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Wild nature, awesome landscapes and warm communities give Abruzzo its special charm. Homes here are some of the least expensive in central Italy, says Fleur Kinson.
If ‘majestic’ and ‘jaw-dropping’ are your favourite types of scenery, then Abruzzo could well be the place for you. This large, thinly-populated region has some of the mightiest landscapes in all of Italy. To the west, celestial snow-capped peaks stand in jagged lines, forming an arresting, ever-present backdrop. In the east, unending golden sands lie in the sun, licked by the warm and shallow Adriatic. And in between, a series of plunging valleys open up to the sky, flanked by pretty little villages artfully draped across hillsides. Abruzzo is a wonderful region in which to look out of the window! And, of course, to do a lot more. Buy a property somewhere in its hills and you could be within half an hour’s drive of ski resorts and of beach resorts, able in certain months to ski in the morning and go for a swim at teatime.
All well and good, but what else makes Abruzzo a place where you might want to buy a home? It may sound boring to consider, but there’s a solid transport infrastructure – including direct budget flights from the UK and good road connections. Abruzzo may be quiet and unspoilt, but it never feels too remote. Even teeming Rome is only an hour or two away by car. The sense of space in Abruzzo is huge, but you’re unlikely to feel isolated from humanity. In the tiny villages and charming small towns, the sense of community is strong. You’d be embraced into the fold in no time, and treated with particular warmth and care as a newcomer. Abruzzo’s food and wine are great, the climate’s good, and the region reportedly has one of the lowest crime rates in all of Italy. All this, and low property prices too! Abruzzo is one of the few places in central Italy where it’s still easily possible to get a habitable country home or a nice village apartment for €100,000 or less.
But it can’t all be utopia, I hear you say. What are the down sides? Well, not everyone likes mountains, or driving up and down their twisting roads. Some of Abruzzo’s more rugged sections of landscape might not be to the taste of those who long for the classic rolling hillscapes of Tuscany with its tame, ‘Cotswolds-in-sunshine’ appeal. What else? The architecture of Abruzzo isn’t often quite the heart-stopping, lyrical stuff of, say, Umbria. And this is not a region that feels slickly developed, like the vast majority of northern Italy. There’s often an unhewn quality to Abruzzo, a real sense that this is not a place that has yet been exploited to anything like its full potential. (For many, this will be a plus not a minus.) There are beach resorts, sure, but there’s also a lot of rather wild, underdeveloped coastline. And there’s certainly a lot of untouched space inland. If what you really hanker after is the buzz of the urban whirl, this eminently peaceful region probably isn’t for you. But if you want space and tranquillity amidst inspiring landscapes for very little cost, then you should take a good look at Abruzzo.
Any discussion of Abruzzo needs to mention the last time the region made international news, especially as it may well be the only other time that some readers have heard of the place. In April 2009, Abruzzo was unfortunately struck by a major earthquake which killed 300 people, injured 1,500, and left 65,000 temporarily homeless. Much was discovered about the region’s peculiar seismology in the wake of the event, and in some minds this complicated information was simplified into ‘Abruzzo is a particularly dangerous place for earthquakes’. You’d have thought this muddled alarm would have harmed the region’s tourism industry and dried up the purchasing of holiday homes, but strangely it did not. Because of the quake, relatively little-known Abruzzo was suddenly visited by the world’s media, and countless journalists noted ‘Wow, what a seriously beautiful part of the world!’ And so Abruzzo itself received a lot of positive attention despite the quake, and many first-time visitors were inspired to check the place out.
The fact is that only certain parts of Abruzzo are at any particular risk of earthquakes, while most other areas are just as safe as the rest of the Italian peninsula. The Teramo province, for example, which includes the northern half of Abruzzo’s coast and its hinterland, has no class 1 seismic risk zones and is thus a particularly safe area to consider. Slightly less secure is anywhere inside the long thin triangle formed with L’Aquila, Rieti and Sulmona as its three corners, a little sliver of Abruzzo wherein another significant earthquake is anticipated sometime in the next decade or two. But put simply, fear of seismic activity should not put you off buying property in Abruzzo. Earthquakes are a fact of life all across Italy – in Tuscany and Umbria and almost everywhere else south of the Alpine regions. You might as well expect it never to rain in Italy as expect there never to be earth tremors.
Which is why it’s the law that all property on the Italian peninsula be made adequately able to withstand an earthquake. Any Italian home built since the 1980s should automatically have incorporated quake-proof techniques and devices in its structure. And anything built before the1980s should include earthquake-proofing as part of any modernization or restoration work. This is the case all over the Italian peninsula, not just in Abruzzo. So if you’re planning on restoring a home, make sure you raise the topic of earthquake-proofing with your builders and insist they include it if they haven’t already planned to. It’s the law! But more importantly, it’s your safety and security, as well as your peace of mind.
