Anna: Hi everyone and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast.

Luca: Welcome back. Happy Saturday everyone.

Anna: Happy Saturday. So, yeah, today we're talking about, one euro homes, Sicily, visas.

Luca: And before you say, oh no, another episode about one euro homes, we're actually starting with something completely novel, which is the first one euro home program in northern Italy.

Anna: What?

Luca: Really? Yes. Anna don't act all surprised. You wrote an article about that.

Anyway, it's just an inside joke. So this week?

Anna: Yeah, tell me more about that. Sorry.

Luca: Yeah, so this week the towns of Recoaro, [00:01:00] Posina, and Valli del Pasubio, very near Vicenta. And for those who know where Vicenza is, that's very near Venice have announced that the first batch of one euro homes in those, uh, lovely mountain villages.

Anna: Oh, okay. And why just now?

Luca: Well, you see, it's actually a very interesting area that I personally know. I would say intimately. It was a magnet for tourists about a hundred years ago. Even Nietzsche, the German philosopher, used to go on holiday there and

Anna: are you joking?

Luca: No, no. Really is true.

There's proof of it. He wrote about it. He wrote, that, it was one of the most beautiful places they had ever been to, but, it kind of fell off the map tourism wise. Because, uh, spas are not as popular now as they used to be in the past in Italy at least. And so even when I was a child at this [00:02:00] place, which was in huge tourist magnet had become less popular in the past few years. It has suffered a massive exodus of people that go and work and live in the nearby cities.

So there's a lot of empty homes and quite simply the local governments decided to make them available to investors and people that want to move there preferentially to restore very much like the schemes in southern Italy.

Anna: Yeah, but these are just the first ones in Northern Italy.

Luca: Exactly. First ones in Northern Italy.

So if you wanna know more about this, go to magictowns.it and read the article in which we cover everything about this brand, brand new program.

Anna: And be the first one to buy them.

Luca: Yeah, maybe. And then we can have a chat with there about how you feel about that. That is, if Anna and I don't buy them first.

What else is on our episode today, Anna? We have an interview right?

Anna: Yeah, we met George after visiting Mussomeli ourselves, and it was, how was it, Luca, because you went [00:03:00] there.

Luca: George is the English beating heart of Mussomeli now.

We spent, half an hour chatting with him about how things are going, how the city is changing now that he has brought in his massive social media following. He also has some new plans that he briefly mentions and he's going to officially unveil in the next couple of weeks.

So without further ado, here's a little excerpt of our chat with George.

Hi George. How are you?

George: Hello. How are we doing?

Gill: Hi. I think we missed you by a day in Mussomeli

Luca: But we met some of your fans. Even the people that haven't met you, they're basically all there for you, which is very interesting. We've actually never seen anything like this.

George: It's been great for Mussomeli. All the locals are very happy, all the one euro houses have been sold now, all the prices are slowly starting to creep up and everyone's spending money at the businesses. So it is just a win-win situation for everyone really.

Luca: Absolutely. You know, we live in the north. And we found [00:04:00] out that for the first time, just today, they have started the one euro home scheme, just near us, 10 miles away.

George: Wow.

Luca: So that's quite exciting because, you know, so far it has only been in the south.

George: I think a lot of the times, you know, one of the reasons people have sort of come to Mussomeli. It is purely just because it's one of the few towns in Sicily, which someone's really marketing it heavily.

All these towns are pretty similar and they all offer similar cultural experiences, similar house prices. But Mussomeli I think has just got very lucky. And the mayor has been a huge positivity because so many of these places, they have so much red tape.

You know, with the one euro house scheme I went through, there was no upfront deposit. You had three years to do the roof and the facade, which they've now scrapped that rule and to incentivize people to keep coming, they've now introduced a new rule where you can remove the roof of your one euro house and make a garden.

The only time I've heard people having bad experiences in Mussomeli is by using contractors who want to charge you upfront. I know one girl at the [00:05:00] moment, she's from LA, she spent 20 grand in the house. I think she agreed to 120,000 pound renovation budget. And she paid someone upfront or didn't pay them upfront and now the builder thinks they've done 40,000 pound worth of work.

She doesn't think 40,000 pound worth of work has been done. She's in legal battle with another contractor. So that's one of the reasons why I like to do a lot of the work myself, because all the times I've heard about bad experiences always ends up by employing someone you employ, unfortunately.

Gill: We've been through that. And then when you employ someone new, they blame the old guy. And you never know where the train of responsibility ends or finishes. So it's even no matter what, it's a disaster going forward.

George: And you don't know if they're cousins or the person you had before. You know, everyone seems to know everyone will be related to someone somehow.

Luca: And so you have to be careful, because if you raze the ground around you in these small towns, it's over.

George: Yep.

Luca: Do you have any plans to rent out your properties?

