Sicily’s one-euro house program has captured headlines worldwide. But Afar contributing writer Lisa Abend wanted to know what happens after the viral stories fade. So she traveled to Sicily to uncover the reality behind the dream—and discovered the process is far more complex than anyone expects.
On this episode of Unpacked: Five Questions, Lisa shares what it’s really like to be an outsider in tight-knit Sicilian communities, why most buyers face years of delays and unexpected costs, and how the distinctively Sicilian spirit endures despite an influx of foreign dreamers.
Transcript
Katherine LaGrave, host: Welcome to Unpacked, Five Questions, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of one great travel story.
I’m Katherine LaGrave, a deputy editor at Afar. I’m pretty lucky. I get to brainstorm, assign, and edit features for our print magazine. And I get to work with writers who have an ear for great travel stories.
Lisa Abend comes to mind. An Afar contributing writer, Lisa is based in Copenhagen and has written about everything from how climate change is transforming Greenland’s landscapes and language to the people who make Marrakech’s medina tick. (Say that three times fast.) For her newsletter, the Unplugged Traveler, she explores Europe without using the internet.
But recently, Lisa visited Sicily to report on a topic that’s very much set the internet ablaze: European countries selling homes for one euro. I sat down with Lisa to learn more about what captivated her about Sicily—and if she came away with a one-euro home herself.
Hi, Lisa. Thanks for chatting with me today. We’ve seen so many headlines about homes selling for one euro, and I was so intrigued by this pitch when you sent it, and I’d love to know where did the idea for the story come from?
Lisa: Probably from the same thing that caught your attention then, which were all those headlines. I think that the program of selling houses in what are often, if not outright abandoned villages, at least villages that are experiencing depopulation, [and] selling them for, for one euro is, it’s such a catchy headline. And it, it taps into so many people’s fantasies about living abroad that every media outlet at some point had done some kind of story on that. I believe CNN was the first to, to really pick it up.
And then subsequently for years and years after that, you would see these, the same headline pop up: “I bought a one-euro house” or “These are the people [who bought a one-euro house.]” There was a, a television show—there are two series about it actually, one British, one American—about people who, who bought their one-euro home. And so just the, the fantasy nature of course lured me in, but it was the question of what came next that seems so interesting. What really happens afterwards, both for the people who buy the houses, but also for the neighbors and the villages?
Katherine: Yeah, it’s sort of the idea that it’s so attractive. Because you’re going for this community life and this way of life, and then the more people that buy these houses, and inevitably the fabric of that community changes, which I thought was a really interesting question for you to try and explore on your trip there. And one of the things you try and turn over in your story is the idea of welcoming, so how these smaller towns are responding to newcomers. I’m curious how it felt for you on the road going out and reporting this story and meeting all of these people.
Lisa: The first town that I went to, which is actually the town that I based the whole story out of, I, I rented an apartment while I was there [in] Sambuca di Sicilia. And I remember walking around my first afternoon there and the streets being very quiet, very few people out, but having the distinct impression that everybody who was out was watching me. I remember, there was a bank and I was going into the ATM to get some money out and I couldn’t get the door to open. And so I’m, like, struggling with the door and suddenly—like there was no one around—and suddenly three people are there to help me. I was like, “Where did you guys come from?”
And I realized that I was a surprising presence there at the time. It was funny though because it, I think my initial response to that, to feeling recognized as an outsider was a sense of, yeah, wariness maybe, or that it wasn’t entirely welcoming. But then I realized pretty quickly that, that that was on me. It wasn’t them. That was my imposing, I think, my fears more than what the actual sentiment toward me was.
There was one café that I went to and in the morning there was an elderly man sitting in the corner just glaring at me. He glared at me as I went up to the counter and ordered and glared at me as I sat back down, I was like, “Oh my gosh, am I in this guy’s seat? What’s going on?” And finally he came up to me and in, in very basic English asked me if I knew his cousins in New Jersey. And I realized that what I had mistaken for, for hostility was actually him just getting up the courage to ask me a question about his family.
Katherine: I love that. That’s so cute. How would you characterize the feelings of the, the people that you spoke with who had purchased the houses? Because in the story you share a bit about some of the setbacks or delays or just things taking longer than expected. And if you could sum it up, I’m curious how you’d characterize the mood of these people that have gone over there and purchased houses as part of this dream.
Lisa: I think for the ones that I met that were still in the, the process, there had been some disillusionment or, or at least education—maybe that’s a way, a better way to put it—but there was still quite a bit of, um, sort of determined excitement. But you know, for people who are successfully navigating the process and could see their houses gradually—and emphasis on the gradually, ’cause it inevitably took much longer than they had had expected—for those who could see them taking shape, there was this, this sense of joy that they were getting to live this, this new life or to have made that fantasy come true.