Level of seismic risk is unlikely to be a big factor in your consideration of where to buy a home in Abruzzo – or anywhere else in Italy. Rightly, you’re far more likely to be concerned with things like landscape, accessibility and price. So let’s look more deeply at these. As suggested at the outset of this article, Abruzzo can be divided into three chief landscapes: the very high mountains of the west, the long sandy beaches of the east, and the hills and valleys in between these two extremes. In Abruzzo as across much of Italy, property prices tend to drop in inverse proportion to altitude. You can find some astonishingly low prices up in Abruzzo’s higher elevations (although this isn’t the case in National Park areas), but you’ll have to offset these low prices with factors like longer journey times, more changeable weather, and lower holiday rental prospects. If you’re mad on hiking and skiing, then these three might not be enough to counterbalance your delight.
What about the coast? Abruzzo’s long golden seaside is an obviously desirable area, but with Italian buyers wanting a holiday home here as much as you do, it’s Abruzzo’s priciest part. Gianpiero De Filippo of the agency HouseAbruzzo recommends buying property a few miles inland to maximize value-for-money. Barbara Baldaccini of Absolutely Abruzzo concurs, citing several reasons why slightly inland is the best place to be. “Slightly away from the coast, property prices are much lower, you have the sense of being in a ‘real’ Italian town or village, and you can enjoy views over the sea and mountains, while the beach is a short drive or easy bus ride away,” she says. Does it matter whether you’re in the northern or southern half of Abruzzo’s coastal hinterland? Not in terms of accessibility, since the airport at Pescara is almost exactly in the middle of the coastline. But it can make a difference in terms of price. Both Helen Queenan of Abruzzo Property Italy and Simone Rossi of Gate-Away.com say that property in Abruzzo’s northern coastal hinterland (Teramo province) is generally slightly higher priced than in the southern coastal hinterland (Chieti province).
If you long to restore an old Italian property, you should note that Abruzzo has an especial abundance of abandoned rural homes ripe for restoration, because so many local people emigrated to the New World in the early 20th century. Old tumbledown houses in Abruzzo sell for a fraction of the price of similar properties elsewhere in central Italy. But be aware that the cost of restoring is not as low as it used to be. You should be absolutely sure you’re ready to put up with all the cost, wait and uncertainty before committing to a major building project. Otherwise, consider saving time and money by buying an old home that someone else has already lovingly restored. Another option is to buy land and build from scratch, in a traditional building style if you like (the building expertise and craftsmanship are all here). This way you’ll definitely get the exact house you want. Abruzzo is one of the few places in central Italy where you can do a bespoke new-build like this. Of course, don’t forget the ease and simplicity of buying a straightforward modern property, too! Coastal apartments can be very comfortable and yield good holiday rents.
In a nutshell, Abruzzo provides many appealing options – in property type, landscape, and in price. Gianpiero De Fillippo of HouseAbruzzo is clear on why Abruzzo is a good choice when it comes to investing in a home in Italy. He says, “There is plenty of territory to explore here, there are business opportunities such as B&Bs, the local authorities are encouraging toward foreign investors, the attitude of local people toward newcomers is positive, and the region is enjoying increasing international visibility and reputation. I believe that the future of Abruzzo is not to become the next Tuscany, but to become something special within its own peculiar identity.”
Separated from Abruzzo only in 1963, tiny Molise is the youngest Italian region, but it lacks the dynamism associated with youth. Tradition and the past dominate here – getting around and getting things done can take that little bit longer. Molise is much less popular with foreign buyers and visitors than Abruzzo. (It’s probably the least popular of all Italy’s regions). But if you’re adventurous, it might just suit you. Certainly the property prices here are among the very lowest in Italy.
50% mountainous, Molise has similar – if less dramatic - terrain to Abruzzo. While fully one third of Abruzzo is protected national or regional parkland, Molise finds room for six nature reserves and two of Italy’s four UNESCO biosphere locations. So you can expect the unspoilt, great-outdoors landscape of both regions to stay that way. Molise also has an Adriatic coastline, and a few modest beach resorts.
Molise remains one of Italy’s poorest and least developed regions, with one of the country’s lowest standard of living. Sheep-farming and small-scale agriculture remain the chief sources of income, although artisan production of knives, lace and bells still endure. (That church bell that kept you awake all night on your last Italian holiday was almost certainly made in Molise.) What modern industry there is tends to be concentrated around Térmoli. It remains to be seen, of course, how the recent discovery of natural gas reserves in Molise might affect its economy.
