Free Houses! Strings Attached.

Just in time for Travel Month: a Sicilian town called Gangi has decided to put some of its vacant houses on the market. Cost: Free! So long as the purchaser can bring them back to life.

The properties in Gangi, a picturesque central town that straddles the Madonie Mountains, are generally dilapidated, some abandoned generations ago.

The structures give new meaning to the term “fixer-upper,” and anyone who acquires one of the properties has just four years to restore it and make it livable.

This smells like a reality show, doesn’t it? “You have four years, two hands, and your wits. Can you DIY this abandoned Italian house into a home?” Get on it, HGTV.

Many of the houses were abandoned, as it happened, by farmers who emigrated either to America or to Argentina, searching for a better, or at least a different, life, one in which presumably they didn’t have to share a roof with the livestock.

Many family homes left behind were the so-called pagglialore typical of this town. The squat, tower-like structures housed donkeys on the ground floor with the paglia, or straw. Chickens and goats were kept on the middle floor. The farmer’s family lived on top.

These structures are now among those that the city has made available, with the local government acting as real estate broker of sorts, facilitating the convergence of the town’s considerable supply of abandoned dwellings and the growing demand. Some have been given away, others sold for a nominal price. The owners decide.

Potential upsides:

+ Mountain air

+ Good food

+ Cathedrals

+ Sex? I mean, it’s Italy, right.

+ Time at last to write that screenplay / learn to knit / get real good at the theremin

Potential downsides:

+ Proximity to the active volcano of Etna. This could be an upside too, though: think of the Instagrams!

+ How are you going to make money?

+ On the other hand, with no Seamless or Sephora, at least you don’t have to worry too much about spending money either

+ No Netflix

+ Swaths of the area remain kinda provincial, kinda patriarchal. In the words of one rueful female transplant, “It takes balls to live in Sicily.”

Concerned, but still want a place to live for nothing but the sweat and tears you plan to pour into it? Luckily you have others to choose from. Here’s a free Queen Anne in Ohio! Here’s an Italianate farmhouse in Indiana! Here’s a cottage in Georgia! Enjoy.

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