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Can You Afford a Vacation Home in Italy?
The dollar is strong against the euro and the pound, and the real estate market in the U.S. is still prohibitively expensive. Those realities have convinced many Americans to consider buying vacation homes in Europe instead of in the United States.
And if you’re dreaming of a vacation home in Europe, it’s hard to imagine a better place than Italy, where the ancient and modern worlds converge.
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The south of Sicily is less than 100 miles from the coast of Africa, while the north borders Switzerland and Austria in the Alps. The unmistakable boot-shaped peninsula dominates the Mediterranean Sea, with Greece and the Balkans to the east and France and Spain to the west.
No matter which region you dream of calling your home away from home, it’s a dream that you might be able to will into reality. While owning a vacation home in Italy might sound like a fantasy, in terms of dollars and cents, it could be more feasible than buying a regular house here.
In Dozens of Italian Towns, $1 Is Enough
In 2008, The Guardian reported that the mayor of a small town in southern Sicily was offering to sell old empty homes for the equivalent of $1. The mayor wanted to breathe new life into his tiny rural hamlet, whose aging citizens were watching their town dry up from depopulation.
The idea caught fire, attracting young, adventurous outsiders lured by the idea of owning a piece of the Italian countryside.
By 2021, nearly three dozen small Italian hamlets had adopted the $1 home program, according to the Washington Post. Buyers flooded the towns seeking refuge from expensive real estate markets in big, pricey cities in Europe, America and beyond.
There are, of course, some caveats.
According to Business Insider, prospective buyers must be ready to search through large inventories of crumbling homes to find hidden gems — and even those will require at least some renovation. But according to the L.A. Times and Apartment Therapy, regular people have taken ownership of historic Italian dream homes in quaint, picturesque villages for next to nothing and brought them back to life with realistic budgets of $12,000-$40,000.
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The Rural/Urban Price Dynamic Applies There, Too
Just as in the United States, prices are higher in Italy’s big cities than in its rural countryside — and not just for those looking to buy ancient $1 fixer-uppers in tiny, remote villages.
For example, Italy Property Guides recommends looking in Umbria — a landlocked region dominated by quintessential Italian small towns and villages — instead of neighboring Tuscany, a highly coveted region known for major urban centers like Florence.
According to My Dolce Casa, a research site about living abroad, the average 2,000-square-foot house in the famous Tuscany region costs $470,000, or $235 per square foot. Next door in the more accessible Umbria region, a comparable property costs just $214,000, or $107 per square foot.
Narrow Your Search by Region — Most Are Cheaper Than the US
Umbria and Tuscany are just two of the 20 administrative regions that divide Italy, and the one you choose for your vacation home will play a big role in what you’ll pay to own it.
According to the St. Louis Fed, the median home in the U.S. currently sells for $467,700. That’s less than the average home price in all but four regions of Italy:
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Trentino-South Tyrol: $538,000
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Aosta Valley: $522,000
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Liguria: $496,000
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Tuscany: $470,000
Not only do properties in 16 out of 20 regions cost less than the median American house, but in a half-dozen regions, the average home costs half as much or less:
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Abruzzo: $234,000
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Basilicata: $234,000
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Umbria: $214,000
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Sicily: $204,000
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Calabria: $182,000
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Molise: $170,000
In the two most accessible regions, Calabria and Molise, the average price per square foot is $91 and $85, respectively. That means you could get a palatial 5,000-square-foot vacation property for less than the cost of the median home in the United States. Across the country, countless seaside villas, lake homes, mountain houses, farmhouses and country estates can be yours for less than what you’d expect to pay for a typical American home in the ‘burbs.
Life Costs Less in Italy
Not only are Italian properties generally more accessible than comparable real estate stateside, but the cost of day-to-day life is lower in the Boot.
In its annual global cost-of-living index, World Data sets the United States at a baseline score of 100 to compare the cost of living in the rest of the world. Italy’s score is 86.2, meaning daily life costs 13.8% less there than in America.
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