George: Yeah, I mean, for my first two properties, I've got a waiting list of about 500 people waiting to stay at the moment. I'm gonna start [00:06:00] taking bookings on my website. But, you know, my departments aren't being ready for at least two or three months. Once they're ready, they'll just be rented out.

Gill: You know, from living in London, the price per square meter is just insane. So you see it and you see the value, but then you have to think about the money it cost to fix.

George: Yeah, I was watching, a YouTube thing about these women renovating a palace in Palermo, and they were saying that the local Municipio wanted a 500,000 Euro, for a grant to start renovating or just to even begin the process. They wanted half a million. Just to get the

Luca: oh, like the bank guarantee? Yeah. It must have been a historical

George: it was a historical one right in the center where you're looking over the main square, like the huge ones on the corner.

She was just like, we may be millionaires on paper, but we don't have half a million pounds just to pay for a permit

Luca: What kind of incentive is it? Italy is riddled with old properties. You should do everything you can to make things easier.

Gill: I guess the one thing everyone here believes in, we believe in Italy, we believe the property's cheap and we believe we should be doing more to bring people in.

Luca: That's what we've been working on. Finding towns where the local [00:07:00] government is supportive. Because as you know, everything changes from town to town.

George: It puts me in a very good position, and, every time I sell a house for Mussomeli, I don't get paid for it. I'm just doing it out of goodwill. The reason I left London is I couldn't afford half a million pound for one bedroom flat, so now I've got more chance of buying a house in London in a few years than I did staying there.

Luca: Hopefully we'll get you to move to Italy permanently. You're working on getting a visa, right?

George: Well, that's the thing. At the moment, I don't have a visa. I can only say ninety outta a 180 days. So for the last probably 40 months now, I spent two weeks in Mussomeli, two weeks in London. I've been doing that on rotation every month for 40 months now.

So at some point it would be nice to spend longer than a couple weeks at a time. But as far as I'm aware, either I get a student visa, which I have to go into college five days a week, four hours a day, and you know, I dropped outta uni after first days.

Luca: Now they have changed the law. You need to have at least a B1 in Italian in order to get the visa. So you must have Italian before you can enroll at university.

George: And the only other option is get a digital [00:08:00] nomad visa, which I could probably be accepted for.

Luca: Nowadays they just sped up the process. You can get one in probably 45 days.

You could also marry an Italian. Just be careful of the husbands.

George: Basically 20% of the people I bring to Mussomeli realize they don't wanna live in Mussomeli. Actually. They wanna live by the beach. And it's just been a rule of thumb. I've realized averagely about 20% of all people end up moving to the beach after coming to Mussomeli.

Luca: It's funny that you mentioned this thing about people, things, their minds, because like we spoke to this Australian woman, she's like, you know, I need to be somewhere else.

I like to be in Italy, but I'd like to be somewhere else as a full-time thing. so finding the few different decent options is definitely important. There are people for whom Mussomeli matter will be fine, but there would also be looking for other things.

George: Well, I think that's the beauty of, of Sicily. You know, there's not many places left in the world you can buy a property for sort of 20 or 30,000 and you know, if you sold your property elsewhere for a couple hundred grand, you can have two, three properties all around Sicily. Jump between each of them, vent them out.

Luca: I think people don't understand just how much of Italy is undervalued. We just bought a [00:09:00] house around the corner from here and we paid 50 K, and it's big, like 3000 square feet.

George: Wow.

Luca: But the beauty of it is that it's actually very thriving town. It's near Venice. It's near Padova, it's near Verona. You can find cheap stuff everywhere. You just have to look.

George: Yeah. The thing that I've seen change about Mussomeli most recently is now all the one year houses and the house under 10 K is starting to go.

The house under 20 K is starting to go, but the biggest change has been the nightly wait per stay. So last time I was there, my cameraman from Channel four who came to stay with me, he went to the standard two bedroom apartment in Mussomeli

He was paying a hundred euros per night on Airbnb. He paid 700 euros for the week. I couldn't believe it.

Luca: I was shocked.

Gill: And that's a fraction of the house you just bought, you know,

Luca: the room we stayed. Ride, but it was also, it also had quite a few problems and 90 Euro night

Anna: Yeah. That's crazy. It's even more, more expensive than bigger cities like Milan, Rome….

Gill: there was also a lot of like quite good people that were doing things for, you know, [00:10:00] social calls, ESG, things like the community kitchens.

I met someone from Armenia who was like trying to set up something with wool that had indirectly met you. So there's a lot of social good going on. On the sidelines of all the things you've introduced. 'cause you've got people who want to do good in an area where they can afford, you know, to set up premises.

