What if we told you you could buy a home in a quaint Italian village for less than the price of a cappuccino? The fine print, of course, is that the house you’ll get will essentially be a collapsed set of walls. It will need major construction to be livable, and it’ll take much longer than you’d expect (read: years, not months) to get that remodeling done.
Municipalities across Italy have been joining the so-called 1 euro ($1.05 in U.S. dollars) house program for years now. It all started back in 2008 when art critic and TV personality Vittorio Sgarbi, then the mayor of Salemi in southern Sicily, got the idea from a friend to offer Salemi’s most rundown, abandoned properties in its city center for 1 euro in an effort to revitalize the town, which had been hit by an earthquake decades earlier and left in shambles.
Since then, the concept has taken off in over 30 municipalities across northern and southern Italy, including the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, as a way to entice buyers to restore dilapidated structures. There’s no all-encompassing website for the program and information about these houses is hard to come by—each municipality has its own listings and local realtors are the best way to track those down.
This has a map of where some of these discounted houses can be found, there’s a for those who’ve bought homes or are thinking about it, and the town of Mussomeli in Sicily, a hotbed of the 1 euro house program, has a.
But we wanted to know, what is it actually like to buy one of these homes? So, we called up Rubia Daniels, a 50-year-old Brazilian who has spent the last 30 years living in Berkeley, California, where she works in renewable energy. In December 2018, Daniels heard about the 1 euro homes in Italy—a country where she has ancestors and always dreamed of living—and promptly got on a flight to Palermo, Sicily. She bought three properties for 1 euro each in Mussomeli in 2019. That was just the beginning of her saga. These are her words.
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Want more of ϳԹ’s Travel stories?After I heard about the 1 euro homes in Italy, I started researching different towns. I reached out to a realtor, and they replied immediately. Three days later, I booked a plane ticket and a rental car, and I was on my way. When I got to Mussomeli, a place I had never been before, it felt like I was coming home. I come from a small town in Brazil, where people are kind and everyone tries to help each other out. Mussomeli felt the same way. When people ask ‘How are you doing?’ they really mean it.
One of the reasons I picked Mussomeli over other towns is because you don’t have to leave to get what you need. Everything is there: furniture makers, ceramic suppliers, window stores. When I was researching areas, I would see that some towns didn’t have a bank, or a pharmacy, or a hospital. I know some people who bought houses in very isolated areas, where you have to drive a long way to get supplies.
The realtor I called only spoke Italian, but I understood enough of the language to get by. My realtor was with me the whole time, showed me around, and was very welcoming. That was 2018 so things are different now. Many realtors speak English, or you can request one who works with English speakers. When I did my first tour of 1 euro houses, it was just me and a bunch of houses to see. But as time progressed, people from all over the world started going there looking for these homes. Now it is a very international community. I know Koreans, Russians, Americans, and Argentinians who all bought a home in Mussomeli.
I was looking for high ceilings and a bigger home. Some houses were in better condition, but they were too small. Some were fully collapsed. You’re basically getting the house for free, so you take what you can get. The cost? It was actually 1 euro. But of course there were other fees. I had to pay the realtor fee, which was 500 euros back then and more now. I had to pay for the deed, which was 3,500 euros. Total, I spent 4,000 euros to get the keys. I bought three houses and closed on them by June 2019, six months after I had first visited. I returned to Italy with five suitcases full of tools, a generator, and my husband and brother-in-law from Brazil, who were ready to start working on the first house.
The roof on the house had fully collapsed. It was three floors, about 1,800 square feet, and from the bottom floor, you could see the sun coming through the roof. We had to do everything from scratch. The new roof went in first. We had to demolish everything and clean it up—that alone took a long time—before we could start remodeling. I worked for a full month rebuilding walls and the roof. Then COVID hit Italy and for two years, we couldn’t return. Construction stopped. The house just sat there.
In 2023, we returned to Italy and began work again. We redid the bathrooms and the kitchen, put in all new tiles and floors. My home will soon be finished, six years after I purchased it. Once we are done with the first home, we will start on the other two. My sons will manage those projects. One may become a restaurant with a house on top, and the other might be a wellness center to give back to the community.
The contractors there are so booked, you have to wait your turn. You have to remember there are 300 houses in a small town all being repaired—many of those are also 1 euro homes—and there aren’t enough workers to get it all done. I manage the contractors from overseas with help from translators and FaceTime. You can arrange everything over the phone, from furniture delivery to painting to curtain installation.
You must understand that Sicily is an island and people operate on ‘island time’. The work is going to get done, but Italians don’t live to work. Everything takes longer. They say they’re coming today to do the job, but that doesn’t mean they’re really coming today. They will come at some point. Sometimes, you have a new contractor who comes in and says, ‘The other guy did everything wrong. You have to demolish this and start from scratch.’ It costs more, but that happens everywhere.
So far, I have spent 38,000 euros in repairs and remodeling. I’m expecting to spend another 12,000 euros to finish. So, it’ll be about 50,000 euros total. But everything in the house is new. I have new plumbing and electrical. For that amount of money in the U.S., you can buy a car. It got me what is now a brand new house in Italy. I go to Italy three times a year to see how much progress has been made.
I’m going to retire there, that’s my goal. That will be my home base. From there, it’s a quick flight to London, Paris, or Istanbul. The air is clean. I can drink the water. The food is produced locally. It’s a much nicer quality of living and a much lower price than where I currently live. My goal is to retire there in the next 15 years.
Many of these houses became abandoned during World War II, and the towns are trying to revitalize them. It’s a way of bringing the town back to life. It’s working. It’s vibrant now. There are more young families, businesses are booming. The people are welcoming and happy. If you’re not from Italy, then you need what’s called a codice fiscal, a tax identification number for foreign citizens in order to purchase a house. It’s an easy process. You go in person and fill out a form to say which house you are buying. You’ll use that number to open a bank account or pay people. If I decide to stay in Italy for an extended time, I am going to apply for my Italian citizenship.
There are still 1 euro houses for sale in Mussomeli. It’s not as big an inventory as when I was first looking, but you can still buy a house for 1 euro. Don’t think everything will be free. Know that the houses may be fully collapsed. Walk around the town, interact with the neighbors. That should help you make your decision. If you’re someone like me who gets excited about a project, then this is for you.
Megan Michelson is an ϳԹ contributing editor who recently took a trip to Italy, where she kept looking over her shoulder for homes for sale for 1 euro. She’s also recently written about how to visit Jackson Hole on the cheap, reviewed the coolest Airbnb in Colorado, and how to find incredible ski lift ticket deals.