Emptiness, it turns out, is everyone's project right now. There are vacant houses across the globe everywhere, and almost everyone in charge has decided it is a problem worth real money to solve. They just disagree, fascinatingly, about how.
If you read this newsletter, you are a person who has at least daydreamed about buying a piece of another country because it is beautiful and cheaper than home.
Sardinia and Calabria are the examples in this issue, but they are part of a broader pattern of repopulation grants — income support, business start-up money, symbolic rents — aimed at getting working-age people to stay and live.
In Spain, the answer has increasingly been immigrants. Whole villages in "España vaciada," the emptied interior, have been brought back from the edge by families from Latin America and Morocco.
We have been thinking more generally about infrastructure and resources, things you can't really know until you spend several seasons in a place.
