Twenty-one years ago the Rockwells were practically the only non-Italians for miles. Today Americans, Britons and Germans have bought ruins with views all over Tuscany. Wealthier Italians whose parents quit farms for the cities in the ’60s are coming back. Hardscrabble poverty has given way to relative wealth–both international and local. The newsstand in the tiny town near the Rockwells now sells the International Herald Tribune, and the ex-sharecropper down the mountain coolly ticks off the merits of Thailand as a holiday destination.
Globalization has shrunk the world, and that includes the distance between Europe’s countryside and cities. Today the quest for quaint rubble amid olive groves is practically a rite of passage: a strong economy, new technology and budget air fares have turned the dream of clean air, cheap wine and a stress-free lifestyle into a reality for Europe’s urban professionals. Millions of white-collar professionals are buying properties in no-collar zones. In the past year the number of Britons buying second homes in France and Italy has risen by 90 percent, according to the Abbey National Bank. So many British have settled in the winegrowing region outside Florence that wags have dubbed it Chiantishire. Germans have purchased 20 percent of the homes on the Balearic island of Mallorca. Americans are thronging to Umbria, Tuscany and Provence. And developers are buying up the countryside to build golf courses, hotels and leisure centers.
The stampede has triggered debates about whether the urban migrants will help or hurt rural Europe. Small-town mayors and shopkeepers argue that new blood from the city boosts the local economy, improves local services and helps preserve local buildings and culture. But others worry that Europe’s countryside has become a playground for the urban rich. Countryside advocates and farmers’ unions argue that rich city folk drive up house prices and don’t make for a sustainable rural economy. Says Jim Connolly, who founded Resettlement Rural Ireland, an organization devoted to repopulating the Irish countryside: “A new summer home is like another nail in the coffin of [a rural] community.”
The new urban migrants are reaping the rewards of one of the great demographic shifts of the past century. After World War II Europe’s agricultural sector radically reformed by modernizing, mechanizing and enlarging farms. The change meant a drastic reduction in the need for semiskilled agricultural labor and triggered a mass migration to Europe’s cities. Forty years ago one in five people of Europe’s labor force worked the land. Today farmers and farm laborers make up a scant 5 percent of the European Union’s work force. Those who still work the land rely on subsidies from their governments or the European Union, or turn to agrotourism, catering to visitors who want farm holidays. In Ireland the average farm income during the late 1990s was £11, 000, with four in 10 farmers surveyed earning less than £5,000. In Britain, a mere 2 percent of the labor force works the land. In Spain, the Spanish Environmental Ministry estimates that there are some 3,000 abandoned villages whose residents have given up on farming and moved to cities. Who will fill all these tumbledown villages in the Algarve or Umbria if not the Brits, Dutch or Americans? Now the middle class are buying fixer-uppers with three bedrooms for prices that would barely buy a closet in New York or London. “The only problem now is that we don’t have enough houses,” says Homard Townsend, a real-estate agent in Luberon in the south of France.
Urbanites who make a break with the cities encourage others to come. Peter Mayle’s “A Year in Provence” lingered at the top of best-seller lists for months, and Francis Mayes’s book on fixing up an old villa in Tuscany spawned not only a sequel, but its own desk calendar. Laura Skoler, a New York philanthropist who has been coming to Luberon for the past decade, organizes trips for other Americans keen on discovering Provence–but she doesn’t want them all to move there. “I hesitate to bring people here,” she says. “It’s so wonderful that I want to keep it a secret.”
The Umbrian hill town of Todi was one secret that spread quickly, particularly among Britons and Americans. When New Yorker Linda Richardson came to Todi in 1985, the village shops didn’t sell Kleenex and there were two real-estate agents in town. Five years later there were 14 of them, some whose “offices” were a car and a mobile phone. Many locals obligingly sold up, using the money to move to modern apartments on the outskirts of town. “Today it’s rare that an Italian from Todi could ever get the scratch together to buy where their grandparents lived,” says Richardson.
Paradoxically, it’s sometimes the city folk who may help protect the landscape and culture. Tuscany and Umbria’s strict preservation laws stipulate that if you buy a historic structure, you must restore it faithfully to its original design. Alessandro and Chiara di Paola, a Roman couple who bought a hamlet outside Todi “for nothing,” lovingly restored it; today aging couples come back to see the restoration. In Luberon, Laura Skoler throws bouillabaisse parties. Andrew Currie, a retired British apple farmer, has taken to giving lectures to local olive growers on cultivation. “[The foreigners] become guardians of the local heritage,” says Roland Baud of SAFER, a French demographic institute. “They take French culture on as their own.”