Tourism has only just begun to thinly flicker into life in Molise. But they’ve already got a good slogan. Umbria has long been ‘the green heart of Italy’, and Molise is now ‘the clean heart of Italy’. Unsullied it may be, but still few come to see it. While Abruzzo plays host each year to more than one and a half million Italian holidaymakers and a modest 160,000 foreign visitors, Molise attracts less than a quarter as many Italians and only a tenth as many foreigners. Travel connections play a part in this. After centuries of isolation, Abruzzo now has good travel connections. But Molise requires more determination to get to. If you’re after splendid isolation and a strong feeling of having travelled back in time, Molise might be the region for you.
For many buyers, Abruzzo’s hilly hinterland is the region’s most desirable stretch. It’s quiet, spacious, and puts the coast and the mountains at each roughly half an hour away. Properties here are still reasonably priced, and there’s an abundance of tumbledown homes to restore – both in the countryside and in the area’s small towns and villages. Hinterland settlements are often attractive, yet rarely see tourists passing through. Teramo is a modern town with an elegant centre, a clutch of Roman ruins, and good transport connections. Atri is a charming spot with narrow, stepped streets and views of tidy olive groves arcing across its surrounding hills. Loreto Aprutino is a quiet medieval hilltop town selling especially good olive oil. Chieti is a relaxed, provincial town set on high with wonderful mountain views. And so on. Buy out in the country and you’ll usually have a choice of pleasant towns and villages nearby to shop in.
The almighty bulk of the Gran Sasso massif stands between L’Aquila and the coast – two parallel mountain chains flanking a vast plateau sprouting unusual rock formations and scattered with old shepherds’ shacks. The Apennines’ very highest peaks are here, in all their awesome majesty, attracting large numbers of skiers and a fair number of summer hikers. Some of Abruzzo’s lowest property prices are in its highest, wildest places. It’s possible to find a rural hideaway with ski resorts and good motorway connections all within easy reach.
Attractive Sulmona is a prosperous place, thanks to its skilled goldsmiths and confection-makers (it’s the capital of the original confetti – sugared almonds and other sweets bandied about at Italian weddings.) In the atmospheric, labyrinthine centre of town, innumerable handsome palaces gaze across broad expanses of neat cobblestones. Meanwhile, high mountains bristle in the near distance. Sulmona is particularly well-situated for the Maiella range, which has some good ski resorts and excellent hiking trails. The steep wooded slopes are peppered with medieval hermitages, built in caves or carved out of sheer rock. Villages set amongst these slopes are a mixed bag. Many are attractive and well-preserved, others drab and tatty. Still others are largely modern-built and intended to accommodate skiers. Scanno is a well-preserved medieval hill-village attracting a fair number of visitors, who admire its striking traditional costumes and its glassy green lake. The Sulmona area has low-priced properties, and an interesting range of settlements. Road connections between Sulmona and Pescara are good.
At the centre of Abruzzo’s coastline lies Pescara, the region’s liveliest and most populous spot with more than 100,000 inhabitants. It’s a major transport hub – offering motorway connections, ferries across the Adriatic, and budget flights to and from the UK. For all its busyness and industry, Pescara is an eminently likeable place. (The uglier bits of industrialisation lie mainly inland, in the 13km stretch between Pescara and Chieti.) Wealthy and fashion-conscious, Pescara has plenty of glossy boutiques and elegant cafés. Much of the city’s older buildings were lost to wartime bombing, but what remains of its historical parts have been pleasantly gentrified with bars and restaurants. The beach is an amazing 16km long, and very family-friendly with warm, shallow water. Obviously, because of its ease-of-access and wealth of job opportunities, Pescara is the most expensive place for property in Abruzzo. Like resorts elsewhere on the coastline, it has very good holiday rental prospects. You might pay €200,000 for a very nice two-bedroom apartment in Pescara, and expect to rent it out for €600 a week in high season. Just a few miles inland from Pescara, you might find a small house needing minor repairs for about €200,000. Depending on its ease of access to the sea, you might rent it out for €800 or more during summer weeks.
