Real Estate Bargain
November 13, 2015 11:50 AM   Subscribe

Wanna buy a palatial 365-room Castle in the Florentine foothills - CHEAP? The bizarre castle and its 160-acre grounds, which have been left to ruin for the last several decades is being auctioned off at a starting price of just S20 million in an attempt to save the estate from private investors who are angling to turn it into a luxury resort if the price falls low enough. Google images here.
posted by growabrain (28 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
This author and I have a vastly different definition of "ruin" based on these pictures.
posted by Krazor at 11:55 AM on November 13, 2015 [3 favorites]


I hate to be the one who just has to point it out, but this looks like a great place to take a lot of LSD.
posted by Gymnopedist at 12:00 PM on November 13, 2015 [9 favorites]


Gymnopedist, it might be the only place I've seen that looks like it could potentially rival My Day At the Chuck Close Retrospective, Freakout Edition.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:02 PM on November 13, 2015 [6 favorites]


Kickstarter, anyone?
posted by emmet at 12:04 PM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Why buy a Tuscan-Orientalist fever-dream palace when you can have a 4 BR apartment decorated with Snickers ads for the same price?
posted by theodolite at 12:04 PM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


No thanks, I'm all about Minimalism at the moment. Surfaces, surfaces, darling!
posted by Capt. Renault at 12:09 PM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Eh, only 365 rooms?
posted by Sangermaine at 12:30 PM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


Such a huge place! So many choices! It's hard to know which wall to line the buyers up against.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:31 PM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


...in an attempt to save the estate from private investors who are angling to turn it into a luxury resort if the price falls low enough.

Yeah, the Riviera real estate mafias I mentioned a little bit back? Par for the course. (Florence is on the southern end of the Italian Riviera.) Agents partnered with shady home inspectors who outright lie about problems that "lower the sale price", who go along with their construction/renovation + resort/tourism buddies and you've got the recipe for homeowners being shafted when they try to sell.

This castle is incredibly gorgeous. I hope it finds an owner with heart.
posted by fraula at 12:39 PM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


But where are you to sleep in leap-years?
posted by GhostintheMachine at 12:58 PM on November 13, 2015 [6 favorites]


You'd have to sleep in the same bedroom twice, like a peasant.
posted by Sangermaine at 1:07 PM on November 13, 2015 [8 favorites]


Actually, I'm kinda sad that I ended up poor. I want to save the castle! Though I would probably rescue local properties first. Hopefully an actual private buyer steps forward to purchase this place.
posted by Ashen at 1:08 PM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


On February 29th you stay up all night.
posted by clew at 1:18 PM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Matteo Garrone just shot some scenes of his Tale of Tales there last year.
posted by progosk at 1:23 PM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


I hate to say it, but something like a resort is probably the only way the deep pockets needed for restoration could happen. I mean, no individual is going to pony up hundreds of millions just so the peasants can walk around and admire it, but resorts are generally open to the public.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 1:35 PM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Oh, and: the starting price was €20M at the first round, and €20M at the second. Since neither brought any takers, at the next round, around february next year, it will be just €15M - just under a grand a head for everybody who signed here to keep it a public property. Unless the Kickstarter gets there first...
posted by progosk at 1:36 PM on November 13, 2015


That first room exists somewhere in a completely bricked-up wing of Ghormenghast...
posted by runincircles at 1:55 PM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Turns out that the place was refurbed in the 19th century, which explains a lot.

I'd be curious to know what it looked like before the makeover.
posted by BWA at 2:03 PM on November 13, 2015


20 million is not cheap for a castle. That's actually on the upper end of the price scale.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20140725-queen-of-your-own-castle
posted by I-baLL at 2:13 PM on November 13, 2015


Elon Musk will buy it, disassemble it, number the parts, ship it to Mars, reassemble it, and live there in his elder years.
posted by crazylegs at 2:13 PM on November 13, 2015 [4 favorites]


What would be wrong with turning it into a luxury resort?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:51 PM on November 13, 2015


Nothing, just not in my backyard.
posted by Carillon at 6:06 PM on November 13, 2015


Castle MeFi!
posted by soakimbo at 7:01 PM on November 13, 2015 [1 favorite]


It is a little sad the the government is not buying it, restoring it, and preserving it for the people of the country, like a government should do in this situation.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 9:27 PM on November 13, 2015 [2 favorites]


Pics make it look like sort of combo Nasrid Spanish Islamic/Austrian Rococo/English late Gothic/16th-c Florentine, that they then let a pack of first graders paint.
posted by Capybara at 6:48 AM on November 14, 2015


the past was SO GARISH YOU GUYS. The Pope's palace in Avingon looks like something out of Disney World. Austere grey classicism is a modernish reaction to dyes being so cheap and bright now. Eye-popping color was SO EXPENSIVE until pretty recently so you wanted to show off as much as possible. (Unless you wanted to show off the stone carvings you couldn't afford so you painted them onto the ceiling so at certain angles they;d look like real carvings and busts. )

Really the only furnishing it would need is a pile of white pillows.
posted by The Whelk at 2:08 PM on November 14, 2015


...and it's just a moe amped of version of Florentine color schemes which are all PINK and GOLD and GREEN and and and
posted by The Whelk at 2:09 PM on November 14, 2015


You can spot bits of the concrete that are crumbling, because they were built when people didn't understand it. Those structural problems will be expensive to fix, but some of them are probably critical - they need to be fixed now, before they get worse and let more water in to cause further decay.

Also, the colour scheme? I understand why they put that motto on the wall:
NON PLUS ULTRA = NO MORE, PLEASE
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:48 PM on November 14, 2015


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