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Last week I published an article on how to buy Italian books outside of Italy. Within it, I also promised you a ladder of Italian book suggestions from elementary level all the way to challenging material best left for later on in your journey.

Most lists of easy Italian books ignore the two walls you’ll face. Let’s start with those.

The two walls

I don’t speak French, but Italian is a fellow Romance language with some vocabulary and structural similarities. This affords me the ability to guess the meaning of very simple French, but I hit a wall pretty quickly as I have not formally studied or immersed myself in the language.

Let’s put it to the test. I took the following intro from a French children’s book:

Laissez-moi vous raconter l’histoire d’un Poulet. Ses amis l’appellent Petit Poulet. Petit Poulet vit dans une petite maison de poulet normale, dans une petite ville normale.

Without cheating, this is what I think it means:

Let me tell you the story of a chicken. Called the Small Chicken by his friends. Small Chicken lived in a small house of normal chickens, inside a small normal (something).

The real translation is:

Let me tell you the story of a chicken. His friends call him Chicken Little. Chicken Little lives in a normal little chicken house in a normal little town.

I don’t speak French, but Italian mostly carried me through.

Now let’s try the same with the French novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert:

Nous étions à l’étude, quand le proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre. Ceux qui dormaient se réveillèrent, et chacun se leva comme surpris dans son travail.

There it is, the first wall. I recognize some words, but I have no idea what those sentences mean. Something about a boy (garçon) in class (classe). The first wall determines what counts as easy on every list out there. It’s the decoding wall.

Can you translate the marks on the page into concepts in your head? If the author uses dialect, “easy” is out. If they use words even Italian kids wouldn’t know these days, the book doesn’t make the cut. Long, syntactically creative sentences? Out as well.

The mistake is stopping at the first wall, because the second one is more insidious. The wall of depth.

It’s the wall that makes a book with simple words and short sentences inscrutable, because the meaning lives in the silence between what’s said, like melodies that would collapse without their pauses.

The perfect example is one of my favorite novels, A ciascuno il suo by Leonardo Sciascia. It’s a short book. The vocabulary is plain, and a C1 reader will rarely reach for the dictionary. And yet the meaning lives in the words nobody says, in irony that is never spelled out, in the cultural fabric of the Sicily it describes.

You can look up every word and still miss the book.

I’ll present one line from the book as evidence. But first, some context without too many spoilers: a pharmacist and his hunting companion have been murdered. A rumor is spreading that a young girl was the pharmacist’s lover, and the murder might be because of the affair. Her engagement gets cancelled overnight. The prospective mother-in-law visits her to hand back the gifts, and on her way out, she loudly exclaims:

«Ogni male non viene per nuocere. E non potevano ammazzarlo prima che mio figlio si infilasse in questa casa?»

A B2 reader can translate every word:

Every cloud has a silver lining. And couldn’t they have killed him before my son got himself into this house?

Objectively, they won’t even need a dictionary for this, as long as they are familiar with the common proverb. And yet, if the translation is all they took from it, they’re missing the sentence.

What the words don’t spell out is how in the Sicily of the time, the honor of the fiancé was on the line. How a whisper would permanently label the girl as a harlot and her man as a cornuto (a cuckold).

How the importance of this perception is greater than the life of a murdered man, so much so that she wishes he had died earlier. And above all, the importance of delivering it loudly to the neighbors within the warmth of a popular proverb.

The vocabulary was the easy part. The meaning behind it is the wall that blocks you.

I didn’t want to rely on my opinion alone and tell you, “trust me, bro.” So I did something slightly overzealous for a simple recommendation list: a morphological analysis of each book I wanted to recommend. Sentence length, word frequencies, density of each tense, and Gulpease score, the readability index Italian schools use. The full results are in the table below.

This largely led to a confirmation of my intuitive understanding of the relative difficulty of each book, but also a couple of interesting discoveries I’ll talk about.