Abruzzo has 130km of Adriatic coastline, with a string of pleasant, family-friendly resorts gazing out over the blue water towards Croatia. While you certainly couldn't call it 'over-crowded', the coast is by far Abruzzo’s most developed and populous area, with good transport connections and amenities. The beach-resorts here are hugely popular with Italians in the summer, and are at their fullest in the last two weeks of July and all of August. In terms of geography, there’s something of a north-south divide on Abruzzo’s coastline. From Alba Adriatico in the north to Ortona just south of Pescara, the beaches are pale and sandy, with hills covered in fruit-bush bracken rising immediately behind them. Seven likeable resorts along this stretch dub themselves the ‘seven sisters’, viz., Alba Adriatico, Giulianova, Roseto degli Abruzzo, Pineto and Silvi. South of Ortona, to as far as where Abruzzo cedes the coast to its southern neighbour Molise, the terrain is steeper and rockier. Sandy coves are interspersed with shingle beaches, overlooked by cliffs. For many people, Abruzzo’s loveliest stretch of coast lies here in the southern half, especially between Lido di Casalbordino and Punto Aderci – where particularly deep blue water is backed by a nature reserve. Vasto is a charming resort in the southern half that has recently begun to entice foreign buyers. Pescara may be the priciest spot in Abruzzo, but the rest of the coast is also of course much pricier than the cheap interior. Two-bedroom seaside apartments average about €120,000.
Molise’s coast is less developed than Abruzzo’s. The only seaside town of any size is Térmoli, and it’s one of the region’s most pleasing settlements – a bright fishing port and smart resort sporting a walled old town, a castle, a cathedral, good seafood restaurants, a long sandy beach and innumerable flowers and palm trees. Property prices are higher here than inland, or indeed elsewhere on Molise’s coast. Heading away from the sea, the landscape becomes hilly and lined with olive groves. Larino is the largest town here and, like Térmoli, tends to hold rather more appeal than many other Molise settlements. Its medieval centre nestles in a valley while the modern town climbs up an adjacent hillside. Life in the old part goes traditionally on while the modern streets are quite slick and bustling – despite the Roman amphitheatre crumbling quietly in their midst.
Campobasso, Molise’s main city, is a pretty faceless place where a steep old centre gazes out on sprawling modern suburbs. The countryside round the city holds some fairly scenic villages, however. Not far off lie the high plateaux, forests and lakes of the Matese mountains which spill over into Campania. This is an extremely little-visited area and a very wild place indeed. Wolves and wildcats pad through the woodlands and birds of prey wheel across the bright sky blazing behind snow-capped peaks. Villagers round here are astonished to see an outsider passing through. Towns of note near these mountains include Agnone, where church bells have been made for more than a thousand years, and Venafro, an empty, neglected place where the arena of a Roman amphitheatre is used as the town’s main piazza. The largest town near the high mountains is Isernia, a luckless spot wrecked eight times by earthquakes and once by a WWII bombing raid. Its surrounding countryside is surprisingly lush and gentle.
Kathryn and David Leggett from Swansea own a large and elegantly-decorated four-bedroom apartment in Loreto Aprutino, a charming hill-village near Abruzzo’s coast. They visit about four times a year, and offer holiday rentals. “We initially bought it just as an investment,” Kathryn explains. “We thought we’d use it just for friends and family and sell it quickly. And then we fell deeply in love with Abruzzo, and now five years later we have no plans to sell. I hadn’t even heard of Abruzzo before David started our property search. In fact, I’d never been to Italy before! Now I’ve visited many different regions – Tuscany and Liguria and Emilia-Romagna and others – but my heart still belongs to Abruzzo. There’s something really special about the place. It’s got everything. We’re 20 minutes by car from the sea, and about 45 minutes from ski slopes. Last year during a winter visit, we were up on high enjoying the snow one minute, then we drove down to the sea and it was all beautiful sunshine. You can’t believe the diversity you can cover in one day here. And so few people seem to have heard about the region.
“Our apartment is wonderfully unusual. It’s on one level of a 200-year-old townhouse, built in the steep centre of the village on a typical Italian street that isn’t wide enough for cars to go down. It looks like we’re on the ground floor when you see it from one side, but go round the corner and we’re on the first floor, because of the sloping street. Inside, we have many period features like vaulted ceilings and original floor tiles. There’s an enormous lounge, a kitchen with an open fireplace, a dining room, and four bedrooms. There’s a lovely internal courtyard, if you fancy eating outside. And from the courtyard, you can go up a spiral staircase to a sun terrace which looks out across all the rooftops and far beyond to the highest mountain peaks.
