If you could move anywhere, where would it be? This used to be a question I’d ask myself or others at dinner parties, but two years ago, as new parents facing 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.
We were, of course, part of a widespread trend: seeking adventure and greener pastures elsewhere in the era of globalisation. Even so, the notion felt thrilling. Where would we go? Our search had some parameters: affordability, a natural landscape (I dreamed of cicadas, cypress trees), a place with a language we either already spoke or could learn easily enough so that we could contribute to the community. We’d spent our careers working in schools and nonprofits with young immigrants, 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 non-negotiable 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 “€1 house” programme in which poor, depopulating towns put their abandoned or unused buildings up for sale. The programme, 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. I pored over dozens of news articles that had served as €1 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, some of Italy’s most remote towns now had new life circulating through them. Many local officials had come to see €1 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. What would it mean just to buy our way into a foreign place where we had no connections and try to set up a home there?
Still, we kept looking. 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 house initiative of its own. A stylish woman in her 60s from Milan, she had recently moved to Sedini from the mainland. The town wasn’t far from the beach and, judging by the pictures and Forina’s descriptions, seemed beautiful.
I arranged a meeting with her over Zoom. She appeared on-screen from her office, a Sardinian valley stretching behind her. A few years ago, she explained, she and her new husband began scouring Italy for the perfect place to live. Each weekend, they would visit a new region, feeling out the vibe in remote villages and golden-lit coastal towns speckled with beaches, in each place trying to imagine a life. It was relatively easy to cross options off their list: this town was too expensive; this one too was full of tourists; this one lacked trees. They wanted easy access to basic services such as a hospital, a pharmacy, a police station. They also wanted a view. But above all, they were looking for what Forina called their dolce vita, their sweet life. Eventually, they found it in Sedini, this breezy, hilltop town in northern Sardinia where the bells of several churches rang at noon, and, from a distance, the white-stone houses appeared stacked like antique toys on a rickety shelf. A local estate agent had found them a three-storey house right in the historic town centre with a view of the great green valley below. The house was livable but rather run-down and not to Forina’s taste, so the couple got to work renovating it, adding an upstairs terrace, exposing old beams, bringing antique tiles to a new gleam and knocking down walls to allow in more light.
Their dream life was indeed becoming a reality. Mostly. As beautiful as their home was, Forina noted early on that many of the other houses in Sedini were in a state of complete dilapidation. This left the otherwise picturesque old-world town with a ghostly quality. The town was stunning, but it needed more people – ideally people from outside Sardinia. She dreamed of more cosmopolitan neighbours, people more like her. Might I be one of them?
Depopulation is a primary struggle for many places throughout Italy’s interior. Young people, especially, are leaving towns such as Sedini, moving elsewhere for educational opportunities or for work. These historic settlements are littered with buildings that now sit empty.
Forina began researching the €1 house scheme 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. That summer, they were going to introduce the idea to the rest of the locals.
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