A village in southern Italy that offered tourists free lodgings to boost the local economy has been inundated with 8000 holiday requests from across the world. At the end of June, the remote medieval hamlet of San Giovanni in Galdo, around 90 miles northeast of Naples, decided to offer travellers a free one-week stay in one of its quaint village homes in a bid to boost the area's tourism industry.   

The small village, which has the capacity to house 12 visitors each week, is now sorting through 8,000 holiday applications, some from as far away as Kazakhstan, after the campaign went viral. The initiative, translated as Give Yourself to Molise - the southern Italian region in which the village sits - was so successful that requests were flooding in from 'all over the world'.