Yahoo Finance An Italian city will pay you $40,000 to move there
We saw Grottole, the fairytale southern Italian village which hosted five international volunteers to revitalise the local village, and northern Italian town of Locana, which invited families up to $14,300 to move there to help keep the local school open.
Now another region in Italy is making another bid for globetrotters to move in and breathe new life into the underpopulated area.
The southern Italian mountainous region of Molise is offering people €700 (AU$1,120) a month for three years to live there, The Guardian UK reports.
The catch? The village must remain with fewer than 2,000 residents, and the newcomer must start a new business.
“If we had offered funding, it would have been yet another charity gesture,” Molise president Donato Toma told The Guardian.
“We wanted to do more; we wanted people to invest here. They can open any sort of activity: a bread shop, a stationery shop, a restaurant, anything. It’s a way to breathe life into our towns while also increasing the population.”
Funding isn’t just being used to entice outsiders: there will be money for towns to revitalise themselves too.
Towns with fewer than 2,000 residents would each receive €10,000 (AU$16,000) to build infrastructure and promote cultural activities.
“It’s not just a matter of increasing the population. People also need infrastructure and a reason to stay, otherwise we’ll end up back where we started in a few years,” he said.
Molise, with a population of 305,000, has lost more than 9,000 residents since 2014, and is one among many other Italian towns that have lost inhabitants over the last few years.
The decline in Italian citizens living in the country is falling due to a decrease in births and a rise in the migration of young people to other European countries in search of jobs, The Guardian reported.
So if you were looking to up and leave your life to start afresh, escape to this southern Italian region and set up a new business – and get paid for it.
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