mean much at all. What, beyond platitude, was a place’s culture? What was it that made Sedini Sedini?

These were hard questions to answer beyond abstractions. Fresi had spoken to me at length about the food festival they had each autumn, in which families opened up their wine cellars, farmers their barns and living rooms, so that people could share their harvests with one another. This was a point of pride for the locals and a matter of community connection. It also was a lure for buyers. Such events wouldn’t vanish with the mere presence of outsiders, but the detractors of the 1 Euro House program seemed to fear that such community events would become less of a genuine cultural tradition and more of a show—these towns becoming precious Italian Disneyland-like villages to be toured and fetishized even by its inhabitants, and whose traditions would, in turn, dissolve over time.

Marco Pizzi, a sociologist who has conducted extensive research into the impacts of the 1 Euro House campaigns in Umbria, told me that many academics like Pileri “are convinced that this approach to the marginal areas represents a sort of commodification of places, a way to sell culture, to sell places and turn them into something different, completely forgetting their traditions, their roots, and their history.” Though Pizzi was similarly skeptical when he began his research, he’s come to see the program as an innovative local approach to economic redevelopment. The foreign investment may, in fact, be what allows some of these towns to survive—and the very fact of their survival would allow their traditions to continue. Almost everyone I spoke with in Italy with firsthand experience of 1 Euro House initiatives agreed—these programs were a form of revival and had drawn people from abroad who were curious to learn about and participate in local ways of life.

Regardless of the murky “culture” question, I understood why locals would be suspicious not just of the aggregate impact of a large and sudden influx of outsiders into a small town, but also of their personal designs on the future.

I spoke to Jennifer Fortune, a veterinarian from the Florida panhandle who started researching Italian real estate during a 2022 family vacation. She’d heard of the 1 Euro House program, but soon figured out that there were lots of cheap houses for sale all over Italy that lacked some of the 1 Euro House competition and red tape. On the real-estate site idealista.it, she found a handsome three-story not far from where she was staying in northern Italy. After failing to reach the real-estate agent, she snuck inside to take a look. The place was even more enchanting than she’d imagined. A stone house with brick ceilings, tiled floors, overlooking the Alps and a hazelnut grove, it was, she said, the stuff of dreams.

It turned out that it had once been owned by a famous local family who made their riches exporting pasta before leaving for the United States. They sold it to a cruise line which had dreams of turning it into a destination, of which nothing ultimately came. By the time Fortune saw it, the property was in rough shape and would need a lot of work, but she was undeterred. In fact, the work seemed like fun. She hired Italian Real Estate Lawyers to help sort out the purchase.

She quickly understood why the cruise line may have abandoned ship; even with the help of Italian Real Estate Lawyers, the process was serpentine, with seemingly endless paperwork. And then came the renovations. It could feel like a full-time job, she told me—not just because of all the choices one has to make for such a big project, but due to the bureaucratic logjams of a famously bureaucracy-laden land. One needs a notary to process all the permit paperwork, and still more offices need to oversee any building plans to ensure they are up to code. One needs a car to get around in rural Italy, but it’s impossible for a non-resident foreigner to buy a car there, and it is difficult to secure a long-term lease. She “had a devil of a time getting the darn bank account” necessary to pay her monthly tax and electricity bills; doing so required an Italian phone number and thus an Italian phone.

It didn’t help the logistical torments that she doesn’t speak Italian. “But I am really friendly,” she told me, “and I laugh a lot. And I have a credit card—that helps too.”

Purchasing a property in Italy, in other words, is not for the faint of heart. This seems to be baked into the 1 Euro House model: The barriers to a foreigner buying property in Italy of the sort Fortune experienced seem to ensure that only the most committed buyers make it to the finish line—those who really want to make a life in the town and have the funds to do it. Marco Permunian of Italian Real Estate Lawyers explained that most of the people inquiring into 1 Euro Houses quickly lose interest when they learn of the competition, the fine print, and the facts of the deal. Cheap houses aren’t generally available in the big cities like Florence or Milan, for instance. (“Oh, yes, a 1 Euro House in the heart of Rome, with a beautiful terrace and a bottle of prosecco chilling in the fridge upon your arrival!” Giacomo, the project developer I spoke to, joked.) Houses along coveted coastlines with views of the sea are also hard to find. Prospective buyers also often give up when they learn how much work, and money, the required renovations entail. (The first episode of Bracco’s show also includes a scene of her sitting outside her house, mopping her brow in a state of rumpled tears. “I’m definitely in over my head,” she says.)

