The life swap dream – or a advertising and marketing gimmick? The Italian cities promoting homes for €1 | Housing

If you could possibly transfer wherever, the place would it not be? This was once a query I’d ask myself or others at dinner events, however two years in the past, as new mother and father going through the unsustainable prices of Bay Space life and the looming menace of middle-age atrophy, my husband, Ben, and I took to the web in earnest with the notion of reinventing our lives someplace new.

We have been, after all, a part of a widespread development: in search of journey and greener pastures elsewhere within the period of globalisation. Even so, the notion felt thrilling. The place would we go? Our search had some parameters: affordability, a pure panorama (I dreamed of cicadas, cypress bushes), a spot with a language we both already spoke or might study simply sufficient in order that we might contribute to the group. We’d spent our careers working in faculties and nonprofits with younger immigrants, and, nonetheless totally different it’d look in a brand new nation, we had no intention of leaving a lifetime of service behind. Above all, although, what we wished was an setting during which we might spend a whole lot of time writing and afford to do it. However Ben had one other non-negotiable of his personal: proximity to browsing. This aggravated me, because it considerably restricted our search, however I supposed it was cheap sufficient to design a dream life in line with one’s precise desires.

“There’s browsing in Sardinia,” he mentioned.

We’d heard concerning the “€1 home” programme during which poor, depopulating cities put their deserted or unused buildings up on the market. The programme, I quickly realized, was truly a free assortment of schemes that economically struggling cities used to lure exterior funding and new residents. The campaigns appeared to me to have been largely profitable – some cities had bought all their listed properties. I pored over dozens of reports articles that had served as €1 home promotion over time. By attracting worldwide patrons to a home that “prices lower than a cup of espresso”, as one piece put it, a few of Italy’s most distant cities now had new life circulating by way of them. Many native officers had come to see €1 home experiments as their potential salvation.

What was the catch? It appeared most municipalities required you to renovate the home inside a few years of its buy, and resulting from excessive ranges of curiosity, the homes typically went to public sale, finally promoting for way more than a single euro. However what we questioned about have been the moral concerns – the basic tensions of gentrification. What would it not imply simply to purchase our approach right into a overseas place the place we had no connections and attempt to arrange a house there?

Nonetheless, we stored wanting. There’s a city in northern Sardinia known as Sedini that was, in line with Liliana Forina, a girl I obtained in contact with on-line, about to launch a €1 home initiative of its personal. A trendy lady in her 60s from Milan, she had lately moved to Sedini from the mainland. The city wasn’t removed from the seashore and, judging by the photographs and Forina’s descriptions, appeared stunning.

I organized a gathering along with her over Zoom. She appeared on-screen from her workplace, a Sardinian valley stretching behind her. A couple of years in the past, she defined, she and her new husband started scouring Italy for the proper place to dwell. Every weekend, they’d go to a brand new area, feeling out the vibe in distant villages and golden-lit coastal cities speckled with seashores, in every place attempting to think about a life. It was comparatively straightforward to cross choices off their checklist: this city was too costly; this one too was filled with vacationers; this one lacked bushes. They wished quick access to fundamental providers similar to a hospital, a pharmacy, a police station. In addition they wished a view. However above all, they have been in search of what Forina known as their dolce vita, their candy life. Ultimately, they discovered it in Sedini, this breezy, hilltop city in northern Sardinia the place the bells of a number of church buildings rang at midday, and, from a distance, the white-stone homes appeared stacked like vintage toys on a rickety shelf. A neighborhood property agent had discovered them a three-storey home proper within the historic city centre with a view of the nice inexperienced valley under. The home was livable however moderately run-down and to not Forina’s style, so the couple started working renovating it, including an upstairs terrace, exposing previous beams, bringing vintage tiles to a brand new gleam and pulling down partitions to permit in additional gentle.

Their dream life was certainly changing into a actuality. Principally. As stunning as their house was, Forina famous early on that lots of the different homes in Sedini have been in a state of full dilapidation. This left the in any other case picturesque old-world city with a ghostly high quality. The city was gorgeous, nevertheless it wanted extra individuals – ideally individuals from exterior Sardinia. She dreamed of extra cosmopolitan neighbours, individuals extra like her. Would possibly I be one in every of them?

Depopulation is a main wrestle for a lot of locations all through Italy’s inside. Younger individuals, particularly, are leaving cities similar to Sedini, transferring elsewhere for instructional alternatives or for work. These historic settlements are suffering from buildings that now sit empty.