“We’re not far from the airport in Pescara, which is great because there’s no long journey ahead of us after we land. The best thing is that as soon as I get to the village I feel totally immersed in Italian culture. It’s just two hours on the plane, but then I’m in a different world. The whole pace of life is different. And of course the quality of the food is tremendous. There are no ‘burger and chips’ to be seen anywhere! We love everything about the place. There aren’t many people there who speak English, which is what we wanted. It’s a genuine Italian experience. We’ve made friends with local people and they’ve all been very welcoming.”
http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/Italy/holiday-apartment-Abruzzo/p71979.htmLinda and Robert Stancer own a villa in the hills of central Abruzzo. They live on the ground floor, and offer holiday rentals on the self-contained first-floor.
What drew them to Italy? “You know how it is with Italy, you get off the plane and it’s love at first sight,” Linda says. “We wanted a less stressful lifestyle than the one we had in England. We wanted somewhere rural, unspoilt and undiscovered. I always dreamt of moving to a Scottish island, and Robert said ‘can’t we go and do it somewhere warm?’ And so that’s what happened. We worked our way through Italy and came across Abruzzo with its stunning scenery. We found the perfect location in the mountains of the National Park. We wanted to live among real Italians. It’s wonderfully relaxed here. Nobody rushes about. Our neighbours are fantastic, and some are very dear friends of ours now. One of them had never met a foreigner before! That’s how rural it is where we are. It’s lovely, and we feel privileged to be here. The Italians love you to join in village life, to chat to them and be a part of the community.
“The villa was built as a summer house about thirty years ago. We decided that because it has outside stairs we’d make two apartments of it. The first floor has a private sun terrace with the most amazing view, so we thought we’d rent out that part of the house, and live downstairs. So now upstairs is a completely self-contained apartment with two bedrooms. I was in the house on my own when the earthquake hit. We had a few cracks in the wall, but no serious damage. The earthquake-proofing is very good. We’re half an hour from the sea, half an hour from the airport, and half an hour from the high mountains. So we’ve got the best of everything.
“We have no trouble filling our rentals calendar. We have a lot of returning guests, and guests who become friends. We give all our guests a three-course meal the night they arrive, and breakfasts in the morning. The last thing you want when you’ve been travelling all day is to turn up to a strange place and have to find a supermarket! We keep ourselves discreet when guests are here. But it’s nice to be available when people want advice on the area. Robert offers guided tours around Rome and elsewhere. Our guests are mostly English, but we also get New Zealanders, Australians, Americans, South Africans, Dutch and Germans. Abruzzo is really becoming better known and much more visited these days. When we first started coming here, the airport was still a military airport! Now it’s a thriving, slick modern place.”
http://www.holiday-rentals.co.uk/p410810
After a long career as a London-based BBC journalist, David Brenner made a permanent move to Abruzzo with his wife Pauline. The couple rebuilt two ruins in an abandoned hamlet up in the pretty hills an hour south of Pescara. They live in one, and have transformed the other into a trio of villas – for couples-only holiday rentals.
“On Millennium Eve we started wondering what we might do with the rest of our lives,” David explains. “Moving abroad appealed. We wanted somewhere with an excellent food and wine culture, so that narrowed it down to France and Italy really. Pauline isn’t a big Francophile, so that narrowed it down to a choice of one! We started looking in 2003. Like most people we began with Tuscany, and soon realized we couldn’t afford even a hole in the wall there. We looked at Umbria and didn’t like it much. We looked at Le Marche and liked it, but by the time we saw it in 2006 it seemed all the decent properties had gone. Then we started looking at Abruzzo. We’d never seen any Place in the Sun type programmes about it. It was just the next stop down from Le Marche. What we found there was a beautiful region with very cheap property.
“We left the UK in October 2007. The sale of our UK home fell through two weeks before we left, and we arrived not having exchanged contracts on our property in Italy! It was a leap of faith. I can’t pretend it was easy. The pound went down, so our project went over budget, and then as soon as we opened for business there was the earthquake in L’Aquila. The epicentre was more than a hundred miles from where we are, and thankfully there wasn’t any local damage. The only effect we saw was a drop in visitor numbers to Abruzzo! But things are much better this year, and our rentals are going well.”
How have the couple adjusted to living in Abruzzo? “It was difficult at first because there is no real ex-pat community here. There’s a thin sprinkling of us, and we all help each other out. The language was a big hurdle initially. We had a vertical learning curve. Now I think we speak Italian with an Abruzzo accent! In terms of people, life here is great. Our village is tiny, and we’re on waving terms with everyone. My best friend Rocco is in his late sixties and he’s taken me under his wing. It’s amazing how far your money goes here. A good meal for two with wine, for example, can be about €35. The views are beautiful, the walks are wonderful, and the climate is a delight. All our villa guests have loved it.”
Visit: www.villasfor2.com
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