To combat depopulation and reverse the trend, a small town in the province of Trapani in Italy is offering 5,000 euro non-repayable grants to anyone who buys a house in the village and moves in. The village in question is Gibellina, a town famous for hosting a majestic work by Burri commemorating the Belice earthquake. Let's find out more about the municipal council's initiative, and how you could move to this Italian village and get paid 5,000 euros.
The initiative: get paid to live in Gibellina
Thanks to the support fund for marginal municipalities allocated by the government (a total of 180 million euro allocated to 1,187 Italian municipalities), Gibellina will collect 171,940.25 euros over three years to be disbursed in the form of grants.
This is why the municipal administration has decided to allocate the sums allocated by the government to be disbursed in the form of non-repayable grants (of 5 thousand euros) to those who buy a house and become citizens of Gibellina. All the details have been announced in a public notice (in Italian) and applications are already open for expressions of interest from those who want to buy a property.
Moreover, through the same funds, the local council also wants to support the establishment of new productive activities in the agricultural, craft and trade sectors. The non-repayable contribution of 5,000 euros, in fact, is also granted to those wishing to start up commercial or agricultural activities that, however, must remain open for at least 5 years.
About Gibellina, Italy
Gibellina is one of the municipalities hit on the night of 14-15th January 1968 by the violent Belice earthquake, which reduced the small town in the province of Trapani to rubble. Gibellina is famous for hosting one of the world's greatest works of Land Art: Alberto Burri's Cretto.
The work of art represents an 8,000-square-metre concrete tomb, mainly made between 1984 and 1989, but only completed in 2015. Seen from above, it looks like a huge white sheet with wide furrows, covering the rubble of the old city. Each fissure is two to three metres wide and divides the vast expanse of concrete into blocks, about one metre and sixty metres high.
Burri's Cretto can be reached via the Gibellina state road 119 in the section that intersects the Grotta di Santa Ninfa Integral Nature Reserve, between the town of the same name and the village of Salaparuta. Alternatively, it can be reached via the A29 motorway in the direction of Mazara del Vallo.
A few kilometres away from Alberto Burri's work of art now stands Gibellina Nuova, the new town that gave displaced people the chance to start living again after the violent earthquake that razed the mountain village to the ground.