Forina started researching the €1 home scheme and introduced the concept to Sedini’s city authorities. The mayor and his employees – all longtime residents whose households had lived there for generations – have been simply satisfied. That summer season, they have been going to introduce the concept to the remainder of the locals.

“Come go to us in Sedini!” she advised me on our name. “Keep in my house. You’ll adore it right here.”

If you happen to might transfer wherever, the place would it not be? It’s a query that gestures towards a life in some stage of calcification – the might implying constraint, limitations, the presumption that one merely can not, in reality, up and transfer. The €1 home programme serves because the doorway for simply this type of craving for one thing new. Hate your job? Wish to transfer however can’t afford a home? Anxious about the place you’ll retire, or the way you’ll even handle to retire in any respect? When you have the correct passport and sufficient cash, you’ll find elsewhere to dwell. Why not make that place Italy?

Final summer season, I made a decision to take Forina up on her supply to go to Sedini and, whereas I used to be at it, a bunch of different depopulating cities all through Italy, too. My husband and I stuffed an inordinate quantity of belongings right into a preposterous variety of baggage and flew with our 11-month-old to Italy for an journey in pursuit of the opportunity of a brand-new life.

‘Everyone desires a bit of historical past,” Giacomo Verrua, an Italian property developer, advised me. “And in Italy, historical past is in all places.” Inside this cliche, an individual can obtain a life’s goal and a way of belonging by way of possession. However Italy’s low cost actual property is barely accessible to foreigners as a result of, opposite to fashionable mythology, Italian life isn’t pure romance and ease.

The nation is house to roughly 60 million individuals, however that determine is predicted to say no by 2 million by 2040 and by a minimum of 4 million by 2050 – one of many steepest depopulation charges in all of Europe. This is because of an ageing inhabitants, however additionally it is a results of lack of alternative that sees poor and rich Italians alike transferring searching for higher alternatives. In 2023, 9.8% of Italians lived under the poverty line, up from 6.9% in 2014. In Sardinia, roughly 20% of individuals dwell in poverty. The nation’s birthrate has hit all-time lows, and almost 30% of its houses are unoccupied. Small Italian cities are experimenting with all types of economic incentives – tax breaks, even money handouts – to deliver Italians again to the countryside. In 2022, Sardinia provided a €15,000 bonus, with some strings connected, for transferring to the island.

Different locations are experimenting with comparable incentives. Tulsa, Oklahoma, provides a $10,000 relocation grant to distant staff as effectively a membership at a downtown coworking area. Throughout Japan, deserted houses promote for zero {dollars}. There are particular visas for UK and different non-EU residents in search of to relocate to Spain; all they should present is a sure sum of money of their checking account to qualify. Greece provides a “golden visa” to anybody who can make investments a minimum of €250,000 in a Greek property.

However no such initiative has fairly captured the general public creativeness because the €1 home scheme. “It’s a PR marketing campaign,” mentioned Maurizio Berti, who runs 1eurohouses.com, a web site devoted to monitoring and selling varied €1 home cities. And it’s a wildly profitable one at that.

The €1 home undertaking appears to have been the brainchild of Vittorio Sgarbi, the Italian artwork critic and TV character turned mayor of the small, quickly depopulating city of Salemi, Sicily. On being elected in 2008, he started questioning whether or not he might draw funding into Salemi by providing up its empty, falling-toward-ruin buildings to foreigners for a token payment. Outsiders scrambled to grab up the dirt-cheap properties, demand for native building boomed and Salemi’s emptied homes have been as soon as once more crammed.

Seeing this success, different Italian municipalities started devising their very own €1 home plans. In keeping with 1eurohouses.com, there at the moment are 73 cities which have launched or are within the strategy of adopting a model of the mannequin. Every city organises the operation barely in another way: some oversee the property gross sales instantly, whereas others merely join patrons to sellers and hype the occasion to the press. However the secret’s that the city can place circumstances on the gross sales. Usually, patrons are required to repair the homes up inside a sure period of time (and can typically must depend on native architects and artisans). Some cities additionally require patrons to take care of full-time residence, or to open a enterprise.

