This Italian town is struggling to sell its empty houses for €1

2024-03-25 07:41:00, Kuriozitete CNA

This Italian town is struggling to sell its empty houses for €1

Illustrative photo

One-euro home sales in Italy have attracted a lot of interest in recent years, with dozens opting to snap up derelict properties in some of the country's depopulated cities.

But while towns such as Mussomeli in Sicily and Zungoli in Campania have managed to free up various abandoned flats for foreigners wanting to live the Italian dream, some have struggled to sell their empty homes.

Among them is Patrica, a remote medieval village of about 3,000 people located south of Rome, where more than 40 abandoned properties from the early 1900s have been left derelict.

Located on a rocky plateau overlooking the Sacco Valley in central Italy, Patrica is an idyllic place, but life here was not easy for the locals in the past.

Many left in search of a brighter future elsewhere, leaving their homes empty for decades.

In an attempt to breathe new life into the dying village, the town's mayor Lucio Fiordaliso has tried to emulate the success of other Italian villages that have put their abandoned houses up for sale for a euro or just over one dollar. So far there has been little success.

"We initially mapped all the abandoned houses and made a formal appeal to the original owners to invite them to hand over their dilapidated family properties, but we only managed to sell two houses for one euro," Fiordaliso told CNN.

While local authorities in towns left unpopulated by earthquakes and other natural disasters have jurisdiction to put abandoned houses up for sale without the owners' permission, this is not the case for Patrica and other towns like it.

"First we need the willingness of the owners, or their heirs, to dispose of their old houses," says Fiordaliso.

"Only then can we put these properties up for sale with their consent, which makes the process very complicated. Almost impossible."

Fiordaliso explains that the city received a "positive response" from 10 owners after they sent out a "public call to include them in our one-euro houses project," but they pulled out at the last minute. The rest never responded.

This Italian town is struggling to sell its empty houses for €1

Fiordaliso thinks those who changed their minds may have done so because of problems with other relatives who owned shares in the same property.

Abandoned buildings in old Italian cities are sometimes divided among multiple heirs who own only one section – such as a bathroom, balcony, kitchen – and nothing can be sold without written consent from all the heirs, according to Italian law.

In the past, it was customary for children to inherit parts of their family home, including plots of land, wells and orchards.

But it is not always a guarantee that relatives will still be on good terms and/or in contact in the years to come.

"The distribution of potential one-euro houses faced an impasse as most of the relatives sharing the same property were at odds with each other for personal reasons or could not agree on the sale, some barely speaking or knowing each other , others lived in distant cities and even abroad", says the mayor.

This Italian town is struggling to sell its empty houses for €1

In some cases, houses were never formally divided between heirs in the past, so the ownership line was broken along the way without a clear indication of who the current owner should be.

According to Fiordaliso, tracing the descendants of owners who had emigrated for a long time abroad, mainly to the USA, Canada and Argentina and perhaps had different surnames, or could have passed their Italian property to foreigners without notifying the municipality of Patrica . a very difficult task.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," he adds.

The only two derelict houses that Patrica managed to sell as part of her one-euro scheme were fully owned by two local residents, so no fourth cousins ??or great-grandchildren were required and they could sold properties without any complications./ CNA