Down in the outdated town of Mussomeli, the occasion is simply getting began. Around 6,000 individuals are crammed into the slim streets across the Madonna dei Miracoli church, our bodies pressed towards our bodies, ready for the present to start. The streets are ablaze as if it’s Christmas: arches lit in neon blue, white, inexperienced and flashes of crimson. The Baroque façade — cream stone, with a double layer of columns — is lit up, “W MARIA” (“Long live Mary”) in a holy blue hue over the door.
Then, out she comes: a wood statue of the Virgin Mary, coated virtually completely in valuable golden jewellery donated by the townspeople. At practically six ft excessive and on a platform manufactured from thick wooden, it takes 20-odd males to hold her. But carry her they do, down the steps of the church, up the steep avenue to the town heart, after which in a procession up, down and round this cliff-edge town for round two hours, with a band enjoying, fireworks going off intermittently, and 1000’s following them each step of the best way.
Welcome to life in a one euro home town: fiercely native, fiercely conventional and with a fearsome sense of group — one folks from everywhere in the world at the moment are changing into a part of. Mussomeli, in central Sicily, is maybe one of the best identified of the cities round Italy promoting off ruined houses for only one euro, or about $1.20. Those are, in fact, in want of an entire rebuild, however the challenge additionally contains “premium” houses, which want fewer interventions, and are sometimes totally inhabitable, ranging from round $12,000. The town council put an preliminary batch of homes up on the market in 2017, and since then, round 450 have been bought, together with 150 one euro houses, in keeping with Cinzia Sorce of Agenzia Immobiliare Siciliana, the real-estate company that launched the challenge.
When most individuals hear about homes promoting for one euro, the response is often both intrigue or dismissal. How can a home price lower than a cup of espresso? Just how dangerous is it? And does anybody really dwell in the town, or is it a semi-abandoned mountain village, hours away from civilization? There should be a catch — proper?
In the case of Mussomeli — maybe one cause it’s so common — the reply is that there is nonetheless so much occurring in this town of round 5,000 residents. Although there aren’t chain shops, there are high-street retailers. There are medical doctors, veterinary surgeons, mechanics, supermarkets and sports activities services. There’s a hospital, and a non-public medical clinic, too. There are eating places, pizzerias, cafés and bars. And there are common occasions, from the dwell music that takes over the town’s piazzas most nights in summer season to the myriad Catholic processions, the most important of which is September 8, the day of “La Madonna di Mussomeli.” It’s clear this is no dying town.
VIDEO: Sicilian Town celebrates its patron saint
“My expectation was that Mussomeli was an abandoned town where nothing was happening, and I was surprised that I was wrong,” says German Barbara Maerkl, who moved right here in 2024, shopping for a “premium” home that she is at the moment renovating. “The town is very vibrant in summer, there are events almost every day. Religious festivals, music festivals, dancing, live bands. That was a big surprise.”
Those who dwell in Mussomeli haven’t any regrets.
“I lived in Turin briefly for work, but wanted to have a family down south, so when I was choosing between the city and the countryside, I chose the countryside,” says Sorce. Happily again in her hometown along with her husband and youngsters, she scoffs at the concept that she might dwell anyplace else. “I don’t get stuck in traffic. I go home during my lunch break. Without driving, we have pubs, a cinema, pizzerias, restaurants. In winter I go for a walk at 11 p.m. I wouldn’t be able to do that in a city.”
Even her youngsters like it. “If I ask my 19-year-old daughter, ‘Shall we move to Palermo?’ she wouldn’t want to. She likes the tranquility of Mussomeli.”
While the picture of Italy in the worldwide creativeness is one in all dramatic coastlines and historic cities stacked filled with inventive masterpieces, those that select Mussomeli are after one thing completely different.
Speak to foreigners who both dwell in Mussomeli or have purchased houses in the town, and so they all deal with the heat and welcome from the locals.
“It’s the people who make me feel very comfortable and very welcome — that’s why I chose to stick around,” says Maerkl.
“People were very welcoming and open,” says Tahira Khan, from Singapore, who arrived in December 2024. “It’s a small town, so it’s easy to get to know you. It’s very different from the city.”
For the Mussomelesi, “accoglienza,” or welcoming outsiders, is part of life.
Take Maria Anna Valenza, for instance. Last yr, alongside her brother Michele and sister-in-law Monia, she opened Manfredomus, an opulent mattress and breakfast overlooking the Castello Manfredonico, the 14th-century fort embedded right into a rocky bluff that dominates the Mussomeli panorama. The B&B has swiftly attained near-perfect rankings from friends on assessment websites, not only for the comfy rooms and trendy furnishings (made by her husband, Michele) but in addition for the household’s heat — any time there’s a competition or occasion in town, you possibly can make certain that Valenza will probably be there along with her friends.
For the friends, it’s a style of actual southern Italian hospitality. Valenza says she good points from it too. “I like meeting foreigners because their worlds are so different from ours,” she says. “They tell us different things, they have different lives, so you always learn from them. I always ask them if they want to come out with us. I think it’s nice to show them things that they don’t have in their own countries.”
For those that know northern Italy higher, there’s a noticeable distinction. That straightforward openness that individuals affiliate with Italy is, really, extra of a southern factor.
“In reality, all Sicily has open and welcoming people, because we lived through foreign rule,” says Mussomeli’s mayor, Giuseppe Catania. “It’s in our DNA to adapt and be open to new populations.” Just a few a long time in the past this inland a part of Sicily was extra insular, he says, however that’s not the case. Partly due to know-how bringing the surface in; partly as a result of immediately’s younger folks journey. But additionally due to the one-euro houses challenge:
“I always say that as well as the tangible benefits, cultural exchange is equally important. It’s opened up the town and has definitely had an important effect.”