Advocates of the scheme insist that everybody stands to win: the city advantages economically with an elevated tax base, extra individuals to patronise native companies and a neighborhood constructing increase, whereas patrons achieve the house – and the life – of their desires. However its detractors fear that these flash gross sales danger turning these endangered Italian cities into mere curiosities, packing them with foreigners in order that the tradition all however disappears.

The philosophical conundrum of those ageing, depopulating cities is that this: open a spot as much as newcomers and danger eroding its important nature, or enable it to wither away and die?

Seen a technique, the story of each place on Earth is that of migration and alter. Between 1880 and 1924, somemore than 4 million Italians migrated to america. In the meantime, prior to now decade, about 900,000 refugees have discovered their method to Italy – from Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, Eritrea, Guinea, Pakistan and dozens of different nations. The Italian authorities is working arduous to seal up its borders to maintain these migrants out, whereas municipalities invite the €1 home gawkers. The €1 home scheme represents a brand new period of migration. A product of late capitalism, it seeks to fill the gaps left in a single place with keen, resourced travellers from one other – these with some cash within the financial institution, steady passports and thus with different choices. Folks, in different phrases, like me.

On the primary leg of our journey, we’d organized to hitch Ben’s dad, stepmother and quite a few members of his prolonged Italian American household in Tuscany. They’d rented a powerful thirteenth century, two-storey stone villa that neglected fields of sorghum and sunflowers. This place was, it occurred to me, tailored for the wistful outsider, possessing sufficient of the quintessential Italian iconography (draping vines, sweeping views from shuttered home windows, stone flooring) and the brand new: an open ground plan, air con and palatial non-public bogs off most bedrooms.

The villa was managed by Yulia, a Ukrainian émigré in her 30s. One afternoon, she came to visit to assist us with the air con and introduced her one-year-old, who joined my child in crawling across the living-room ground.

“How a lot does childcare value in California?” she requested. “$2,300 {dollars} a month,” I advised her, surprising myself as I mentioned the phrases. Yulia gasped. She had a daughter a number of months older than ours and had been lamenting the Italian price ticket of round €300 a month. Contemplating that our childcare value greater than we spent on housing, it was all too apparent to surprise but once more – what the fuck have been we doing with our lives? Home costs have soared in current a long time and rents proceed to rise, and all of the whereas increasingly more individuals have jobs that enable them to work from wherever with an web connection.

“If you happen to discover the correct place, we’d go in on it with you,” Ben’s uncle Aldo mentioned. Our rental villa was simply an hour and a half from the Tuscan city of Montieri, a hilltop settlement relationship again to pre-Roman occasions that had been one of many first to undertake a €1 home mannequin again in 2016. I left the household at some point to go to the city, winding by way of fields of sunflowers and climbing a number of thousand ft in elevation by way of cooling stands of forest. Montieri’s younger mayor, Nicola Verruzzi, took me on a strolling tour of the city, with its streets and slim stone passages, which have been virtually completely empty of individuals. “The warmth,” he mentioned with a shrug.

Montieri had been a mining city since its founding across the 12 months 1000 – silver and copper, then pyrite and lead. However when the final mine closed within the Nineties, the city was flung right into a cycle of depopulation and abandonment. Within the Sixties, Verruzzi mentioned, roughly 4,000 individuals lived right here. Within the 20 years after the mines closed, Montieri misplaced 3,000. Homes in the primary squares have been empty and falling to smash, and companies have been getting ready to closure.

In 2014, Verruzzi introduced his plan to promote its deserted homes for €1. It was only a whim, he advised me. Not like Sardinia and lots of of Italy’s poorer areas, Tuscany already loomed giant within the overseas creativeness. The municipality’s inboxes have been rapidly filled with patrons from all world wide.

In some methods, Montieri was the best candidate for the €1 home experiment. The city had already been arduous at work updating its power and heating infrastructure and laying fibre web cable. And Tuscany is already a vacationer vacation spot, notably for cyclists, mountain bikers and hikers.

Nonetheless, the success of its €1 home scheme was exceptional. Verruzzi estimates that 30 new companies have opened on this small city on account of the initiative. On our tour, I used to be fascinated to see simply what number of buildings within the dead-centre of city had been renovated by foreigners prior to now few years. “This home was an previous jail,” he advised me, pointing to a slim two-storey that had bought for €80,000, its unique stone coated in locations by new stucco punctured by giant, fashionable home windows.

Because the launch, some 70 homes have bought. Lots of them are used as trip houses, however they have been not empty and falling into smash. New electrician companies have opened to service the renovators, there are new eating places and bars, and tourism income is up.

