Luca: Hey Anna

Anna: Hi Luca. Where are you right now?

Luca: I'm actually at Catania Flughafen.

Anna: Why?

Luca: I've just come back from a little tour of Sicily. I spent a week going around. Visiting places. Meeting up with expats.

It was, it was very enjoyable. My only problem with Sicily is that every time I go to Sicily, I put on three or four kgs.

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Luca: So it's a bad place for me to be.

The, the food is amazing, but there's a lot of it that's fried. So it's good, but it's dangerous.

Anna: Oh, and where have you been?

Luca: There was a bit of a wide tour, started off in Caltagirone. Licata Sciacca and then went off to Mussomeli. No. Of which, you know, yes. You know a lot about Mussomeli, so,

And then ended up back in, Catania.

Anna: But sorry. Are [00:01:00] the one euro houses real there, or is just.

Luca: Yes, yes. Oh, I can attest to the fact that they exist.

There's not many of them. In fact, I don't think there's any of them left. That's actually a funny, a funny thing that all the expats I met, none of them bought a one euro home. They heard about the place from, of course from George Laing, and we know him. From the one euro home system, but none of them bought a one euro home, but they're still affordable homes, you know, so.

Anna: Yeah. So did you get to see any of these properties? Like what condition are they actually in?

Luca: Yeah, so the, you have to understand this. Mussomeli like many Sicilian towns h as an old historical center that was not made for cars.

Tiny homes, very often in a very bad state, surrounded by newer buildings, mostly erected in the sixties and the seventies. I actually had a chat with an architect a Sicilian architect yesterday who does [00:02:00] not want to be named. He told me that this is almost inevitable in Sicily, that he cannot think of a single town in Sicily that does not have this layer of frankly, a bit ugly buildings from the sixties and the seventies around it.

So what you can play with is the size of the historical center. Some have a very large historical center like Catania, Catania, five kilometers wide historical center. Some of them have a very small historical center and, in the case of Mussomeli, you have the outskirts, which are like I don't wanna say modern, you know, semi modern sixties and seventies buildings. Not super pretty, although the nature around it is very pretty. Then you have the historical center, which has all these very cute, lanes, alleys, stairs, going up and down, winding, absolutely not made to be driven with a wide car. I am thankful that I had a, a Cinquecento, Fiat Cinquecento with me [00:03:00] so it will fit and the one euro homes are in this section.

They're mostly very old buildings, they need a lot of love.

Anna: Does it feel like a place you could live year round or more like a slow rural escape?

Luca: It is surprising when George says that there's a lot of expats. He is not kidding. I personally met quite a few of them and I'm just gonna say hi to Charlotte and Tim, I know you're listening, so I'm saying hi to you.

There's maybe four restaurants. Mm-hmm. But they are quite busy with expats and you find people from everywhere. Family from Colorado, there was a German couple, there was a girl from Milan, so we may have internal expats. A person from Australia, a gentleman from the UK.

It's a bit of a varied group. It's an interesting kind of setup.

Anna: Yeah. Is English widely spoken like bars, you know? Or would someone need to speak Italian to manage daily life?

Luca: I wouldn't say [00:04:00] that English is commonly spoken, younger people get by a little bit easier, but if you remember, George himself told us that he uses Google Translate to survive.

Anna: So what's around Mussomeli?

Like, are there interesting towns, beaches, or cities nearby? Is it,

Luca: Now this is the tough point with the place because, to be completely honest with you, Mussomeli is not near anything. It is set atop a, well, it depends. If you're British, you call it a mountain, and if you're not, you call it a hill, but a high hill. And, it's a couple of hours away by, from Catania and maybe 40 minutes from Caltanissetta. It feels remote, uh, to be sure there are shops and the supermarket, et cetera, and the nature around is very nice, but it is a little bit isolated, so one has to be ready for that. But then again, [00:05:00] most 7% towns are like this, trust me, I have seen places like, to mention one Palazzo Adriano, where they shot, Cinema Paradiso, you know, the Italian movie that won the Oscar for best foreign film in what is it, 89? Yeah. It was shot in that town and that, for instance, is even more remote. Beautiful, but extremely remote, maybe three hours from Catania. So, you have to keep in mind that, while there is a, an expat community, that you're gonna have to be traveling from far afield to get there.

Anna: So who would you recommend Mussomeli to? Like retirees, remote workers, families?

