If you’ve ever wanted to live in an Italian castle for the low low price of absolutely nothing, today is your lucky day. Thanks to a new scheme by the country’s government-run State Property Agency, Italy is giving away 103 castles, towers, inns, farmhouses, and monasteries for free.
Of course, there’s a catch—sort of. If you acquire one of these disused properties, you have to transform the building “into facilities for pilgrims, hikers, tourists, and cyclists,” Roberto Reggi from the State Property Agency told The Local Italy. In other words, you have to take a building that’s fallen into disrepair and turn into a hotel, restaurant, or maybe one of those cool cafe/bookstores that you sometimes find in repurposed churches around Europe.
I’m curious about how much these would sell for on the “mainstream” real estate market. I suspect “not very much”, otherwise they wouldn’t need to make this offer.
The cost of rehabilitating one of these buildings to make it appropriate or interesting for tourists must be huge. My hunch is that these are unlikely to be profitable as tourism enterprises, savvy investors can see that, and that is the reason there wasn’t much open market demand for these properties in the first place.
I doubt the difference between purchase + rehabilitation cost and rehabilitation cost is enough to change these dynamics. So I’d be nervous that the supposedly lower cost to entry (free is a lot easier to understand than complex construction costs) might attract the less savvy investor, the type of person who opens a restaurant because they love to cook, with the resulting personal economic doom.
Excellent.
Anyway, however smugly tedious the Romantics got, much of their poetry is swooning, and there’s not a British lad who will not quote you Browning’s
*What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O’ the grave, and loose my spirit’s bands,
And come again to the land of lands)—
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala dies of drouth,
And one sharp tree—'tis a cypress—stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o’ercrusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water’s edge. * *
to match Byron’s
*The castled crag of Drachenfels
*Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine,
**
It’s difficult to stop when quoting Browning.
** Both Byron and Shelley and others set works in the Apennines. The Italianate Englishman had a long, long provenance.
It’s actually something I’ve long thought I’d like to do, although my idea was more along the lines of “use part as an apartment for me, set up the rest for use partly as a hostel, partly as a meeting place for local youth, partly as cheap rentable to NPOs ‘hotel’ (hostel plus meeting areas)”. I’d need a partner or two, anybody game? I already know a guy who’d be perfect as our construction manager.
They seem to do this every few years. About 10 years ago my friends and I looked at an old church complete with vineyard near Orvieto. We thought we could turn it into an agriturismo (sp?) and export wine to the US. We decided we would rather have careers and make money.
If it was even slightly practical for me to do so, I would jump at the chance. Even though I’m not Italian, nor even all that interested in the hospitality industry. It just sounds like an exciting and romantic opportunity.
