If you watched the second season of Master of None and promptly dreamt of devouring homemade pasta and thriving in the Italian countryside, then dream no more. The president of Molise, a duel mountainside and coastal-hugging region east of Rome, wants to invite you to come live there. An added perk? He wants you to open up your own business, and will give you $27,000 to do it.
“If we had offered funding, it would have been yet another charity gesture,” the President Donato Toma, said to in a report by the The Guardian. “We wanted to do more; we wanted people to invest here. They can open any sort of activity: a bread shop, a stationery shop, a restaurant, anything. It’s a way to breathe life into our towns while also increasing the population.”
The offer comes on the heels of a dwindling population in Italy, where young people have immigrated to other European nations in search of job opportunities, and where birthrates are at an all-time low. Molise, a region that covers over 1,700 square miles, has a little over 300,000 citizens — and the numbers are decreasing. In fact, there wasn’t a single recored birth in the region in all of 2018, according to the paper.