Luca: I'll tell you who I saw that is the happiest there. I met a mm-hmm English gentleman that found that the combination of property affordability and his desire to help people and to have a social business, so to say, allowed him to invest his capital. And like now he wants to set up a [00:06:00] coworking space. There is one expat that set up a sort of like community kitchen. The fact the property is cheap allows you to do things. Mm-hmm. And you know, you couldn't just start a coworking space in the central of Milan for a hundred thousand euro.

You have to keep that in mind that if you wanna do a fair bit with, uh, a limited amount of money, I think it's a good place if you, don't need to be in a big town. It's a good place. And I think some people are attracted to the fact that it has a growing expat community. I would not recommend this to someone that feels like they have to be in the center of the world or even remotely in the center of the world.

Does what I just said gel with what George said, does it match what you had understood from talking to him?

Anna: Yeah. It's definitely what George said that, I mean there's a growing expat community that, you need a car outside of Mussomeli, [00:07:00] but like the city center is walkable and we are doing lots of projects and stuff, so that's great.

Luca: Yeah. We're gonna be keeping an eye on this one. I think I'll be back in the next, month or maybe two. Mm-hmm. And then, uh, I should probably say the other, the place that really stole my heart and, you know, that I'm a picky person i I really liked it. It's on the sea, not too far from Agrigento. And, it is incredibly beautiful. All the town perched atop the sea property, affordable.

I would be lying to you if I told you that I haven't spent a bit of time thinking about and then looking at a few properties and, excellent food. You know, it, it has a port. So fish is the, fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner almost. The only bad thing it has going for itself is transportation links to some degree [00:08:00] because you only have buses to other major cities. But it is also too big to be a 7% town, it has 40,000 inhabitants. And, unfortunately that will preclude it from becoming too much of a expat magnet in my view, but absolutely stunning, stunning.

Anna: Yeah, I would say the pictures actually, it really seems like the, you know, one of those post postcards that you see of the Amalfi Coast, like this town by the sea with the boats, it's beautiful.

Luca: Yes, absolutely. So there you go. These are, these are my very brief, and live from the airport takeaways.

Anna: Okay, so today we have another special guest, Eliseo, our data man.

Luca: Our data man, okay. Do you like to be called a data man? Would you rather prefer no data analyst, data scientist,

Eliseo: Maybe something more professional?

Luca: Right. I think so. Welcome Eliseo. It's a [00:09:00] pleasure to have you. Eliseo has been our data analyst since the beginnings of of Magic Towns. Is it your first time on a podcast?

Eliseo: Yes. Thanks for having me. It's my first time and it's a pleasure

Luca: So we invited Eliseo because he is working on a brand new feature for Magic Towns, subscribers. Do you wanna talk about it very briefly?

Eliseo: Sure. So, uh, we've been working on a property evaluator application. So our main goal is to make the decision of buying property easy for our subscribers. Either if they want to make a, a simple investment or for people that want to relocate from different countries. So it's a data driven insight that, we provide them before they commit to investments. It's easy to use. So users simply, provide a property URL that they have [00:10:00] liked or they have found and they provide that to the application.

So the system, leverages enrich data for cities across all Italy, covering data points like demographic trends, economic performance, geographic characteristics, social dynamics, infrastructure quality. it gives comprehensive, insights and recommendations. And maybe, it's more insight, and fact driven than emotional.

Luca: But how does the system know if the property is suitable for that specific person who is asking the question.

Eliseo: Before the user makes the request for the property evaluation, we ask them what kind of investment they want to do. And then we remember that , and then we provide the recommendation back.

Luca: So if I had to summarize this in very non-technical terms, it's a sort of chat bot that remembers what kind of property you like and you're looking for, and it tells you whether the property you're [00:11:00] considering is a good match for you. If it's a good investment, what the town is like, et cetera, would that be right?

Eliseo: Yes, exactly. We enrich the evaluation with our data and we provide the recommendation.

Luca: Lovely. I'm looking forward to using it. When do you think this might be ready?

Eliseo: We plan to release this, to the general public in April, and it'll be live then and, every user can, evaluate their property there.

Luca: Lovely. Well, thank you Eliseo. This is only one of the many things that you help us with. It's great to have you on the call.

Eliseo: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Luca: Anna fell asleep during this, you know she's allergic to data. The two of you are yin and yang. Data and emotion.

Anna: Ganz genau.

Eliseo: Different poles of the magnet.

Luca: Well said. So I think we can wrap this up for today.

Anna: Yeah, that was really interesting guys.

Thank you so much.

Luca: We'll be back next week with a more normal podcast, not recorded at Catania Airport. And so all our listeners for the background noise [00:12:00] if you heard any.

Anna: Bye. Thank you.

Luca: Bye. Have a good weekend.