Even those who find the 1 Euro House option to be too much of a headache often decide to buy something a little pricier in Italy, as Fortune did. Permunian says his clients soon learn that there are, in fact, plenty of beautiful buildings for sale in Italy at slightly higher, if still affordable, prices, many of which are move-in ready.

Fortune finally got the renovations going with thanks to a local geometra—a sort of combination between architect and surveyor—whose wife is fluent in English. “Thank god for Fabio,” she told me. Then she found another house in the mountains, built in 1702 entirely of stone. This, too, she snatched up. Then one of her daughters bought a house and started fixing it up. Her other daughter is currently on the hunt for another still.

Her husband questioned her real-estate choices. What future was she imagining?

“I told him that the worst possible outcome was that I owned a bunch of houses in Italy!” she said.

Fortune loves Italy, and can’t stand the idea of living in Florida for much longer. In a few years, she plans to retire to her Italian estate, then to buy a few more houses nearby, which she’ll rent out or sell to other Americans. She also has a real-estate agent friend in Florida who is, as she puts it, “chomping at the bit.” He’s never been to Italy but knows that there’s a market for Italian homes among his upscale clients in Florida’s wealthy suburbs. Fortune’s daughter, too, sees a potential business opportunity in Italy. It’s almost impossible to contact anyone from the lower-market listings, even via websites like Idealista that are trying to close this gap, and there are often no photos, or just crappy ones, of the listings. “He could fly over and take photos,” Fortune told me of her friend’s plans, to help sell those properties to Americans.

There’s nothing abjectly wrong with the Fortune family plans, but if I were a townsperson in one of the places where they were buying, this commodification instinct might make me anxious. Probe a little into Italy’s low-cost foreign real-estate boom, and it reveals itself as a gold rush, rife with profiteers. “Wish you could talk about your ‘Italian Renovation’ with others who totally get it?” asks the landing page of renovatingitaly.com. “Join the Club!” The site is run by Lisa, a woman from Australia. She offers members-only resource lists for would-be renovators and workshops on things like “building your Italian brand.”

“Selling a house for one euro,” continues Pileri’s article, amounts not just to the sale of a property, but to “selling off community memory.” The owners of a house, in other words, can erase its past—and also determine its future.

It’s true that some one-euro housing municipalities are now so crammed with foreigners that one wonders what beyond historic curiosity the original town has, or will soon, become. The Sicilian town of Sambuca di Sicilia, as CNN reports, has been so successful in luring 1 Euro Housers that it’s now considered the Sicilian “Little America.” At the same time, it’s not clear whether Italian residents of the region seem to mind. “We need fresh people to come here and show us how they live,” one Sicilian native told the Washington Post, “and what they think the community could be.”

Pileri’s argument against the 1 Euro House model makes perfect sense to me when leveled against moneyed outsiders, but it also verges on the kind of nativism that seeks to keep refugees and poor immigrants out of Italy. What is an “original” place, anyway, when every place is the product of migration upon migration, change after change? And is a town really better off if half-emptied?

But whatever the case, most foreign buyers weren’t only after the property as an investment. Financially and logistically speaking, they’d do better closer to home. What they want above all is a life—and they all seem to have heard the call I’d yet to encounter myself, that whisper I’d been waiting for, that mystical hand guiding them to make this house into a home.

Fortune certainly had. The day she received the keys, she and her son hopped into the car to head to the house with the hazelnut grove, where’d they’d fling open the doors and get to work making it their own. But before they’d even gone inside, they found a deer splayed out in the front yard, freshly dead.

“That’s a bad sign,” her son said. But she disagreed. It was an offering, a blessing. So they buried the deer between the roots of an ancient, dying cherry tree with the prayer, “May new life start!”

