A century ago, 900 people lived the harsh peasant life of Italy’s wild Abruzzo
hill country in the village of Santo Stefano di Sessanio. By the time
Daniele Kihlgren first gunned his motorbike up the winding roads that climb
into the Gran Sasso National Park and discovered the medieval stone houses
slowly decaying into their warren of narrow stepped alleys, the population
had dropped to just 70.
Kihlgren, 42, a scion of a Milanese industrial dynasty who describes himself
as a “philosopher” (he never really took to the family cement trade),
immediately knew what he had to do: rescue Santo Stefano. “The Italian
authorities only want to save the patrimony of Caesars and popes,” he
laments. But the young millionaire’s heart was with the poor people, as he
set out to “conserve traces of life as it was lived in the economia della
lana [the wool economy]” that had sustained the locals for centuries.
In 1998, he started buying abandoned houses in the village, along a few miles
of snaking road off the main drag to the historic town of L’Aquila and less
than an hour’s drive from Pescara. It was a tortuous process – the
descendants of those who had fled the poverty for new lives all over the
world had to be traced and asked to sell – but the result is Sextantio, a
boutique hotel with 30 rooms scattered in buildings along the main street.
With his combination of carefully concealed mod cons, including underfloor
heating, and scrupulous respect for the materials and building methods of
the past, Kihlgren has turned Santo Stefano into a destination for smart
Italians – with the unintended consequence of pushing the prices of the
remaining wrecks in the village to levels approaching £6,200 per square
metre, dizzying for a region that is not exactly lacking in suitable ruins.
In fact, it has become so expensive that Kihlgren is no longer buying there
himself, although he is currently restoring three small houses to sell, with
an arrangement to rent them back as hotel accommodation when the owners
aren’t there. Prices start at £144,000 for the smallest one-bedder, rising
to £373,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house with valley views.
Kihlgren seems to have embarked on a mission to save the neglected heritage of
Abruzzo one village at a time.
That’s when he’s not looking after his charitable foundation in the Congo. In
partnership with Lelio Di Zio, a local architect whose enthusiasm matches
his own (“I was proposing projects like this 20 years ago,” he tells me,
“but, unlike Daniele, I had no money, so nobody took any notice of me”), he
is restoring three villages in even more remote country on the other side of
the forbidding Gran Sasso mountain.
Building work is yet to start at Serra, a hauntingly beautifulspot overlooking
the little town of Rocca Santa Maria, where the grey stone houses and byres
cost Kihlgren no more than £155 a square metre, Di Zio reckons.
The most advanced of the projects is Borgo Martese, abandoned by the 1950s and
now being rebuilt, stone by stone, into a small hotel and 30 flats. Prices
will be somewhere between £2,750 and £3,600 per square metre (visit www.
orianoassociati.com). Surveying the surrounding hills, where wolves and even
bears still roam in the densest mountain forests, and where sheep graze
under the watchful care of the area’s distinctive, and ferociously
protective, white dogs, Di Zio says: “You’re not buying a little patch,
you’re getting 100,000 hectares.”
Even for those without Kihlgren’s ambitions – or budget – the Abruzzo has an
alluring selection of traditional properties in various states of distress.
“Those with less purchasing power can still invest here,” says Thierry
Parent, an estate agent based in Castel di Ieri. “You can get something
habitable for £25,000, and a reasonable price for central Abruzzo is £750 a
square metre.”
Down in the L’Aquila Valley, and still in the national park, we cross a clear,
rippling stream to reach the village of Campana, where we inspect an
imposing four-bedroom house with 220 square metres of living space and a
garden, priced at £171,000. You’d need about £50,000 to update it, Parent
says – and, while you might not want most of the old furniture that comes
with the house, you may like to keep the German munitions case left over
from the second world war.
We move on to see a £27,000 one-bed flat with garden in Secinaro, then visit a
recently sold property just off the main piazza of Molina, which cost its
new owners £25,000, plus £8,000 for the garden. Parent estimates that the
renovations will come in at about £47,000, giving them a one-bedroom house
on two floors with a 45-square-metre terrace. He thinks it will be worth
£100,000 when it’s finished, but in reality there is not much of a precedent
when it comes to establishing prices for rustic wrecks restored to
fashionable modern standards.
