Anna: Hi everyone and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast.

Luca: Welcome back. Happy Saturday everyone.

Anna: Happy Saturday. So, yeah, today we’re talking about, one euro homes, Sicily, visas.

Luca: And before you say, oh no, another episode about one euro homes, we’re actually starting with something completely novel, which is the first one euro home program in northern Italy.

Anna: What?

Luca: Really? Yes. Anna don’t act all surprised. You wrote an article about that.

Anyway, it’s just an inside joke. So this week?

Anna: Yeah, tell me more about that. Sorry.

Luca: Yeah, so this week the towns of Recoaro, [00:01:00] Posina, and Valli del Pasubio, very near Vicenta. And for those who know where Vicenza is, that’s very near Venice have announced that the first batch of one euro homes in those, uh, lovely mountain villages.

Anna: Oh, okay. And why just now?

Luca: Well, you see, it’s actually a very interesting area that I personally know. I would say intimately. It was a magnet for tourists about a hundred years ago. Even Nietzsche, the German philosopher, used to go on holiday there and

Anna: are you joking?

Luca: No, no. Really is true.

There’s proof of it. He wrote about it. He wrote, that, it was one of the most beautiful places they had ever been to, but, it kind of fell off the map tourism wise. Because, uh, spas are not as popular now as they used to be in the past in Italy at least. And so even when I was a child at this [00:02:00] place, which was in huge tourist magnet had become less popular in the past few years. It has suffered a massive exodus of people that go and work and live in the nearby cities.

So there’s a lot of empty homes and quite simply the local governments decided to make them available to investors and people that want to move there preferentially to restore very much like the schemes in southern Italy.

Anna: Yeah, but these are just the first ones in Northern Italy.

Luca: Exactly. First ones in Northern Italy.

So if you wanna know more about this, go to magictowns.it and read the article in which we cover everything about this brand, brand new program.

Anna: And be the first one to buy them.

Luca: Yeah, maybe. And then we can have a chat with there about how you feel about that. That is, if Anna and I don’t buy them first.

What else is on our episode today, Anna? We have an interview right?

Anna: Yeah, we met George after visiting Mussomeli ourselves, and it was, how was it, Luca, because you went [00:03:00] there.

Luca: George is the English beating heart of Mussomeli now.

We spent, half an hour chatting with him about how things are going, how the city is changing now that he has brought in his massive social media following. He also has some new plans that he briefly mentions and he’s going to officially unveil in the next couple of weeks.

So without further ado, here’s a little excerpt of our chat with George.

Hi George. How are you?

George: Hello. How are we doing?

Gill: Hi. I think we missed you by a day in Mussomeli

Luca: But we met some of...