The empty homes within San Fruttuoso, which are now being dubbed the "world's best council houses", will become redecorated and handed over later this year as the full-time population of the once thriving village dips from around hundred in the last century to just five.
"It is a unique case of a new beauty spot that is well known around the world little by little emptying," said Giovanni Boitano, the regional housing assessor who is vetting locals to fill the 11 new flats.
Hidden in protected wood land and connected only through footpaths to the exterior world, San Fruttuoso comes from a cluster of households and a disused 10th-century Benedictine abbey that give on a beach and translucent waters where fishermen have cast their nets for years and years.
Just over the headland sits bustling Portofino, the haven for Hollywood superstars since Richard Burton planned to Elizabeth Taylor within a local restaurant. In the town where Dolce and Gabbana host Madonna at its villa, small flats in old fishermen's residences are snapped up for around €1.5m.In San Fruttuoso, where habitants must go by motorboat to reach nearby towns – or take an hour's walk through chestnut trees and ancient Olea europaea groves when rough seas stop sailings – it is a different story. Visiting superstars rarely stay longer as opposed to time it takes to get a leisurely lunch in the harbour, while locals include kept up a stable exodus for years.
In the 1980s, a teacher exactly who arrived by boat via nearby Camogli to train classes in the abbey's tower stopped coming as the population disappeared. In 1994 politicians quit showing up to create voting booths at elections.
"The best place is all yours in winter, although you share it with torrential rain in addition to fog and not all people like it," said Giuseppina Repetto, 68, whose partner's family has run an expensive restaurant in the summer with regard to generations.
"In the summer season it is like a show," said Mario Scevola, sixty five, one of the five full-time residents eventually left. "But in winter, when the boats can't make the idea, you need to be in the supplies, you can't get a doctor so we play a lot regarding cards."
Alessandro Capretti, who's going to be restoring the abbey, said: "When the last traveller boat leaves, the small town returns to how it had been when the monks were here. There is some sort of mystical silence."
Repetto was less convinced. "The area spirit we once experienced has long gone," the girl said.
Apart from this restoration of the properties abandoned in the 1970s, spaces for two fresh restaurants, a bed and breakfast, a small adult ed and an olive fat mill are being opened up to boost job prospective buyers. Only local residents qualify for the cut-price housing, and no millionaires would be admit, said Boitano. "You have to be on less than €40,000 a year for getting an apartment, and everyone caught sub-letting will probably immediately be ejected," he was quoted saying.
The plan is just one of many being put into action up and down Italy as stunning yet often remote villages tend to be slowly abandoned by small Italians moving to the particular cities. Immigrants landing within the island of Lampedusa will be invited to take way up a trade in your Calabrian town of Riace, while other towns are turned into holiday destinations or wired for high-speed internet to draw artists.
"I remember this beach here packed using 20 fishing boats, as well as my father's, when I became a child," recalled Scevola. "I can't wait to see existence starting to be lived again here."