The ladder below is built with the two walls in mind, and divided into three tiers. Tier 1 has no walls worth mentioning. Tier 2 raises the first wall to a height you can still climb. Tier 3 is the trap: prestigious books you will be tempted by, guarded by a wall of the first or second kind, too tall and too slippery for most learners. Tackle them if you’re a comfortable C1 reader or come back to them when you’re ready.

For each book, I’ll show you the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) level based on my own judgment as a long-time Italian teacher and the morphological measurement I did on the books. (If you don’t know where you stand, test your Italian level on Linguetto for free.)

Tier 1: Easy Italian books

Read these books extensively. A second reading at this level often teaches you more than the first. Don’t worry about looking up every single word. The goal is flow and getting the gist of things. Use the dictionary only when a specific word you don’t understand is critical for the plot.

Graded readers (A1-C1). These are books written for learners and labeled A1 to C1. Alma, ELI, and Black Cat publish full series but are mostly found in Italian stores. Olly Richards’ Short Stories in Italian for Beginners is the version you can likely grab at your local bookstore. If your reading comprehension is not yet at B1 level, I’d focus on these. Get the paper versions and annotate them as you need.

Io non ho paura by Niccolò Ammaniti (A2-B1). The story is told by a child, so the language is disarmingly simple. The topic and emotional load are heavy, but the Italian within is objectively easy. Italian kids read it in middle school. Pair it with Salvatores’ 2003 film.

Favole al telefono by Gianni Rodari (A2-B1). A traveling salesman calls his daughter every night and tells her one story. Simple language (it’s meant for kids) and short stories capped at two pages. This makes it accessible despite the playful made-up words here and there that you’ll need to watch out for.

La volpe che amava i libri by Nicola Pesce (B1). A fox in the Siberian taiga steals books from the village to read through her hibernation. It’s a modern fable some reviewers argued was “inspired” by a Russian tale. Meant for kids but appreciated by adults as well. At any rate, this one is great to master passato remoto. Of the 15 books I measured, only Pinocchio uses this tense more often. Bonus points to this book for being available as a cheap Social DRM ePub.

One more move that could pay off: read the Italian versions of books you already read in your native language. The Italian is often simpler due to fewer native idioms, plus knowledge of the plot will assist your understanding. Don’t consider it cheating. It’s a smart hack.

Tier 2: the bridge to B2

Dictionary out, folks. We are now entering first wall territory. The effort to get through these books will pay dividends and greatly expand your vocabulary.

Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino (B2). Twenty short stories of a few pages each about a laborer’s adventures in a northern industrial city. Everybody classifies this as an easy read, as it is meant for Italian readers 9 and older; yet, my analysis shows that it uses the lowest percentage of everyday words of all fifteen books on the list.

The real wall here takes dictionary work because Calvino names precisely everything in the city: plants, tools, birds. You’ll need the dictionary on page 1. Re-read each story before moving to the next.

Va’ dove ti porta il cuore by Susanna Tamaro (B1-B2). A grandmother, aware of her imminent death, writes one long letter to her granddaughter who’s traveling to America. The first wall is moderate, but understanding the full depth of the emotions and family dynamics introduces a mild second wall that earns the B2 in the estimated rating. This was big in the 90s, so you’re also reading a piece of modern culture.

Esco a fare due passi by Fabio Volo (B1-B2). Nico is a radio DJ allergic to adulthood, but life doesn’t care about his reluctance to accept responsibilities. This book is very conversational. Italian critics don’t take Volo seriously. Ignore them. He’s not Cesare Pavese or Umberto Eco, but his books are perfect for teaching you the language.

Fabbricante di lacrime by Erin Doom (B1-B2). This is an interesting one. It’s a gothic romance that came out chapter-by-chapter on the Wattpad social writing platform (the one where a lot of questionable romance novels appear). Yet, it became the best-selling book in Italy in 2022, and the 2024 Netflix adaptation was the first Italian film to top the platform’s global chart for non-English-language movies.

