Can selling its homes for the price of an espresso save this Sicilian town?
Buyers flocked to Sambuca last week when it put empty houses on sale at €1 each in a bid to reverse decline. We joined the queue…
Darkness falls on the small town of Sambuca di Sicilia, where the council offices on Corso Umberto have been closed for more than three hours. And yet the phones keep ringing, hour after hour.
“They’re calling from Sydney, London, New York,” says the exhausted deputy mayor, Giuseppe Cacioppo. A week after the town announced it was putting up abandoned homes for sale at a euro each, he has fielded requests for information from all over the globe. By Wednesday last week the council had received more than 300 calls and 94,000 emails. Many prospective buyers, not wanting to miss out, grabbed the first available flight to Palermo.
Sambuca sits inside a nature reserve, surrounded by woods and
