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.“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 implying constraint, limitations, the presumption that one simply cannot, in fact, up and move.The €1 house programme serves as the doorway for just this sort of yearning for something new.Hate your job? Want to move but can’t afford a house? Worried about where you’ll retire, or how you’ll even manage to retire at all? If you have the right passport and enough money, you can find somewhere else to live.

Why not make that place Italy?Last summer, I decided to take Forina 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 11-month-old to Italy for an adventure in pursuit of the possibility of a brand-new life.‘Everyone wants a piece of history,” Giacomo Verrua, an Italian property developer, told me.“And in Italy, history is everywhere.” Within this cliche, a person can achieve 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 mythology, Italian life isn’t pure romance and ease,The country is home to roughly 60 million people, but that figure is predicted to decline by 2 million by 2040 and by at least 4 million by 2050 – one of the steepest depopulation rates in all of Europe,This is due to an ageing population, but it is also a result of lack of opportunity that sees poor and wealthy Italians alike moving in search of better opportunities,In 2023, 9,8% of Italians lived below the poverty line, up from 6.

9% in 2014.In Sardinia, roughly 20% of people live in poverty.The country’s birthrate has hit all-time lows, and nearly 30% of its homes are unoccupied.Small Italian towns are experimenting with all sorts of financial incentives – tax breaks, even cash handouts – to bring Italians back to the countryside.In 2022, Sardinia offered a €15,000 bonus, with some strings attached, for moving to the island.

Other places are experimenting with similar incentives.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 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 in a Greek property.

But no such initiative has quite captured the public imagination as the €1 house scheme.“It’s a PR campaign,” said Maurizio Berti, who runs 1eurohouses.com, a website dedicated to tracking and promoting various €1 house towns.And it’s a wildly successful one at that.The €1 house project seems to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian art critic and TV personality turned mayor of the small, rapidly depopulating town of Salemi, Sicily.

On 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.Outsiders scrambled to snatch up the dirt-cheap properties, demand for local construction boomed and Salemi’s emptied houses were once again filled.Seeing this success, other Italian municipalities began devising their own €1 house plans.According to 1eurohouses.com, there are now 73 towns that have launched or are in the process of adopting a version of the model.

Each town organises 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 the houses 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 scheme insist that everyone stands to win: the town benefits economically with an increased tax base, more people to patronise 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,The philosophical conundrum of these ageing, 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,Between 1880 and 1924, somemore than 4 million Italians migrated to the United States,Meanwhile, in the past decade, about 900,000 refugees have found their way to Italy – from Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, Eritrea, Guinea, Pakistan and dozens of other countries,The Italian government is working hard to seal up its borders to keep these migrants out, while municipalities invite the €1 house gawkers.

The €1 house scheme represents a new era of migration.A product of late capitalism, it seeks to fill the gaps left in one place with willing, resourced travellers 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 13th century, two-storey stone villa that overlooked fields of sorghum and sunflowers.

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, air conditioning and palatial private bathrooms off most bedrooms.The villa was managed by Yulia, a Ukrainian émigré in her 30s.One afternoon, she 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.“$2,300 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 €300 a month.Considering that our childcare cost more than we spent on housing, it was all too obvious to wonder yet again – what the fuck were we doing with our lives? House 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.“If you find the right place, we’d go in on it with you,” Ben’s uncle 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 times that had been one of the first to adopt a €1 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 said 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 town was flung into a cycle of depopulation and abandonment.

In the 1960s, Verruzzi said, roughly 4,000 people lived here,In the two decades after the mines closed, Montieri lost 3,000,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 €1,It was just a whim, he told me.

Unlike Sardinia and many 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.In some ways, Montieri was the ideal candidate for the €1 house experiment.The town had already been hard at work updating its energy and heating infrastructure and laying fibre internet cable.And Tuscany is already a tourist destination, particularly for cyclists, mountain bikers and hikers