Martin Sustrik
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
None of it worked.
By 2007 the city went bankrupt.
The festival was cancelled and the winners from years past never got their prize money.
Or, to get a different perspective, consider someone who moved to a shrinking Italian town, lured by a one-euro house offer.
They are about to retire.
They want to live in the country.
So they buy the house, go through all the paperwork.
Then they renovate it.
More paperwork.
They don't speak Italian.
That sucks.
But finally everything works out.
They move in.
The house is nice.
There's grapevine climbing the front wall.
Out of the window they see the rolling hills of Sicily.
In the evenings, they hear dogs barking in the distance.
It looks exactly like the paradise they'd imagined.
But then they start noticing their elderly neighbors getting sick and being taken away to hospital, never to return.
They see them dying alone in their half-abandoned houses.