If the genre appeals to you, this is a great choice because the prose is simple, the pages turn themselves, and the book is relatively large. Which means it gives you volume, and that’s exactly what you need at this level.

Plus, it serves as a good introduction to congiuntivo, having the highest density of the tense of all books on the list.

Testimone inconsapevole by Gianrico Carofiglio (B1-B2). A legal thriller in Bari, written by a former anti-mafia prosecutor. It’s credited with inventing the Italian courtroom novel genre. The language is formal but also repetitive, which is quite useful for your learning purposes. It’s the first in a series, so if you enjoy it, you’ll have plenty more to chase it with.

Le otto montagne by Paolo Cognetti (B2). Two boys, one from the city and one from a hamlet under Monte Rosa, establish a friendship that develops at altitude each summer. It won the Strega Prize in 2017, the highest literary award in Italy. It’s a serious book you can brag about having read. The writing is excellent, but the sentences are sparse and relatively accessible for a B2 reader. Pair it with the slow but also excellent movie.

Novecento by Alessandro Baricco (B2). A monologue about a talented pianist adopted by a ship worker. Born on an ocean liner, he never gets off the ship. Only 66 pages, yet full of lyricism. The quickest read on this list for a B2 reader. Pair it with the film, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano, for full emotional understanding.

Tier 3: the traps

We are now in the section where the walls get tall. These books are a trap, or at least a challenge, as they look approachable but they are not. When one of them stops you, make note of which wall stopped you, as the fix is different depending on which.

Le avventure by Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (B2-C1). This is the most recommended beginner book on the internet, and it’s a flat-out terrible recommendation for a beginner. Unless you read a simplified version, Pinocchio combines 1883 Tuscan words that Italian kids wouldn’t understand with the highest use of passato remoto on the list (a tense that is largely being disused by modern Italian, especially when spoken).

La forma dell’acqua by Andrea Camilleri (B2-C1). Camilleri’s series of books on Inspector Montalbano is extremely popular in Italy. On the surface, it’s an accessible series of books, but for a foreign learner this is the case of a tall and strong first wall. Camilleri mixes Italian and Sicilian dialect. The analyzer found one word in 25 to be outside of the Italian vocabulary it used. And even that undersells the linguistic difficulty. For example, Camilleri uses the word “spiare” (to spy) to mean “to ask” as Sicilian dialects do.

L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante (B2+). L’amica geniale series developed into four volumes. It’s now an international bestseller that was adapted into a TV series as well. The language is relatively simple, so the books remain approachable by less fluent Italian readers. However, this is pure second wall. The Naples that permeates each novel must be experienced in person to truly understand the novels. A B2 reader can begin to understand the unspoken messages and the social fabric assumptions. Below that level, you miss much of the book.

Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (C1). This book was rejected by Einaudi and Mondadori. The author died, and a year later, Feltrinelli published it. It became the best-selling novel in Italian history. Lampedusa never got to see it. Nor did he, obviously, see how successful the Netflix series became in 2025, leading to a new wave of international readers.

This book captures both walls. It uses long sentences with relatively difficult words. The analysis shows it is the most difficult book, linguistically, in the whole list. But the difficulty doesn’t end there. The book mourns something that’s never said outright. The historical context is captured but never fully spelled out. Nor is the Sicilian mindset that justifies the characters’ actions.

It takes a genuine C1 reader to tackle this.

A ciascuno il suo by Leonardo Sciascia (C1). One of my favorite novels and what inspired this article. A shy professor, school smart not street smart, naively gets interested in the circumstances of the death of two acquaintances in a small Sicilian town. He starts asking questions the locals would rather not be asked.

As mentioned earlier, it’s a short book (115 pages) with plain, standard vocabulary. The sentences, though, run long, and the Gulpease score sits near the bottom of the list, so a first wall does exist to some degree.

Still, none of that is what truly stops you. You can clear every word and every long sentence and miss the whole book, because the second wall is very tall. And wall two does not show up on a morphological analysis.

