This Texas couple bought part of a dilapidated Italian mansion for $160,000 without even seeing it

Snapping up a home in Italy for a fraction of US prices has gone from being fantasy to a familiar playbook. The once-novel one-euro house schemes — properties in idyllic towns costing little more than a dollar — are now a well-established, and mostly successful, path for bargain hunters.

But the low-stakes route didn’t appeal to Houston couple John Alan Ambrose, 61, and his wife, Vicky, 57. Instead of chasing a one-euro fixer-upper, they bought a slice of a dilapidated former palazzo in a city most people outside Italy have never heard of — and they did it sight unseen.

It was still a relative bargain. In 2022, they paid 140,000 euros, or about $160,000, for the empty shell of a historic mansion in the center of Biella, a city in northern Italy’s Piedmont region, in the foothills of th