Before you buy
The legal side of a purchase
The italian notary
The property buying process
Taxes on real estates in Italy
The running costs of a house
The property ownership issues
The italian property market
Restoring an italian property
ICI 2007 - General Guide
ICI 2007 - Town of Gaeta
ICI 2007 - Town of Formia
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Restoring an Italian real estate — The pain and joy of renovation :
When indulging in an Italian dream home fantasy, it comes easy imagining a beautiful flat with a golf-size terrace over the blue Mediterranean Sea where to enjoy your ‘spaghetti with clams’ and a glass of white
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Frascati with it. Or maybe a stunning house with an outstanding view across sun-washed hills and a magic landscape of vineyards and olive groves in your back garden.
Here in southern Lazio is not difficult to discover an ancient hill town, with little, old churches with ancient frescoes with many ruined or abandoned buildings which can be purchased for a song. Of course, you need to be ready to have both an adventurous spirit and lots of patience as many are very abandoned and ruined. Restoring anything really old anywhere in Italy can be often fraught with unimaginably elephantine bureaucracy.
Whether you are restoring a ruined hillside farmhouse, old flat in the historic centre or simply changing your Italian villa according to your needs, you will have to need time, a good basic knowledge of renovations and again, the necessary time to find and supervise good builders. Sometimes estate agents may presents properties in need only ‘of a lick of paint’ when is actually not the case. You will then find out that the roof need reinforcement to meet anti-earthquake regulations and that the balconies and staircases should not be all connected but supported by separate pillars so that if the ground shakes the whole place won’t fall down. These kinds of things inevitably lead to change your designs, plans and the weight of your wallet. In addition, all the rules and regulations can sometimes seem very obscure.
You may have the feeling that plans, planning permissions, reviews and surveys could be done quite quickly, but that just didn’t happen. With you looking forward to enjoy your spaghetti with clams or the outstanding view across your olive groves, it is easy to forget that a project of a certain size could take a long time even in the UK or anywhere else. Inevitably large renovation projects take time and patience and while nothing ever goes quite according to your plan there is also the joy to see your Italian dream home slowly coming out from the limbo of builders’ dust.
Most of UK works are now done by ‘general builders’, able to deal with plumbing, electrics, carpentry, plastering and so on…just to find out that after few weeks from your renovation, your ceiling is leaking, your corridor walls have already cracks, your boiler suddenly seem dead and on top of all this your wardrobe doors don’t seem to be all of the same size!
Whereas the definition of ‘general builders’ have become the norm in these days, the building profession and workers are often facing an erosion of traditional skills. In Italy, especially here in centro-sud (middle-south) you meet the very skilled artisans who work on the different aspects of the house. For anyone who has undergone through the nightmare of building works in their London home, it will be a pure joy to discover the way Italian builders and craftsmen do things.
Italy is a country where the trades are still highly specialised: the ironworker still spends his entire working life on ironwork, the plumbers know about plumbing, your windows will be made by a specialist joiner who only makes window and someone else will be coming to do your doors. They don’t also do the electrics, plastering and carpentry. You will meet the electrician and the plumber: they all have their highly specialised skills, giving you choice and high standards. In Britain you rarely still find that. That’s not all. Their enthusiasm to do a good job and to make something special for you is quite contagious, compensating the Byzantine bureaucracy and its delays for your planning permissions. The specialist workers take great pride in their profession with masons, jointers and carpenters, who do their job just the way it was done by his great-great-great-grandfather did a century or more ago’, in the early 1800s.
You’ll encounter specialists you have never seen before like the marmista (marble mason) a common profession in Italy. In fact, the travertine marble from this region here in Lazio is extensively used in Italian homes rather than the more well known and commercial tiles. Travertine marble of exceptional quality it’s far less a luxury thing than you would assume. It can easily found and worked at reasonable price, with skilled men you will never find anywhere else than Italy (especially in the south). Your relatives and friends will be amazed with the results and even more with the price you have spent on it! In reality you know now that this is possible mainly because Italy has maintained its old, traditional apprenticeship system vanished years ago in our father’s generation in the UK and in many other countries.
The important ingredients to achieve a successful renovation are quite simple. One of the most important is to get the right architects with experience to drive your planning permissions through a sea of personal connections, friendship and user-friendly bureaucracy. Depending on the scale of your work your chosen architect will draw up plans and drive your planning application through the planning office of the local council.
An experienced architect will also ensure your works are progressing with frequent site visits while he is checking the work of the able tradesmen he has hired for you and pushing the council on the planning permission. Clearly it helps to do some checking and pushing yourself just like anywhere. A vital aspect for all of you wanting to renovate is make careful plans to anticipate overall costs and arrange deadlines discussing with your architect what you are getting, how long it will take and how much you are going to pay for it. Your regular visit to survey the work will also help in getting thing done. So in summary, you will need passion, determination and patience as well as the right working partners.
If you think you are going to do it yourself that is fine. Some people enjoy restoring their homes in Italy. But if you lack of time and have got the right tradesmen in, leave them to do their job and your chosen architect drive the work: they know the job better than you do and you will avoid just wasting your time and money. Among the joy of renovation you will be pleased to know that labour is considerably cheaper than in the Britain or US. Here on the border between middle and south Italy, it is even cheaper than in the north of the country and much more in line with the local cost and standard of living. With the right architect you can get a lot value and skills for your money. The right architect will obviously know the local tradesmen and will be able to recommend local builders and specialists to take on your job and amaze your friends with the results!
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