We get back into Parent’s 4WD and, as he drives, he explains that he is paid
for his estate-agency services by both the seller and the buyer, usually on
a percentage basis, but with a minimum charge to the buyer of £1,500, as so
many of the properties cost such small sums. He also takes on project
management for renovations, and can source and run local teams, for 8% of
the rebuild cost. Architects will generally charge 7%-12%.
The conversation dies when Parent switches into 4WD mode and we swing off the
Aterno Valley onto a road with a “20% gradient” sign. For several miles, the
only man-made things we see are a stone water trough and wooden finger posts
indicating walking trails through the woods.
Tyres crunching on gravel, we turn a corner and ahead of us, spread out on a
grassy plateau, with the grey escarpment of Sirente forming a dramatic
backdrop, is the 500-year-old hamlet of Pagliere di Tione, altitude 1,200
metres.
These scattered stone houses were the summer residences of the folk of Tione,
back in the valley. Surprisingly, it seems that centuries before the English
chattering classes colonised Tuscany, the medieval peasants of the Abruzzo
had already refined the concept of the second home.
Their pastoral way of life involved taking their flocks to the high pastures
in summer and spending the season with them, literally making hay as the sun
shone. Then down they’d all come in the autumn, just as life up there was
becoming uncomfortably chilly.
Still strictly for the summer, the village has been partially restored, with
the aid of European Union grants, into idyllic holiday homes; solar panels
are much in evidence. Parent has one ruin for sale at £23,000 and a finished
two-bedroom property for £100,000. The village, like many in the region, no
longer has a school, shop or bar – paradise for some, but definitely too far
off the beaten track for others.
Keith and Jean Lazenby, from Cat-wick, near Beverley in East Yorkshire,
visited more than 50 houses before they found the property they wanted.
“Things generally look better in the photos,” Keith, an instructor at a
further-education college, remarks – though, with a budget of £25,000, one
hopes they weren’t expecting much.
Last May, the couple, who are in their fifties, paid £19,500 for a
three-storey stone house in the “lovely little town” of Raiano. They expect
to spend double that doing it up, with Keith carrying out most of the work
himself. “We originally envisaged a mountain village with views,” he says,
“but we decided that would be too remote.”
Santo Stefano was, until recently, also considered too remote for many, but as
fashionable Italians make tracks to the Sextantio hotel, and locals return
to open small businesses and celebrate the first two babies to be born there
for decades, it seems Kihlgren’s vision of restoring life to the heart of
the Abruzzo is working. And Britons are starting to do their bit.
Three Abruzzo properties, from ruins to rustic chic
Santo Stefano£322,000 Casa sulla Corte, a recently restored villa in this
medieval village, has two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen and a living
room. Part of the Sextantio project, it benefits from some of the hotel’s
services and basic maintenance; it can also be let as part of the hotel for
an additional income. (The owner earns 80% of the room rate.) Sextantio
Real Estate; 00 39 0862 899112, www.sextantio.it
San Giorgio£117,000 Set in 35,000 square metres, this ruined farmhouse with
mountain views is more than 200 years old and has been uninhabited for half
a century. It is sold with planning permission to knock it down and build
two new houses, with four and three bedrooms, in traditional local style.
The land includes a grove of 30 mature olive trees. It is a five-minute
drive from the medieval hilltop village of Castiglione and 30 minutes from
Pescara and the airport. Houses in Italy; 01264 810171, www.houses-in-italy.co.uk
Castel di Ieri£12,000 This one-bedroom house is in the least populated and
most mountainous part of the Abruzzo. Measuring just 45 square metres, the
property has a kitchen, a cellar and a balcony with panoramic views. It has
retained original details, including a period fireplace and vaulted
ceilings, but the interior is in need of restoration. It is 20 miles from
L’Aquila and 35 from Pescara. Ideacasa; 00 39 0864 79229, www.idea-casa.eu
