A 48-year-old American musician decided Travel to Italy to settle there and live the “Italian dream” but, after buy an abandoned apartment at a low price, he had to invest thousands of dollars in spare parts and he still can't keep it in good condition.
The “Italian dream”, a life in a picturesque town far from big cities in which peace becomes the determining factor, is one of the goals of many people who try to get away from the noise and adrenaline of the city, and Joshua Shapiro, a saxophonist from Chicago, is one of them.
Five hours from the Italian capital and three from the nearest airport, Latronico is a small municipality with less than 5,000 inhabitants -according to a 2017 census-, and a notable population decrease in recent years. For this reason, the Government launched a program to attract immigrants and avoid depopulation.
In 2022, after three different trips to the European country, Shapiro became convinced and bought an abandoned apartment in the Latronico area, within the southern region of Basilicata, for the price of US$23,600. At first, the agreement seemed like the first step towards his dream, but it brought new difficulties that he did not expect.
The problems of the abandoned apartment after moving from the United States
Although he still maintains his dream of settling in Latronico, the saxophonist had to accept that the department It was not ready to be inhabitedand rented an apartment while he remodeled the place with the aim of moving there later.
Located on the second floor, with an external staircase and independent entrance, the 74 square meter apartment with two bedrooms and a panoramic balcony needed cleaning followed by a total reformon which Shapiro has spent more than US$10,730, as revealed in an interview with cnn.
In addition to the misunderstanding with the owners over the furniture included in the advertisement, of which only a few were obsolete, the saxophonist should have installed new windows, a new roof in some rooms and patches in cracks of humidity that appeared on the walls.
The work was not finished yet: Shapiro had to repaint and fix the walls, and as he revealed in dialogue with the aforementioned media, he also had to “redo the bathroom, add a new water heater and fix a humidity problem inside a bathroom.” bedroom”.
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