When John Alan Ambrose and his wife, Vicky, started exploring the idea of owning a place in Italy, they bypassed the widely publicized 1-euro home programs and instead made a more unconventional wager: buying part of an abandoned mansion in a little-known northern Italian city they had never visited.

The Houston pair paid about $160,000 in 2022 for a floor of a former palazzo in Biella, a wool-industry hub in the Piedmont region, set against the foothills of the Alps.

The property, a 1930s Liberty-style building once tied to an aristocratic family, had stood empty for years.

Inside, original details remained — towering ceilings, arched windows, wood doors — but much of the interior had fallen into disrepair.

Vicky first encountered Biella while exploring potential cashmere and wool s

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