The tech revolution has also helped skilled professionals move from town to rural areas. High-speed trains mean that money managers can commute daily from jobs in skyscrapers to dream cottages. E-mail lets CEOs send memos from Umbrian hamlets to Manhattan. Some Britons buying second homes in France have taken to bringing their own Sky Television decoders so that they can get their cable favorites.
Pierre Pages of the chamber of commerce in Mende, in the southern French region of Lozere, hopes the Internet revolution will help level the inequities in rural and urban economies. He estimates that around 20 percent of new IT companies won’t have to rely on urban infrastructures. That’s an encouraging statistic for regions like Lozere, which, with 14 people per square kilometer, has the sparsest population in the country. In the last eight months four high-tech companies have moved from Paris to “The Green Desert,” lured by cheap rents and lovely countryside. Local employees who don’t want to leave the region have a vested interest in the business’s success. Lionel Boudoussier, CEO of the online accounting firm AGT, was born in Lozere and wanted to stay, but moved when he couldn’t find a decent job. After seven years working in the financial sector in Paris, he took a 50 percent pay cut and moved back to set up his own business. Now he does all his work–with 650 clients all over Europe–on the Internet. From his offices outside town, he can see cows.
But as some new migrants have discovered, not all is peaceful in the country. In Britain some recent migrants have sued farmers over the smell of their pigs, or complained to neighbors about the early rooster’s crow. The German expatriates who bought derelict farmhouses by the sea in the Mani region of Greece didn’t appreciate the timing of pieties at the local church. “The Germans in Horioudaki have asked that the church bells stop ringing so early in the morning,” complains one Mani resident. “They can do that because they’re all German.” The locals are quick to fight back. Last year residents on Mallorca passed out pamphlets urging fellow Spaniards to say “No to German Colonialism,” and started an Association for the Defense of Majorca. In 1998 the Balearic Islands’ regional parliament passed laws requiring businesses advertising or labeling products in foreign languages to provide parallel labels in Spanish or Catalan. And earlier this summer environmentalists picketed model Claudia Schiffer’s holiday home with “Claudia Out!” signs, claiming her villa blocks access to a 16th-century fortress on the Mediterranean.
When big money gets involved, the sense of being colonized by outsiders can become even more blatant. The 4,000-odd golf courses that now dot Europe were frequently built on what was once farmland. In Kinsale, County Cork, developers paid [Pound sterling]250,000 for the Old Head, a craggy peninsula jutting off the Irish coast with 200 acres of scrub grazing land and fields. A farmer owned the land and grazed his sheep there, and locals used to freely ramble through the remains of a 13th-century castle to the bluffs. Since developers spent millions to create the Old Head Golf Links, the land is off-limits not only to ramblers and farmers but to everyone else. It’s open only to overseas residents–90 percent of whom are American–who pay $50,000 for lifetime membership in addition to annual fees. An American flag flies at the main gate, and Americans don’t even have to change money: the bar takes dollars. Says fisherman Jerome Lordon, “The developers just swept in with their permits, burned off the heather and dumped tons of soil over all of that life and history.”
But even as the old way of rural life fades, there remains a collective memory of the European countryside that won’t seem to die. Even American companies like Disney are working to preserve it. Minutes from the main entrance to Disneyland Paris in the Val d’Europe, the company has underwritten the expansion of nearby hamlets amid rolling cornfields and crumbling churches, developments that are scheduled to be home to 38,000 people by 2015. Only 40 minutes from Paris, there’s the pastel-pretty “French village” of Apollonia, purpose-built, complete with apartments, town houses, a boulangerie and a Thai restaurant. Anglophiles can opt for “English cottages”; shoppers will soon be able to frequent La Vallee, modeled on villages in the Brie region but housing 70 factory outlets. Country life, however bowdlerized, seems to suit Jean-Jacques Maillot. “In Paris, it’s metro,boulot, dodo [subway, work, sleep],” says Maillot, who has a place in the Disney-spawned development at Serris. Up the street, Jean Marx is playing petanque in front of the brand-new house he bought last November. “It’s good to be out of the cite.” He hesitates. “Well, I guess they’ve sort of made a cite here. But it’s more flat.” Maillot has a point. With more and more city types fleeing for the country, it’s getting harder and harder to tell where the city ends and the countryside begins.
