So, first-time house buying in the land of the Celtic Tiger has become expensive, has it? Welcome to the mainland European club.
It may be of scant consolation to young Irish couples trying to get into the market with approximately £100,000 but, for that amount of money in today's Rome, the best you could purchase would be an 85-square metre, one-bedroom flat, probably without a terrace, certainly without a kitchen you could sit down to eat in and guaranteed not to have a garage attached. (In the chaotic parking arrangements of modern Rome, a garage is worth gold.)
Needless to say, the apartment in question will afford no access to a garden while even the comfort of a fully functional lift cannot be taken for granted. Obviously, this being apartment living, you are likely to share - and share in the cost of - heating, lighting and general building maintenance.
If you absolutely insist on living somewhere central and famous - perhaps even close to your work - then for just over £90,000 you could currently buy yourself a one-room, 30-square-metre, bed-sit on Rome's splendid Piazza Navona. If you still insist on a fairly central, somewhat exclusive residential zone such as Parioli, then for only £80,000, you could have a one-bedroom, 45-square-metre (the size of a large garage) flat, this time complete with a little terrace.
Perhaps by now, readers may have got the point. The Italian real-estate market is very expensive, even at the moment when it is in a state of relative stall following its first serious crisis in more than 60 years of constant growth. Put simply, £100,000 don't add up to much in modern Italy's housing market.
Given that there are limited first-time buyer concessions (and no grants on new houses), Italians have had to find other ways into an expensive and overcrowded market. The method most tried and true starts early, practically at birth, when parents start saving for their children's first abode.
I can think of three young couples and neighbours, newly married in the last year, who all walked into new or refurbished homes, kitted out down to the last bed-sheet and dinner service, all totally paid for by loving parents.
Take a walk around any big Italian city and look at the 'citofono' (door bells) on apartment buildings and you will soon find that some buildings appear to have three or four flats lived in by people with the same surname - Rossi, Bianchi etc. The reason is simple. Often parents watch and wait for an apartment to become available in their building and then invest hard-earned savings in it in order to have it for their son or daughter (or both) when the happy day of marriage comes along.
Such far-sighted thrift often seems de rigeur in a country where the average household still saves 18 per cent of income and where, until recently, mortgage interest rates started at around 13.5 per cent, were often fixed and were usually repayable over 10 years.
As the Italian economy converges on European Monetary Union, relative fiscal stability and low inflation rates have seen mortgage interest rates tumble to as low as 8 per cent in some cases, suggesting that in future Italians may be more tempted to follow the northern European route of borrowing along the road to the first house.