Admittedly, a lot of the proof for the success of the €1 home programme extra broadly stays anecdotal, and most of it comes from city leaders themselves. However what little knowledge does exist suggests the initiatives’ exceptional financial promise. Since asserting a €1 home marketing campaign in 2017, the ten,000-strong city of Mussomeli, Sicily, for example, has seen greater than 125 homes bought. The mayor’s workplace calculated that this introduced €7m to the native financial system, together with builders, tradespeople, eating places and motels. The financial increase wasn’t only a results of the home gross sales: it estimated that roughly 6,000 individuals visited Mussomeli simply to have a look at homes in 2018 and 2019, bringing revenue to native eating places and motels.

In Montieri, Verruzzi put me in contact with Paolo, a Tuscan architect who married a Canadian lady; the 2 of them now comprise the in-demand design crew of Montieri’s new, overseas class.

Although enchanted by the notional historical past of the place they’re shopping for, many patrons have a poor historic sense of simply what it’s they’ve purchased, Paolo mentioned. He and his spouse advised me, with a smile and a slight eye-roll, that American guests “are all the time in search of frescoes”.

The trickiest half concerning the €1 home scheme for patrons, Paolo defined, is that it’s a gamble: inspections on previous houses similar to this may solely glean a lot data, making it arduous to know what, in fact, you’re shopping for and the way a lot work it is going to want. That’s additionally a part of the enjoyable. He recalled that one home in Montieri took years to promote as a result of a menacing crack ran down a central wall. Maybe the entire constructing would wish retrofitting – or to be constructed anew. When it lastly bought, the patrons employed Paolo, whose crew rigorously eliminated the plaster on the broken wall solely to seek out a stupendous stone chimney behind it. This was what had brought about the plaster to buckle. What had appeared like a legal responsibility was in reality a shocking relic of the previous home.

We spent the week sprawled like lizards in Tuscany, having fun with the quiet and the pure gentle and availing ourselves of the free native childcare (the grandparents). Then early one morning, Ben, the child and I obtained within the automotive and drove to the ferry, which delivered us to the japanese facet of Sardinia, the place we went in search of a seashore with surfable waves. We headed westward, crossing by way of the mountains and the city of Montresta, which has additionally jumped on the €1 home bandwagon. It was settled within the 18th century by Greeks fleeing the Ottoman empire. Now, the place and its individuals have been weighing whether or not to usher within the subsequent wave of individuals from distant.

It was scorching and empty, like Montieri had been, and all its companies have been closed. We didn’t see a soul. It was arduous to image dwelling there for sensible causes. We’d spent over per week straight having fun with the assistance of grandparents in taking care of our child. If we moved right here – even when surrounded by individuals – we’d be, at first anyway, all on our personal. Was that the life we wished? An individual should purchase a home, in different phrases, however house is one thing that appears to require greater than cash: the forex of relationships and time.

The subsequent day, I used to be due in Sedini, the place I’d meet Forina and attend the launch occasion for the city’s €1 home initiative. I arrived simply because the night’s setup was starting.

“We’re a city of previous individuals,” Sebastiano Finá, one in every of Sedini’s city councillors, advised me with a shrug as he dragged chairs into a big assembly room within the centre of city. A lean, good-looking man in his 60s, Finá was sporting shorts and a tan and had simply stubbed out a cigarette within the entryway. In only a few quick hours, the corridor can be filled with townspeople for the formal announcement of the brand new housing plan that Forina had helped to draft, hoping to persuade the house owners of Sedini’s previous, deserted homes. Some had moved away. Others lived close by and easily couldn’t afford – or didn’t need to hassle with – the maintenance. And a few of the houses have been shared by so many descendants of the unique house owners that they hadn’t figured how one can break up the prices of the renovations or make a cogent choice concerning the constructing’s future. Below the brand new proposal, the city authorities would create the mandatory tax buildings and supply tax incentives to each patrons and sellers, along with channelling events on to the Sedini residents promoting their previous tumbledowns. This was half of a bigger initiative known as “Sedini per la rinascita” (Sedini for Rebirth).

Whereas Finá completed unstacking chairs, Forina stood on the entrance of the room, clad in an elegant purple pantsuit and twiddling with a projector. “How do I make this join?” she groaned with frustration. “A city of previous individuals!” Finá repeated, pointing to Forina with amusing. “That is why we want this programme!”