What this demands is not more Italian; it is more Sicily.

How to climb the two walls

Track which wall stopped you as you approached these, because the fix is different. If the meaning of words or dense syntax throws you, you need more pages at your current level. Tackle more books on the list.

If you understand each sentence but the meaning of the book remains foggy, you might need more Italy. Watch more movies, read the newspapers, dive more into its history, visit the country if you can. You need to acquire more of the context that supports those sentences.

Then one day you will reread A ciascuno il suo and hear the pauses, the omertà in the air, the irony never spelled out.

That is the day the second wall comes down.

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“They got in while we were at the grocery store. Through a window. In and out in less than 20 minutes. The carabinieri were already there by the time we got back.”

This is how a friend of mine described his break-in in a quiet town in the Marche region.

Crime is low in the Marche. Break-ins feel out of place.

Decades earlier, burglars had hit my parents’ place in Ostia, in the then province of Rome. I was six, maybe seven. My father gave me the key to open the porta blindata (the armored door) of our rental apartment. It wouldn’t open.

Thinking I was doing something wrong, he tried himself. No luck. Then the realization hit him that something was afoot. Somebody from the inside had manually engaged the secondary lock, the type you slide.

I remember the sense of violation and the image of my toy safe left open, emptied of its few coins. It was a plastic safe with a single dial, the kind that comes with chocolates in it. They bothered trying each of the 12 possible combinations and hit the jackpot on number 9. The equivalent of roughly $5. They got into the apartment through the roof of the building.

But that was Rome. You expect real crime in 1980s heroin-addicted Rome.

My friend said that roaming gangs, mostly from Eastern Europe, target houses in central Italy and up north. “Sooner or later it happens to everyone,” he said, resigned. “What about the south?” I enquired. “They don’t really go there.”

So I got curious and looked at the burglary statistics across Italy. What I found proves him right.

The four provinces where you are least likely to have your home broken into are Oristano, Crotone, Messina, and Catanzaro (ISTAT, 2023 data). Also well positioned (in the top 15): Reggio Calabria and Palermo.

Read that list again. OK, Oristano is in Sardinia, isolated, so a roaming organized gang can’t quite reach it so easily. But what’s going on with the rest of the provinces?

Crotone, Catanzaro, and Reggio Calabria are all in Calabria. Reggio is the historic capital of the ‘Ndrangheta, the most powerful mafia in the world. It’s also the province with the worst quality of life according to Il Sole 24 Ore’s yearly index. Messina and Palermo have Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia we exported to the US a century ago.

Almost all of the top 15 safest provinces for burglary are in Sardinia, Calabria, and Sicily.

Here’s what we know so far: the safest provinces in Italy for break-ins are mostly in mafia country or on a remote island.

That’s not a coincidence.

Looking at this crime data, on the surface, a paradox appears: the scary south you were warned about looks much safer than the north.

The numbers are real. The conclusion is a trap.

For burglaries, the south is indeed safer. But the reason for this and the bigger picture of crime in Italy are worth discussing.

Before you pick a town to move to, you’ll want to know how safe the north and the south really are, and separate perception from reality.

Get this wrong, and the price is living in a place you’ll never quite be comfortable in. Or one that’s downright dangerous.

Is southern Italy safe?

Whether the south of Italy is safe or not depends on your definition of safety. In other words, what you’re afraid of.

If we go by total crime in Italy, the index cited by most journalists (Il Sole 24 Ore’s, built on Interior Ministry data), you’ll find that Milan in the north is the most dangerous city in Italy. Consistently, year after year for a long time now. Florence and Rome follow it. The safest provinces are all small and essentially invisible to tourists: Oristano, Potenza, Treviso, Benevento.

But that’s misleading. “Total crime” is largely influenced by the most popular crime: theft. So big tourist cities that see millions of people arrive each year have a high crime rate per capita. You’re not getting stabbed in Venice, but total crime doesn’t care whether your phone was lifted when you weren’t paying attention or if a blade narrowly missed your carotid.

