Even in Its Priciest Neighbourhoods, Buying in Rome Remains a Bargain

Gianluca and Selene Santilli have all of Rome at their feet.

Their four-storey penthouse apartment in an early 20th-century villa sits atop a hill in the Italian capital’s Parioli district. With 360-degree views from sitting rooms and outdoor areas, the property provides glimpses of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, residential Parioli’s towering pine trees and the winding course of the Tiber River.

The 4,010-square-foot home has free-standing pavilion-like spaces that suggest an urban compound more than an individual apartment. Now, after nearly two decades in the custom-designed space, the couple have listed the four-bedroom unit with Italy/Sotheby’s International Realty. It has an asking price of $6.1 million.

A similar level of luxury in Milan, Italy’s financial and fashion capital, would cost a lot more, says Gianluca, a 67-year-old attorney. “Rome is cheap,” he says, of both the homes for sale and for rent.

Gianluca and Selene, a 64-year-old office manager, priced their home at just under $1,500 a square foot. In Milan, by comparison, a smaller three-bedroom, 2,750-square-foot unit in a decade-old high-rise, with lavish views and similarly upscale fittings, is listed for $6.445 million, or about $2,350 a square foot.

Roman-style luxury was once associated with the gargantuan villas of ancient emperors and the frescoed palaces of Baroque-era princes, but these days it conjures up another phrase: a bargain.

Affordable Luxury

Rome’s average home prices, as of August, were about $350 a square foot—less than Italy’s Florence and Bologna, and around a third less than Milan, according to Immobiliare.it, a real-estate website.

Prices in Rome peaked in 2007, and the city has been slow to encourage new development and investment, says Antonio Martino, the Milan-based real-estate advisory leader for PwC Italy. In Milan, on the other hand, an increase in supply has been outpaced by a greater increase in demand, he says.

A one-bedroom apartment in Rome is far more affordable than the average for major European cities, coming in below Barcelona, Amsterdam and Vienna, according to an affordability index compiled by Savills, the international real-estate company, which analyzed apartments outside of the historic city centres.

An average-earning Roman might need only four years’ salary to buy the apartment, while a Parisian would likely need more than twice that, according to Savills.

Rome’s luxury sector is showing new signs of life, outpacing the rest of the market, says Danilo Orlando, managing director of Savills Residential Italy. Comparing 2023 sales of homes over $1.1 million with prepandemic 2019 levels, he says, prices in Rome have increased 4% while the number of luxury-level transactions has risen 3.6%. Overall real-estate transactions were up 3% in the second quarter of this year, compared with a year earlier, says PwC’s Martino.

Orlando says that residential luxury sales in Rome are traditionally concentrated in three nearby areas that are the city’s most expensive: The Centro Storico, or the historic center, is where centuries-old palaces are often broken up into lavish multi-bedroom apartments. Parioli is a hilly district known for its Midcentury Modern flare. And a short walk away is Trieste, which has clusters of early 20th-century apartment buildings that vie in splendour with their Baroque counterparts down in the centre.

Centro Storico and Trieste

Centro Storico is by far the most expensive, says Orlando, with average prices in the premium sector reaching $1,493 a square foot in 2023. Luxury units in Parioli average about $950 a square foot, while those in Trieste are about $900 a square foot.

Tourists may flock to Centro Storico’s celebrated sites, like the Trevi Fountain, or make their way through the Villa Borghese, a massive landscaped garden that serves as a green space for both Parioli and Trieste. But they are likely to miss the three districts’ prime residential areas, which can seem discreet, if not outright hidden.

Centro Storico’s Via Giulia, running just east of the Tiber, and Via Margutta, tucked under Piazza del Popolo, are hard-to-find streets if you’re not looking for them. Via Giulia was once the address of choice for Roman nobles, and it can still lay claim to being one of the city’s most prestigious streets. A two-bedroom Via Giulia triplex, located in a building dating back to the 16th century and outfitted with vintage coffered ceilings, is listed with Italy/Sotheby’s, with an asking price of $2 million.

The centrepiece of Trieste is the Coppedè quarter, a neighbourhood of towering 1910s and ’20s apartment buildings, decorated with Moorish arches and ghoulish gargoyles, and built around a storybook-like frog fountain. Conceived by an eccentric Florentine-born architect named Gino Coppedè, the quarter combines Art Nouveau elements with a range of historical styles.

Exclusive RE/Christie’s International Real Estate has a well-maintained, four-bedroom Coppedè listing for $3.56 million. Original details in the 3,770-square-foot home include stained-glass windows, mosaic tile floors and painted ceilings.

