Italy: Buy a house in Taranto city for €1

Rome: The bargain homes offer is no longer just for remote Italian villages. Taranto has become the first city to offer houses for sale for one euro, as part of a bid to improve the city’s image.

We’ve all heard about remote, under-inhabited Italian villages putting crumbling houses up for sale for the price of an espresso.

In fact, the list of idyllic hilltop villages in rural Italy offering up bargain properties for sale for the symbolic price of one euro just keeps getting longer.

But if you’re looking for something less rural, the city of Taranto is now doing the same, as the local council plans to start selling off historic properties as part of a drive to improve the city’s image.

Officials hope the one euro homes offer will help breathe new life into the run-down historic area, which sits on a strip of land between the sea and a lagoon, or mare piccolo and mare grande.

“We’re aiming to take measures which will result in the repopulation and development of the old city,” council official Francesca Viggiano told Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, saying they’d already had inquiries from New York, Milan and Rome.

Taranto today is a city of around 200,000 people, but the historic centre’s population has now dwindled to less than 3,000.

The council said it plans to start by offering five properties up for sale at the symbolic price, and hopes to list more if these sell.

But not everyone thinks the offer of a home in Taranto’s old town is such an attractive one.

Il Corriere della Sera described Taranto’s città vecchia as “a set of narrow alleys with dangerous houses.”

Many people reportedly left the area due to the poor condition of the streets and buildings, particularly after 1975, when a building collapsed killing an entire family in the historic centre.

Today in Italy the city is synonymous with Ilva, the controversial, heavily-polluting steel plant.

There are plans to bring the Ilva steel works up to acceptable environmental standards by 2024 but it will require investment.

The toxic steel plant is one of the main employers, in a city with a chronic shortage of jobs, meaning it’s unlikely to be closed down.

But the one-euro homes offer is “the nucleus from which Taranto must be reborn,” Viggiano said, “we no longer want the city to be associated only with Ilva.”

And the Italian government has recently awarded Taranto 90 million euros for improvements to the historic centre, including to water and sewage infrastructure, as well as the reconstruction of the waterfront.

As with other one-euro house schemes, which have been a hit in smaller towns and villages across the country in recent years, the one-

euro homes offer in Taranto will come with terms and conditions.

And the total costs of buying and renovating these properties will of course be far higher than one euro.

New owners will need to foot the bill for extensive restorations, which could run to hundreds of thousands of euros.

They will also be required to live in the properties, a condition designed to stop property speculators snapping them up and selling them on for a profit. The homes in Taranto are expected be listed for sale in the coming days.