Real estate, Italian style

I imagine that if you're shopping for a penthouse in Rome or a villa in Tuscany, priced in the high six figures or beyond, the on-line ads look pretty inviting. But in a small town like Fidenza, and at the bottom of the price scale, many sellers either don't seem to know the modern protocol for real estate advertising, or just can't be bothered.

When we started looking at apartments on line, we not only enjoyed the thrill of the hunt but the sheer amusement value of the photos we were looking at. For while even modest homes in Northern California are gussied up like an Architectural Digest spread when they go on the market, the photos for lower-cost Fidenza apartments tend to be charmingly, or even alarmingly, candid.

Take the notice that showed a bathroom featuring not only a hoarders' trove of hygiene products but an enema bag and what appears to be a skinned lizard.

Danny copied this photo and sent it out to his friends in real estate with the subject line, "A real estate photo designed to SELL."








For the listing above, the sellers appear to have been told not to put things away before the photos were taken, but rather to get every knick-knack they had out on display. I like the casual way the decorator/seller sneaks into this shot.

And I love how this apartment's interiors marry a glittery design sensibility that's molto italiano with college-dorm nonchalance.

You can see the whole listing here.








Some of the listings are sad, though. A lot of these apartments seem to have gone on sale after their occupants died; in this one, even the furniture looks morbidly ghostly.












In fact, several of the places we looked at are offered fully furnished. And since most of these residences sit on the market for months, the images of closed-up apartments and all the unwanted pictures and chairs and chandeliers add up to a potent memento mori. I found this bed covered with pots and pans particularly poignant.

I was also intrigued by this listing because the place is huge (four bedrooms, two baths, 1,700 square feet), cheap (75,000 euros, or about $87,000), and kind of gorgeous (although I don't think the furniture or the batterie de cuisine are included). Unfortunately, it's on the third floor by Italian reckoning, with no elevator, which means it's a fourth-floor walk-up. Hard as I tried to convince myself that this would be great exercise, I knew that at our age it would be folly to gamble on too many years of four-flights-of-stairs mobility.

There was one apartment we were really taken with, however. But let's save that for the next post.