Parioli and Pinciano

Parioli, with its many steep streets, is a bit more remote, while Trieste is flatter and more urban. For many luxury-minded Romans, a fine compromise is Pinciano, a neighborhood beneath the heart of Parioli that is as rarefied as its hilly neighbour but as accessible as Trieste.

In 2007, Dr. Claudio Giorlandino, a Roman gynaecologist, created a sprawling family home in a Pinciano building that had been commissioned just before World War I, he says, by a member of the House of Savoy, then the Kingdom of Italy’s ruling family. Designed by a noted Venetian-Jewish architect and decorated with marble recovered from a Palladian villa in northeast Italy, the building has a small number of units, with Giorlandino’s 6,200-square-foot apartment taking up a whole floor.

“I love the elegance and the extremely refined, aristocratic atmosphere,” Giorlandino, now 70, says of his neighbourhood, which borders the Villa Borghese.

Now that two of his three children are grown and living on their own, he has listed the home with Exclusive RE/Christie’s for $6.89 million.

Rome’s three most expensive districts can seem like a self-contained world, with residents moving around between them. Giorlandino, who relocated from the Centro Storico to Pinciano, is now thinking about moving back to the historic centre. The Santillis, who moved to Parioli from Trieste, are considering looking for a more compact rental still in Parioli, which they say feels insulated from the Italian capital’s notorious traffic.

“We have the historic centre nearby, but we are not in the chaos of the centre,” says Gianluca Santilli, adding that he considers “the jewels” of his unique penthouse to be the home’s three parking spaces.

Vatican views

American buyers, traditionally drawn to the Centro Storico, are also open to Parioli and to the Aventine Hill, a very steep, purely residential area on the edge of the historic centre, says Diletta Giorgolo, head of residential at Italy/Sotheby’s.

Known for its jaw-dropping views of the Vatican and for its sedate, almost suburban quality, the Aventino, as Italians call it, may be Rome’s most elusive address. Premium listings rarely come up for sale.

Lionard Luxury Real Estate currently has a ¼-acre Aventino compound, with an early 20th-century 10,800-square-foot villa, listed for $22.2 million.

Mother-daughter apartments

A new Centro Storico development proved too good to pass up for Delphine Surel-Chang, a U.S.-born student studying business in Rome, and her French mother, former actress and investor Francoise Surel, who will also relocate.

The two are putting the finishing touches on their new homes in the Palazzo Raggi, where 21st-century details are being installed in a renovated 18th-century palazzo situated between the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona and the Pantheon. This summer, Surel purchased a 1,460-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment for herself, and Surel-Chang says her parents helped her buy a 645-square-feet one-bedroom. The units cost $1.88 million and about $944,000, respectively. They are set to move in later this year.

Surel-Chang, 20, says she loves how the project’s contemporary elements—which she and her mother, 60, are augmenting with kitchens and bathrooms from Italy’s sleek Boffi brand—are housed in a classical setting. And she appreciates amenities like a concierge and home automation, allowing residents to control temperature, lighting and appliances via app.

She was able to customise her unit’s interiors, she says, by drawing inspiration from her two favorite local hotels, the Bulgari Hotel Roma and Six Senses Rome. She plans to furnish the unit, where she says they will stay for at least three years, with Italian Midcentury Modern pieces.

The duo bought the apartments—which are a five-minute walk from Via Condotti, Rome’s premier shopping street—for between $1,200 and $1,500 a square foot, using Italy/Sotheby’s, which also helped develop the project.

The apartments can seem like a bargain compared with similarly situated units in other major cities. For instance, a two-bedroom, 2,025-square-foot apartment in London’s Mayfair district—a five-minute walk from Bond Street, Via Condotti’s U.K. shopping district equivalent—is asking nearly $10,000 a square foot.

Affordability played a part in their choice of the Eternal City, says Surel-Chang. They considered relocating to Paris, she says, but soon realised that “for the price of an apartment in Paris, we can afford two in Rome.”

From the Spring issue of Kanebridge Quarterly magazine, on sale now. Order your copy here.

When Zoe Wilson and her husband moved into their two bedroom terrace on Newtown’s Dickson Street in December 2020, one of the first things on their agenda was a paint job: not the inside or the front of the house, but the side wall, facing onto a graffiti-covered laneway. It was big and white — and heavily tagged. The couple called the council — who cleaned it off — but before long, the wall had been tagged again. And so began a seemingly endless cycle of tagging and clean-up — the same cycle plaguing councils across Australia, and costing more than $2 billion annually to remove.