We nonetheless had a while earlier than the occasion started, so Forina provided to indicate me round city. Southern Europe was within the midst of a heatwave. It was about 38C (100F) in Sedini, the air so thick that it was disagreeable to breathe. The asphalt and centuries-old stone emitted a warmth haze that made every little thing seem warped, as if seen by way of smudged glass.

It wasn’t exactly the paradise I had pictured for myself, as a result of, I realised as soon as I’d arrived in Sedini, I wasn’t truly all that concerned about dwelling within the centre of a city however extra within the distant ramble of the countryside – which wasn’t what the €1 home programme was usually promoting. However, vulnerable to the decision of low cost actual property and the craving for a full reinvention of self and life, I had at that very second been questioning what precisely it was promoting.

By six, we have been again on the assembly corridor the place individuals have been taking their seats. Some 40-odd individuals had turned out – not a foul displaying given the warmth. A lot to my discomfort, I used to be seated on the entrance going through the gang, together with Forina; Salvatore Carta, the gravel-voiced mayor; and Angela Fresi, the city’s buoyant deputy mayor, wearing a fitted pantsuit of brilliant inexperienced.

“Welcome,” Carta bid the gang in Italian. To not fear, he assured the viewers: the “€1 euro” value was simply a place to begin. Sellers might checklist for a lot as they wished. “The municipality is barely the facilitator of the sale,” he mentioned. It will be the job of the mayor’s workplace to draw patrons.

When it was Forina’s flip to talk, she implored the gang and the house owners of an deserted or uninhabited home to “perceive the significance of handing it over to those that can and need to renovate and dwell in it. In any other case, there will probably be double injury: the proprietor will find yourself with a pile of damaged bricks of no worth and the degradation of the village will probably be progressive and irreversible.”

A Dutch couple who have been renovating their lately purchased Sedini house took the stage. The husband, a white-haired gentleman with a slight swagger, spoke at size in respectable Italian about his fondness for the city. His spouse, a trim lady with quick auburn hair, apologised for her lack of Italian.

“Thanks for the nice and cozy welcome to your nation and to your city,” she mentioned. “I discover this place very genuine. I really feel the long run right here.” After a pause, she added, “And I see the long run right here for us.”

‘A nation,” writes Paolo Pileri, an Italian professor of city design and an outspoken critic of the €1 home mannequin, “is a fancy artefact of structure, streets, alleys and homes, mixed with an internet of relationships, experiences and interrelated social practices, and it subsequently can’t be decreased to a mere confused sum of homes.”

And but homes are what are on the market. The concern is that, as with all types of gentrification, a sudden inflow of moneyed outsiders will change the tradition of a spot – erode its customs, flip its values on their head, change its basic essence.

Fresi, Sedini’s deputy mayor, had spoken to me at size concerning the meals competition the city held every autumn, during which households opened up their wine cellars, and farmers their barns and dwelling rooms, so that individuals might share their harvests with each other. This was some extent of pleasure for the locals and a matter of group connection. It additionally was a lure for patrons. Such occasions wouldn’t vanish with the mere presence of outsiders, however the detractors of the €1 home scheme appeared to worry that such occasions would develop into much less of a real cultural custom and extra of a present – these cities changing into Disneyfied villages to be fetishised, even by their inhabitants.

Marco Pizzi, a sociologist who has carried out intensive analysis into the impacts of the €1 home campaigns in Umbria, advised me that although he was sceptical when he started his analysis, he’s come to see the programme as an revolutionary native method to financial redevelopment. The overseas funding might, in reality, be what permits a few of these cities to outlive – and the actual fact of their survival would enable their traditions to proceed. Virtually everybody I spoke with in Italy with first-hand expertise of €1 home initiatives agreed: these schemes have been a type of revival and had drawn individuals from overseas who have been curious to find out about and take part in native methods of life.

I spoke to Jennifer Fortune, a veterinarian from the Florida panhandle who began researching Italian actual property throughout a 2022 household trip. She’d heard of the €1 home scheme, however quickly found out that there have been plenty of low cost homes on the market throughout Italy that lacked a few of the €1 home competitors and pink tape. On the real-estate web site idealista.it, she discovered a good-looking three-storey home not removed from the place she was staying in northern Italy. After failing to succeed in the real-estate agent, she snuck inside to have a look. The place was much more enchanting than she’d imagined. A stone home with brick ceilings and tiled flooring, overlooking the Alps and a hazelnut grove, it was, she mentioned, the stuff of desires.