The truth is that a dream life tends to follow the flimsy logic of an actual dream. I both wanted to sprawl upon a blanket in the Italian countryside and to be a bike or subway ride away from dozens of my closest friends in the city. I wanted days upon days of quiet solitude and to get dressed up for fun literary events whenever I felt like it. I wanted a spirit of timelessness and presence away from the capitalist grind within which I could contemplate and read and do yoga and frolic with my daughter on the hillside, but I also wanted to have someone else take care of her a lot of the time so I could work and tend to a to-do list, because, for better or worse, working also gives my life meaning. I wanted a beautiful old relic of a house that gestured toward centuries past, but one with structural integrity—to live in a home where the swallows issued echoey croons into my living room, but without ever having to pay someone to rid the chimney of the swallow infestation so that I could light a fire during the frigid nights of winter. In my dream life, in fact, winter only comes a handful of days a year, and only ever in such a way that mantled the world in a foot or two of sugary snow.

And what of Sedini’s dreams of rebirth? Now, nearly two years later, Liliana says only a handful of Sedini residents have committed to selling their homes in the historic center of town—some for the token one-euro price, and others for a starting price of closer to 5,000 euros. Transplant Liliana remains somewhat at the helm. She has teamed up with Maurizio Berti and a tourist outfit to offer a “Grand Tour” of the area this coming summer in hopes of attracting international buyers and, for the tour operator and Berti, of perhaps making some money along the way.

I asked Angela Fresi why she thought so few had yet signed over their houses to sell. She wasn’t sure. She admitted there was already a “lack of trust” between the town’s longtime residents and the few newcomers who had recently moved into town. All this effort to sell their town to outsiders, and so quickly, felt suspicious to some. Yes, they wanted the town to survive. But many liked things how they were.

One of the fundamental “purposes of primary public interest that the Municipality intends to pursue,” read Sedini’s guidelines for its 1 Euro House program, “is the revitalization of the historic part of the town, restoring it to its historic function of the driving force of life, culture, and activity.” A town needs people, Fresi and the rest of the town leaders knew. It needs patrons of its restaurants and bars and grocers; it needs people to tend its streets and take away its garbage; it needs people to help make its decisions, build its houses, teach its children, care for its elders, and dress its people’s wounds. It needs people to have its children and bury its dead. The question, really, is who these people will be—and how they’ll be lured there.

A place also needs people for that ineffable matter of simply feeling alive. Maybe that’s what had been most lacking during my visit to Italy, when it was so hot that even the streets of Rome were quiet. It was impossible to truly imagine myself in an even temporarily unpeopled place.

By the time we got back home to California from our own “Grand Tour,” we weren’t so sure any longer about the Sardinia plan writ large. It was far; it was hot; living all by ourselves in the countryside with a small baby might be a really excellent way to lose our minds. But while en route back home, I’d received an email from a couple who were trying to attract buyers to a small hamlet called Bozzolo in the northern region of Liguria.

“Liguria is the sweet smile of a woman who does not let herself be forgotten,” read the email attachment, “a thin arc of land where the rocking of fishing boats and the tops of fir trees on the slopes touch the same sky, it is that micro-world where the intense scents of the sea meet with the aromas of mountain herbs, it is a postcard that stops time.”

It was more than over-the-top, but it had an effect. Had we given up too quickly? Maybe there was a dream place for us in Italy, and we just hadn’t found it yet. I knew myself better than to think that a revolution in geography would constitute a revolution in selfhood (Wherever you go, there you are, etc.) or even in my relationship or my family life or my writing. In truth, it was the musing itself that called me most—running my desires through the sieve of imagination, like my daughter did with sand at our local playground. (Had there been playgrounds in Sedini? I’d forgotten to look.) Maybe what we needed to be happy was not to defect from our lives, but hold the possibility of defection forever in our back pocket, taking it out and turning it over in our hands from time to time, because doing so revealed that the life we already had was actually, blessedly, pretty fucking good.

I often think of a bike trip we took one afternoon from our Tuscan villa, arriving, sweating and panting, at the top of a hill where a house, boarded up and overgrown with scrub brush, sat quietly in the sweltering heat. One window remained open, and an old curtain, just a scrap of cloth, now, billowed with breeze—a suggestion of life. Every now and then, convincing myself it’s just for research, I’ll poke around on the internet to see if it’s for sale.