In Wilson’s case, there was a circuit breaker: she applied to the Inner West Council’s Perfect Match street art program, which pairs residents, businesses and property owners with artists to create murals on public walls. She and her husband were matched with David Cragg, an artist of Irish, Scottish, Bundjalung and Biripai ancestry who had grown up in the area. The resulting landscape mural, which now covers the house’s laneway wall, pays tribute to the site’s history as a tributary feeding into the Gumbramorra wetlands and Goolay’yari (Cooks River) and features native flora and fauna, including a giant kookaburra.

“My daughter is three, and when she talks about what to do if she ever gets lost, she’s like, ‘I’ll just say I live in the kookaburra house!’ It’s sort of known now around here,” says Wilson. “I’ll be inside or out the front and see people stop and take photos — and it’s just a really nice chance to have a chat and meet more people in the community.”

It seems to have solved the tagging problem, too: the wall has been tagged just once in roughly 18 months since the mural was unveiled in 2023, and its waterproof coating is designed to make graffiti removal quick and easy in the event it happens again.

Owners Zoe and Andy Pedashenko and their daughter Maggie (left) smile with artists Karla Hayes and David Cragg in front of the mural David created.

No wonder, then, that Perfect Match has proved a hit. Since the program started in 2014, applications by residents have increased a whopping 926 percent, and now outstrip the council’s funding pool. What started as a graffiti removal initiative has turned into a bona fide public art program, with council paying artists — many of whom started out in illegal graffiti — to create more than 170 works on walls. Similar inner city programs, such as StreetWORKS in Melbourne’s Maribyrnong LGA, have also proved popular.

These initiatives are emblematic of a diversification of government policies over the last three decades, as the criminalised subculture of graffiti, once seen as a the scourge of inner city neighbourhoods, evolved into a broader, more palatable genre called “street art” — and thence from the margins to the mainstream. At this point, street art has been collected and exhibited by museums, co-opted by luxury brands and advertising agencies, and embraced by high end hotels such as the Hilton, which commissioned pioneering Melbourne street art collective Juddy Roller to paint the facade exterior of its Little Queen Street outpost.

In Victoria, state and local governments have shifted from the “zero tolerance” and “rapid removal” policies of the 80s, 90s and 00s to embrace graffiti as a fundamental part of their identity. Hosier Lane, once a grungy testing ground for young graffiti artists, is now a major tourist attraction, drawing 1.4 million visitors annually. The Wimmera Mallee region is attracting visitors from overseas and interstate — and particularly grey nomads — with its silo art trail, which Visit Victoria spruiks as “the country’s biggest outdoor gallery”.

Street art has become a welcome addition to walking trails, including Dave’s Tours Sydney, which focuses on the craft drinks scene. Image: Destination NSW

For street artist Helen Proctor, who cut her teeth in the illegal graffiti scene but now paints commissioned street art murals in Sydney’s Inner West, the silo art movement represents a tipping point. “Every time I speak to someone over 70, they ask ‘Have you painted a silo?’ Getting that demographic interested in street art is amazing — they were the ones yelling at us (when we were teenagers) to put down the spray can! But they have an appreciation (for the silo murals) because of the size and the technique that goes into it, and it’s a subject matter that they can relate to.”

Top: A colourful mural by Helen Proctor in progress.

The slippery politics of taste is at the heart of graffiti culture in Australia: what is art to some people is vandalism to others, and treated accordingly. The government-led graffiti wars have not ended — they’ve simply shifted territory and tactics, in line with changing demographics and community taste, and with the rise of the “creative cities” theory, which ascribes economic value to creative culture. Painting or spraying anything on the walls of a building you don’t own without permission remains illegal in every state, punishable by prison. But councils, who are on the frontline of maintaining the “clean community”, take a more nuanced view.

In the past year, the City of Melbourne has removed roughly 112,000 square metres (equivalent to five MCGs) of graffiti, focusing on tags, but they leave street art strongholds such as Hosier Lane alone. “They’re places of cultural significance and heritage,” says City of Melbourne Councillor Jamal Hakim. “There’s a social licence [(or artists to paint there illegally).” Even when councils are removing graffiti elsewhere, they can see it’s not working.

“We can’t do that forever, it doesn’t actually solve the problem,” says Cr Hakim. “It’s a never-ending cycle.”

Shannan Whitney, who has seen the shift in attitudes over the last three decades as an inner city Sydney resident, real estate agent and co-founder of BresicWhitney, says that although homebuyers don’t necessarily see graffiti or street art as a value add yet, they — like councils — recognise it as a part of the cultural tapestry of certain suburbs.

“(Today in Newtown) I was in a $10 million building that was covered in (illegal) graffiti…it was allowed because the people who own it see that as being suitable for the environment they live in, and they like it.”