For Khan, Sicily’s previous as a “melting pot of multiple cultures” was notably engaging when she was deciding the place to come back.
Rural Sicily is maybe surprisingly progressive. In 2013, judges in Trapani grew to become the primary in Italy to rule {that a} transwoman certified for a feminine passport with out present process gender reassignment surgical procedure. Judges in Caltanissetta, near Mussomeli, made a similar ruling 4 years later.
Sorce places Sicilian openmindedness all the way down to the waves of emigration, as islanders left for a greater life elsewhere.
“Mussomeli was always lived in by people who came and went,” she says. “Lots of people left to work abroad. Some were able to return; others, their children or grandchildren did. Having people with outside origins was always seen as a good thing here. There was always immigration and emigration.” Mayor Catania hit the headlines lately when he organized for medical doctors from Argentina to immigrate to Mussomeli to employees the agricultural hospital. There’s now a thriving Argentinian group in town. More importantly, the hospital is additionally thriving.
The panorama is one other pull for foreigners. Although most outsiders affiliate Sicily with its spectacular shoreline, the entroterra, or inland Sicily, is equally spectacular. The panorama round Mussomeli — high-spurred, rolling hills that unspool for miles — is out of this world.
“When you come up into Mussomeli and see the centro storico, you’re fascinated,” says Sorce, referring to the town’s historic heart. “There are lots of little houses suspended in the air on the rock. It’s like a nativity scene, or like going to Greece and seeing all white and blue houses on the mountains. People come for the beauty of the town, and the peacefulness.”
Khan reckons that, “Some bits look like Canada, others are true Mediterranean.”
Little surprise that the preferred homes for foreigners are these in the best a part of town, overlooking the view.
VIDEO: Quiet life… hear what a night in Mussomeli sounds like
There’s a lot to do in the world, too. On the opposite aspect of the valley, wrapped round one other rocky spur, is one other fairly town, Sutera. An hour east, throughout rolling hills that may very well be in Tuscany, is Caltanissetta, the provincial capital — it’s finest often known as the birthplace of the cannolo pastry, and home to a few of Europe’s most particular Easter Week celebrations.
Beyond Caltanissetta, and 90 minutes from Mussomeli, is Piazza Armerina, a wide ranging Baroque town. On its outskirts is the Villa Romana del Casale, an historic Roman nation property, whose flooring are coated in mosaics — together with one notorious one in all feminine athletes in bikinis — described by UNESCO as “the finest mosaics in situ anywhere in the Roman world.”
An hour south of Mussomeli is Agrigento, whose Valley of the Temples is an historic Greek settlement, the place temples nonetheless stand between almond timber which bloom pink every spring. Nearby is the birthplace of Nobel Prize-winning creator Luigi Pirandello, which is now a museum. His theories on humanity’s need to put on masks are joltingly prescient for the social media age.
Ninety minutes northwest is Palermo — and en route, at Cefalà Diana, are Arab-Norman baths into which thermal water nonetheless flows. Catania is about two hours east, with Etna, Taormina and Syracuse past it.
As for that all-important coast, the closest seaside is simply 40 minutes’ drive, whereas the social media-famous Scala dei Turchi is simply over an hour from Mussomeli.
The one euro home challenge has had a big impact on the town, says Catania, who took workplace in 2015 and inherited an outdated town that was emptying out, and a declining inhabitants. The town — which had practically 18,000 residents at its largest — noticed waves of postwar emigration, with households leaving for the UK and US (the Madonna di Mussomeli competition is celebrated in Buffalo, NY every year). The centro storico, which spills down the hillside, could also be lovely, however with steep, slim streets that may barely match a Madonna via them, it wasn’t essentially the most sensible of locations to dwell. So as condominium blocks went up in a flatter space above town from the late Seventies, households moved as much as the “new town,” leaving the centro storico to empty out.
Catania was elected to a abandoned town core. “We found ourselves in front of a centro storico that need to be requalified and repopulated,” he says. They additionally needed to deliver a contact of “internationality” to the inland space. After evaluating varied plans, they determined the one euro challenge would work finest: restoring the crumbling houses in the centro storico, rejuvenating the elements of town the place locals not needed to dwell, and combating these falling demographics. Eight years on, it appears to be working: with 18 nationalities now dwelling completely in the town, Catania says that in 2023, the variety of residents matched the inhabitants of 10 years earlier for the primary time in twenty years.
The challenge has additionally boosted the native economic system. Builders are rushed off their ft — consumers should now be a part of ready lists for one of the best ones — and new lodgings and eating places have opened up on the again of the challenge. Mussomeli is now on the radar for tourism, too. Catania says that the variety of vacationers registered yearly rose by 919% from 2016 to 2024. As they go away glowing opinions for locations like Manfredomus, extra folks arrive in their place.
Sorce says that the one-euro challenge is “the loveliest thing we’ve had. It’s changed the mentality, opened minds, knocked down prejudices.”
So far, they’re not satisfied that there are downsides. Initially folks fearful concerning the variety of people that may arrive, says Catania, however to this point all of the foreigners have embraced the approach to life and traditions. “Every few weeks there’s another saint being celebrated, and processions going through the town,” says Maerkl. “It’s really beautiful to experience that. Also, people celebrate here without getting drunk. They drink to celebrate life, not forget it.”
Catania, who has additionally lived in Rome and Bologna, wouldn’t swap Mussomeli for anyplace.
“Even when I worked for 20 years in Agrigento” — an hour away — “I preferred to come home every day,” he says. “I returned because I was crazy in love with Mussomeli.”
It appears he’s not the one one.