The property was in tough form and would wish a whole lot of work, however she was undeterred. In truth, the work appeared like enjoyable. She employed Italian property attorneys to assist type out the acquisition. However even with their assist, the method concerned seemingly countless paperwork. After which got here the renovations. It might really feel like a full-time job, she advised me – not simply due to all the alternatives one has to make for such an enormous undertaking, however as a result of bureaucratic logjams.

It didn’t assist that she doesn’t converse Italian. “However I’m actually pleasant,” she advised me, “and I chortle so much. And I’ve a bank card – that helps, too.”

Buying a property in Italy, in different phrases, just isn’t for the faint of coronary heart. This appears to be baked into the €1 home mannequin: the boundaries to a foreigner shopping for property in Italy be sure that solely essentially the most dedicated patrons make it to the end line – those that actually need to make a life within the city and have the funds to do it.

Some €1 home municipalities at the moment are so filled with foreigners that one wonders what – past historic curiosity – the unique city nonetheless has, or will quickly develop into. The Sicilian city of Sambuca di Sicilia, as CNN reviews, has been so profitable in luring €1 housers that it’s now thought of the Sicilian “Little America”. It’s not clear whether or not Italian residents of the area thoughts.

Pileri’s argument towards the €1 home mannequin makes good sense to me when levelled towards moneyed outsiders, nevertheless it additionally verges on the form of nativism that seeks to maintain refugees and poor immigrants out of Italy. What’s an “unique” place, anyway, when each place is the product of migration upon migration, change after change? And is a city actually higher off if half emptied?

What of Sedini’s desires of rebirth? Now, almost two years later, Forina says solely a handful of Sedini residents have dedicated to promoting their houses within the historic centre of city – some for the token €1 value, and others for a beginning value of nearer to €5,000. She stays considerably on the helm. She has teamed up with Maurizio Berti and a vacationer outfit to supply a “grand tour” of the world this coming summer season in hopes of attracting worldwide patrons and, for the tour operator and Berti, of maybe making some cash alongside the best way.

I requested Fresi, the mayor, why she thought so few had but signed over their homes to promote. She wasn’t certain. She admitted there was already a “lack of belief” between the city’s longtime residents and the few newcomers who had lately moved into city. All this effort to promote their city to outsiders, and so rapidly, felt suspicious to some. Sure, they wished the city to outlive. However many favored issues how they have been.

One of many basic functions of the €1 home programme, in line with Sedini’s official pointers, “is the revitalisation of the historic a part of the city, restoring it to its historic operate of the driving power of life, tradition and exercise”. A city wants individuals, Fresi and the remainder of the city leaders knew. It wants patrons of its eating places and bars and grocers; it wants individuals to have a tendency its streets and take away its rubbish; it wants individuals to assist make its choices, construct its homes, educate its kids, take care of its elders and gown its individuals’s wounds. It wants individuals to have its kids and bury its lifeless. The query, actually, is who these individuals will probably be.

By the point we obtained again house to California from our personal grand tour, we weren’t so certain any longer concerning the Sardinia plan. It was far; it was scorching; dwelling all by ourselves within the countryside with a small child could be a very wonderful method to lose our minds.

However whereas en route house, I’d obtained an e-mail from a pair who have been attempting to draw patrons to a small hamlet known as Bozzolo within the northern area of Liguria. The e-mail was excessive in its evocation of paradise, nevertheless it had an impact. Had we given up too rapidly? Possibly there was a dream place for us in Italy and we simply hadn’t discovered it but. Or possibly what we would have liked to be completely happy was to not defect from our lives, however maintain the opportunity of defection without end in our again pocket, taking it out and turning it over in our palms sometimes, as a result of doing so revealed that the life we already had was truly, blessedly, fairly rattling good.

I typically recall a motorbike journey we took one afternoon from our Tuscan villa, arriving, sweating and panting, on the high of a hill the place a home, boarded up and overgrown with scrub brush, sat quietly within the sweltering warmth. One window remained open, and an previous curtain, only a scrap of material, now, billowed with breeze – a suggestion of life. Now and again, convincing myself it’s only for analysis, I’ll poke round on the web to see if it’s on the market.

That is an edited model of a narrative that first appeared in VQR