An Italian house for less than €1... what's the catch?

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'It seemed like a very good deal,' says Rafael Solorzano, leaning his back against the ancient white-washed wall. A half-smile of moderate satisfaction appears on his young, bearded face, which could be attributed to the discount he received on the purchase of the acoustic guitar on his bedside table.

But the 28-year-old Miami resident is talking about the house we're in - it might as well be a pretty decent four-story house, if you include a spacious basement - and the fact that he paid the price of a single slice of pizza for this apartment building with a history, lost in a picturesque old hilly Sicilian town.

It's been 14 years since former MP and cultural commentator Vittorio Sgarbi proposed a radical solution to rural decline in Italy. Young Italians have been leaving the countryside for the cities and out of the country for more than a century, a trend that intensified in the 1950s and has hardly slowed down since.

Over the past two decades, a million Italians have left their hometowns. To reverse the trend, Sgarbi proposed that the villages that remain empty offer their many vacant homes to new residents at a token price. It took a long time to convince mayors and owners who had left their homes, but 34 remote towns and villages are now running €1 home sale programs scattered across the country.

For some, these initiatives have become just part of a desperate solution to a significant crisis. If you commit to living in Molise, a struggling region in the southern Apennines, local authorities will give you €800 a month for three years.

In southern Calabria, new residents of small towns who pledge to start a business or enroll children in school are offered a golden worship worth up to €33,000.

But more than half of the towns where you can buy a house for €1 are in Sicily, where the socio-economic pressures leading to radical population decline in rural areas are doubling: Sicily is one of Italy's poorest regions, with youth unemployment at an astonishing 48.3 percent.

Most cities on the mainland are hoping to attract young Italians, but the mayors of the 20 small Sicilian towns that currently offer houses for €1 can't afford to be fanciful. They don't care how old you are or your nationality. Sambuca di Sicilia, which had a population 1/3 of the current number of inhabitants, put 16 old houses up for auction at a starting price of €1 according to a press release that instantly went worldwide.

'The headline wrote itself,' says Tom Murray, editor of Business Insider, one of the many media outlets that has published hot stories about homes. 'I mean, it's a beautiful house in rural Italy for that price. Who wouldn't want to click on that?

Indeed, who wouldn't want to? Within 48 hours, Sambuca City Hall received 38,000 inquiries. Until the houses found new owners from all over the world - UK, USA, Norway, Dubai, Jordan - the municipal mailbox received more than 100,000 letters, while the remaining 90 houses were bought at a price below €10,000 by about 100 foreigners who missed the auction.

Inspired by the success, hill towns across the island have also joined the initiative, and no one is doing it with more vigor than Mussomeli, a settlement of 11,000 people right in the middle of Sicily, which to date has already sold 50 houses for €1 and is currently listing another 100 properties.