To shed some light on crime in Italy, we need to split the data into specific types of crimes. I did, and the numbers paint a much more accurate picture of the country and the gap between north and south. (The rates below come from ISTAT’s reported crime data, per 100,000 residents.)

Summarizing it, the north and center tend to be affected by crimes against property. Home burglaries are twice as common in the north as in the south. Robbery and bag-snatching too.

The south is affected by more serious crimes: homicides, attempted homicides, threats, mafia association, and car theft.

For example, the crimes of mafia association are 0.03 per 100,000 in the north against the south’s 0.41. That’s over 13 times more prevalent.

Your car excluded, the south is safer for your things and more dangerous for your person.

The south looks sleepy and safe on the overall index because petty theft is relatively rare there outside of isolated cases like Naples.

Theft tends to follow where money, crowds, and tourists are. That is: Milan, Rome, Florence, Venice. A pickpocket works the Milan tram or the Rome metro, not Lentini in the province of Syracuse in Sicily.

Why the mob towns have the fewest break-ins

Back to Reggio Calabria, there are a couple of reasons why the headquarters of the ‘Ndrangheta has almost no break-ins.

The first reason has to do with control. A mob boss doesn’t want commotion or attention. Petty theft draws police presence in his neighborhood over, essentially, peanuts.

If a talented burglar were to start robbing homes, it would draw a lot of attention from the authorities who might find other illegal activities going on nearby. It also makes the local populace unhappy, which stress-tests their loyalty and ability to keep quiet about other crimes they have witnessed.

Over what? A 200-euro flat-screen TV? Some old jewelry you can pawn for 300 euros? The mob itself would put a stop to the burglar’s career for the sake of keeping the community happy and away from police investigations.

The real money is in drugs, pizzo (monthly extortion of businesses), rigged public contracts, money laundering, and so on. Real crime with millions of dollars in payoff, not petty stuff.

This is one incidental benefit of hierarchically organized crime. They offer informal, underground enforcement against petty crime. The uncomfortable truth, the intellectually honest acknowledgment, is that the mafia isn’t just coercion. It offers a brutally delivered service in places where the state is missing. Of course, in the process, they also end up being the cancer that eats alive the areas they control.

The second explanation is underreporting. “Snitches get stitches” applies to the south far more than the north. Trust in the authorities and the state is understandably lower. People take matters into their own hands or silently accept the victimization more often, so those crimes never get reported and never become statistics.

This second explanation is partially true but less convincing than the first one. Researchers at Transcrime, the organized-crime observatory in Milan, caution that this hypothesis is real but oversold. Above all, they admit it’s an effect that’s challenging to measure in the first place.

Where I do believe the underreporting is obvious is with extortion. The pizzo, protection money, is a staple of the mob in the south. A large share of businesses in Campania, Puglia, and Sicily pay it, whereas very few in the north do.

Yet, the reported extortion rates in the north and the south are almost on par (ISTAT again, 2024 data: 21.5 per 100,000 in the south and 19.6 in the north). A crime that even children know tends to concentrate below Naples barely skews south in the data.

Nobody is buying that. That gap is omertà, the code of silence. The consequences of reporting a stolen bag in the south are an hour wasted at the police station. The consequences of reporting your extortionist asking for pizzo are your shop getting firebombed or you getting shot.

Palermo’s Chamber of Commerce recently put a number on the silence: 800 extortion cases documented by police, two or three reported by the victims.

So treat the low burglary and pickpocket rates in the south as real. Your apartment in Crotone is likely not getting broken into. Nobody will steal your wallet at knifepoint there either. Just don’t read that as Crotone having low crime. You might not see it, unless you run a business, but the local criminal organization runs the show in town.

The crime you’ll see

What matters, arguably, are the crimes you’re likely to experience directly when you move to (or visit) Italy.