Luca: And that's what you can do when you're in a place where you can actually play with property, where you can buy stuff and have a bit of fun with it. There's no way someone can say, I'm gonna throw €100k something in London and make a coworking space out it. Because you're not even gonna buy a garage.

George: There's one guy in Mussomeli who I like a lot. He started with one house, bought it for 20,000. He now owns. All six adjoining houses in the first house, the top floor. He's turned it into a hairdresser studio where he gets a couple young guys and girls is doing hairs. He's turned the bottom floor into a cafe and he is got a license from the mayor to have tables and chairs outside and they've made a communal garden and he's just turned his corner property now into like half the street, which he owns. And it costs him [00:11:00] like 150 grand in total.

Luca: He's got empire

George: and he is got his own little empire, you know, and he gets people on WeWork who come and work for him for free, for sort of work experience. And um, you know, he's living like a king.

Gill: Yeah. But then people supporting each other and that kind of lifestyle people miss.

And the thing is, if you relocate to a big city or you relocate somewhere, there's no foreigners. You feel very lonely. Whereas that's what Mussomeli has. You have like-minded people and you pull them all together to a place so that that dissipates the loneliness. So I can see how it really works.

Luca: It makes a huge difference.

George: Yeah. And you know, when you live in a place where you are restrained financially and you've got so many bills coming out, it's almost a luxury to be able to have all these sort of ideas and go through with them, you know? But because you're not constrained financially or by the mayor, you know, there's a lot of freedom to sort of, I say to anyone, if you've got 50 grand, you can come buy a house and start a business and have a good life.

Which is, you know. In London. That's like a year's rent, so

Luca: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

George: No, I mean there's, [00:12:00] people ask, why'd you choose Miss Me? I didn't really choose Miss Somme. It was just they had a one year house scheme going on and I wanted a cheap house. And then because I was there, I started promoting it.

You know, miss, so me's beautiful, but you know, there's another 10,000 towns which look pretty identical to Miss Milli around sissy. But you know, it really depends who's there and who's promoting it.

Luca: So they come over because it is like, I'm not gonna be the only foreigner in a town.

George: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my, my problem is I don't really tend to think things through too much. I just sort of go with the flow and, um, hope for the best. And, uh, that's planned out pretty well so far.

Also, I try and show, you know, a positive side of this. You know, a lot of it people who document this process, it's quite negative. They're talking about all this sort of things that have gone wrong.

I just try and show, doing on a shoestring budget, with not speaking the language, not knowing anyone, you know, it's still possible.

Luca: Yeah.

George: I see the people who end up in the biggest trouble are the ones who are just trying to throw money at problems all the time when that doesn't really solve the problem.

A lot of the time, just constantly throwing money at the issue. But you learn from your mistakes and fortunately I've not made the [00:13:00] costly ones.

Gill: Or say, if you do nothing, you don't make any mistakes. So the only you know, that's how you learn, that's how you progress.

Luca: It was really a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much, George.

Anna: That was such a great conversation.

Luca: Yeah. He is always full of insight.

Anna: I love how honest George is about what he did. I mean,

Luca: absolutely. We cut out some of the more, more honest, honest, honest parts, but he's still very honest on record. Um. Anyway, it was a pleasure to talk to him. Uh, and, uh, we're always following what he's doing.

And, it would be interesting to see how the region of Sicily develops, given that, the one euro homes scheme is, uh, kind of maxing out and people are starting look a little bit more further afield for other locations. So I am bullish Sicily over the long term, we shall see.

Anna: Yeah, I mean, it's not just about cheap property. It's about community. It's about [00:14:00] building something bigger and yeah finding the right one isn't that easy.

Luca: Absolutely. It's mostly about community. I'd say if there's something we learned, it's that. Thank you listeners for being here thus far and for listening to us every week.

We really appreciate you and feel free to send us your comments. The last thing I want to mention before going on to enjoy my Saturday branch is that this week we have launched, on Magic Towns Italy two new indicators, which are very, very important. We're gonna be talking about this in next week's podcast in a little bit more detail, but we now cover demographic fragility as an indicator on our Town Explorer.

It has, become clear that a large amount of towns in Italy. Almost two thirds of them are shrinking at a pretty rapid pace, and that, of course, is a dangerous signal for anyone. They may find themselves in a [00:15:00] community that will shrink over the next 20 years. So we have crunched the data and simplified it in a way that everyone can understand.

Anyone that has access to the Town Explorer on Magic Towns Italy that they can now filter by whether a town is solid from a demographic standpoint, meaning likely to do well over the next few years mixed, or if it is in a position of fragility in those cases, you may want to be thinking twice about what your own needs will be in 10 or 20 years.

I hope you're going to enjoy using this. I hope you enjoyed our podcast and I hope you enjoy your weekend.

Anna: Thank you guys. See you next time.

Luca: Thank you, Anna. Thank you everyone.