I did not meet a single person for whom the process had gone smoothly or even just as they had expected. I interviewed someone, in a town called Mussomeli, someone named Danny McCubbin, who had—I think I describe him as like the poster child for one-euro houses. And that’s because he had gone through the whole process. He had actually arrived not only with the desire to buy one of these homes, which for most people, one of the things I discovered is that most of the people buying them don’t intend to live in them year round. They wanna use them as vacation properties. They wanna rent them out. But he was one of the few who came to live and not just to live, he wanted to launch a program there. He had worked in the U.K. actually with Jamie Oliver, um, in creating programs for people who, uh, didn’t have access to sufficient food.
And he had wanted to do the same thing in Mussomeli only to discover that actually the people in Mussomeli didn’t really need that kind of program. During the pandemic, he instead started cooking and providing food for elderly people or people who are isolated, and distributing it that way. And so he had really kind of carved a place for himself in the fabric of, of that town. And because of that, he had become also this kind of resource for anybody else who was thinking of, of buying one of these one-euro houses.
And I remember him telling me how he felt like so much of what he was doing was just crushing people’s dreams because he would tell them things like, “You know, the fact that you buy a house doesn’t mean that you automatically get a residence permit. And if you don’t have a residence permit, then you can’t get a driver’s license or buy a car. And because there’s so many people who are buying these homes, there’s actually a shortage of construction workers. So it will be years before anyone will even start on your house before, let alone finish it.”
So it’s gonna be much, much, much more complicated than what people expected. But for the people who kind of chilled out over all of that, and were able to just be a little less uptight, let go of their expectations, accept the obstacles, and maybe this is the other sort of aspect of Sicilian culture that I encountered there, then there was real, real joy and pleasure in the process. It just took them a while to get there.
Katherine: You also write that one thing you found was that, yes, there has been some change, but that a distinctively Sicilian spirit still dominates. And so thinking about the destination specifically, what felt different to you about Sicily, about that feeling, about that spirit, than other places that you’ve traveled to in Italy?
Lisa: The places that I went to felt like very tight communities, and these are small enough towns where people really do know everybody else who lives in them. They run into each other on a daily basis as they do the shopping or take an evening walk. One of the questions I went with was: Is that sense of connection and community going to be disturbed by all of these outsiders coming in? And from what I could tell at that point, it really hadn’t happened. There were some like very, very mild points of friction where some of the Americans who had bought houses had gotten annoyed that the teenage boys in the town would roar through on their motorbikes at night because there was nothing else to do.
But I also saw evidence and the woman that I met that first night, who eventually got cut from the story, but her name was Jennifer, you know, she had become really good friends with people in the town, Sicilians themselves, and so she had felt accepted into that community even though she still didn’t really speak Italian. She hadn’t been able to buy a car yet because she was having some residence issues, all kinds of things, but that, that core kind of communal element was, was there for her as well.
Katherine: Love it. One of the things that we trimmed slightly from the story because of space was your personal interest in finding a home. So I’m gonna make your dreams come true here and ask you after all of this time, what would your dream home in Sicily look like? Would you be starting at a euro and put in 200,000 or would you be starting at 50? Where would it be?
Lisa: OK, well, it would not start at one euro, that’s for sure. Um, one of the things you very quickly realize when you start looking at these is that you’re lucky if, if one euro buys you four walls, and those four walls will be nowhere close to upright. I was very amused that in Sambuca di Sicilia after the success, the runaway success of the one-euro program, they then decided to double the price to two euros. Um, one or two euros, you’re, you’re basically buying the opportunity to tear something down and start over again. Maybe I just don’t have enough imagination, but that wasn’t very appealing to me.
And one of the things I do describe in, in the story is, is on my last day there, going to see a house that was, it was definitely more than one euro, but it was still, it would’ve been considered quite cheap by any other standards. It might have been something like 50,000 or something. It was a quite lovely three-story building with incredible terraces and views of, of the surrounding area and beautiful chandeliers and tile floors, and it was in good enough shape that I could imagine the house that it would be.
It had also had a rental apartment with like a woodburning oven. I was like, “I could open a pizza place here.” Who knows? Um, and it was, yeah, it was in good enough shape that you could actually move into it. And by that point I had become attached enough to this, this village that I could suddenly imagine myself making a life there, being part of that community and having this, this beautiful light-filled Sicilian home overlooking a lake to live in. It really was a really fun story to do and like I said, helped me fall in love with a, a part of Italy I’d never been to before.
Katherine: Listener, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Unpacked: Five Questions. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to Lisa’s story and to her social media handles. Join me in two weeks for another episode that takes you behind the scenes with our award-winning features writers. I’ll be speaking with Peggy Orenstein, an author and Afar contributing writer who traveled to Busan, South Korea, and came away with more love for the “second cities of the world.”
Ready for more interviews with travel writers? Visit afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok. We are @afarmedia. If you enjoyed today’s exploration, I hope you’ll come back for more great travel stories. Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform.
It helps other travelers find it. This has been Unpacked: Five Questions, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislyn Greene, Nikki Galteland, and Katherine LeGrave.
