A hotel that is a whole village?

Santo Stefano di Sessanio is a stone village 1,250 m above sea level in Abruzzo, central Italy. In the 16th century it sat on the route that carried wool, and 3,000 people lived there. After World War II, people left for the cities and abroad to find work, and 120 remained. One by one, the stone houses fell empty.

In northern Italy, one answer had already appeared. After the 1976 earthquake, Carnia rebuilt its houses, but few people came back and the houses stayed empty. In 1982 came a plan to let guests sleep in those empty houses. The name was albergo diffuso, the scattered hotel. Albergo means hotel; diffuso means spread out. The rooms stay in houses that were already there, within a 200 m walk of the front desk. One front-desk building runs everything. In 1998 it was written into law.

In 1999, an entrepreneur riding a motorcycle through the mountain roads stopped in this village. He bought the empty houses one at a time. Twenty houses, a quarter of the village. He made a promise to the village: no new buildings, and the stone walls, wooden ceilings and fireplaces would stay as they were. Only the insides of the empty houses were turned into rooms, and the village women wove the bedding by hand in the old patterns. It opened in 2005. The name is Sextantio, the village's name in Roman times. That is how one hotel became the size of a village.

The front desk is one house in the middle of the village; the rooms are scattered in stone houses a few alleys away. Guests walk the alleys several times a day, to eat breakfast, to leave their keys. The alleys are the corridors and the square is the lobby. The cook at the evening restaurant is from the village too. Down the same alley, residents go home and guests go to their rooms.

There is one condition. It has to be a village where people live. In an empty village, this hotel does not work. So only empty houses were bought, and houses where people lived were left alone. The person who created this model called guests residenti temporanei, temporary residents.

In 2008, the UN Development Programme named this model a best practice for growth and gave it an award. Counting only those reviewed and recognized by the association, Italy has more than 150 albergo diffuso hotels. Santo Stefano still has not a single new building. The stone houses and alleys are as they were in the 16th century.

This hotel has no tourists. Only residents who stay for a while.
Did the hotel fill the village, or did the village fill the hotel?