A California woman purchased3 houses in a Sicilian village for $3.30, using Italy's abandoned town settlement.

Rubia Daniels, a journalist and SEO copywriter, traveled to the town of Mussomeli in Sicily after hearing about affordable houses. In the end, in 2019, she bought three crumbling houses for $3.30 and is now restoring them. Many Italian towns offer similar programs in an effort to populate rural Italy.

When Rubia Daniels first heard about cheap houses in Italy, she decided to see it for herself.

“I was shocked. It’s one of those things you have to see to believe,” Daniels told Insider. “I did some research, and within three days, I had a plane ticket, a rental car, a hotel, and I was off.”

By the end of her 10-day trip to Mussomeli, a small town in Sicily, in July 2019, she became the proud owner of three dilapidated houses, which she bought for just 1 euro or $1.10 each.

A representative of Case 1 Euro, the organization responsible for the housing project in Mussomeli, confirmed this information.

Daniels, who moved to California from a suburb of Brazil 30 years ago, said that the Italian city reminded her of her hometown.

“The people were very hospitable, everyone wanted to have coffee with me. The realtors treated me like their sister - they were with me every day while I was there,” said Daniels.

She was enchanted by the rich history of the city and its inhabitants, and she also liked the idea of restoring the abandoned house. "It's an ecological concept," added Daniels, who works in solar energy. "We need to stop building and start repairing existing things."

Daniels said that she has different plans for each of her new homes. "The one I'm working on now, I plan to turn into an art gallery. One will be for me, where I will stay. And the third house, which will be my biggest project, I want to turn into a wellness center to give something back to the community," she added.

A 49-year-old woman resumed her property restoration project at the end of 2019, but had to pause it due to the pandemic.

Italy is desperately in need of people like Daniels. She is not the only one who has taken advantage of Italy's desperation to populate its empty towns. In 2021, nine villages in southern Italy offered millennials $33,000 to move to rapidly depopulating towns. The villages—all located in the southern Italian region of Calabria—offered financial incentives to people under 40 to relocate. Among the towns offered were the cliffside village of Civita and the coastal town of Aieta.

The only thing that connected these places was that they had a population of less than 2,000 people and were just a few years away from becoming ghost towns. The Calabria region also made headlines in the summer of 2020 when it offered houses for $1.14 in the village of Cinquefrondi. Twelve houses were sold at that price in a frantic attempt to revive the town, which was dubbed "Operation Beauty."

In 2019, Insider journalist Will Martin reported on Campobello di Mazara - a town in central Sicily that was giving away houses for free to anyone who wanted to live there. The town's mayor, Vincenzo Giambone, stated that this was part of efforts to prevent the town from turning "into ruins."

However, acquiring a house for 1 dollar is not an easy task. According to Insider journalist Tom Murray, there is a catch related to the fact that the house may be in complete disrepair and require extensive renovations to become livable.