The south will quickly introduce you to the concept of parcheggiatore abusivo (abusive parking attendant), an unauthorized thug with clan connections who’ll extort 5 to 10 euros from you when you finally find a spot in a free parking lot. Refuse to pay, and your car will earn a few scratches. Or you might.

The north will smash your car window for leaving a bag or anything of remote value in it.

The south will steal the whole car, sell it for parts, or ship it abroad. On occasion, they’ll phone you and ask for ransom money. Yes, they essentially kidnap your car in a scheme known as “il cavallo di ritorno” (the returning horse).

And we already discussed the issue with pickpocketing in big cities, and burglaries in the north and center.

Immigrants and maranza

Immigration affects the crime numbers as well, so I’m going to touch that live wire. It also acts as useful context for understanding much of the current political discourse in the country.

Italy has received massive waves of immigrants over the past few decades: Albania, Romania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh. It’s not France by any means, but we have over 5.5 million legally resident immigrants. More if you count the undocumented ones. Most of them moved where the jobs are, which is the prosperous north.

This has an impact on crime, and I’ll give you the numbers. But first, the lens to read them through. There are many factors explaining why immigrants are so overrepresented in the crime statistics, and I could fill an entire essay with attenuanti (extenuating circumstances).

Very briefly:

• The immigrants are largely single, young males, a group that always skews high on crime. (Testosterone is a hell of a drug.)

• The gap between natives and immigrants is particularly high among the irregular immigrant population. Regular residents still offend more often than Italians, but the multiplier factor is much smaller.

• Immigration offenses are part of the overall statistics, and Italians cannot by definition be arrested for staying in Italy illegally.

• Immigrants from the aforementioned countries tend to take low-paying jobs and live at the margins of society where crime levels tend to be high regardless of nationality.

Now the numbers. Foreign nationals are just over 9% of the population and 31% of imprisoned people (Ministry of Justice data). That’s an overrepresentation by a factor of 3 to 4 times, depending on how you count.

The gap lands on the visible side of the equation: the crimes involved tend to be the detectable, street-level kind, and they concentrate in the north.

Maranza are young males, often (but not always) second-generation immigrants from North Africa, who act up in public. Typically bullying and threatening, occasionally pulling out a knife. This is a north problem.

Speaking of knives, I still remember, as a kid of roughly 12, when an Albanian we knew loudly complained about Italy to a group of us. I naively asked him why he came to Italy if he hated it so much. He pulled a knife on me and put it to my face.

A grown man, of perhaps 30, pulling a knife on a literal child, for a comment, an irreverent one in hindsight, but still just a comment. An uncivilized individual, not a people. Some of the most lovely people I have ever met in Italy were also Albanians. They largely managed to integrate into Italian society and contribute to it at all levels.

Many Italians are unhappy about the crime gap between immigrants and natives. Millions, in fact, feel that the immigrants are coming here to behave however they please.

“These sneaking and cowardly [people], the descendants of bandits and assassins... are to us a pest without mitigations.”

That last paragraph was actually from the New York Times Editorial Board (March 16, 1891). It expresses how millions of Americans saw southern Italian immigrants over a century ago. The word I bracketed was “Sicilians.” Now many Italians in the north see immigrants from selected countries in a similar light.

This is part of the reason why the right-wing ex-general Vannacci (more on the right than Prime Minister Meloni) and his new party, Futuro Nazionale, are growing in the polls with the “remigration” idea of somehow sending back the immigrants we accepted. A sort of Italian ICE operation for closing the barn to the tune of an estimated 5 billion euros a year after the horse has bolted.

Visible vs invisible risk

On the surface, the north is taking a beating. But the useful distinction is between visible and invisible risk, rather than a flat read of south safe, north unsafe.

The visible risk is pickpockets and burglaries in the center and north, smashed car windows in Milan, maranza harassing you on the bus. And in the south, it’s parcheggiatori abusivi, your car disappearing, and a thug shaking you down each month for the privilege of running a business.

The south is more insidious than the north, despite appearing safer, because of its invisible risk. It’s the economy the clans run and the informal order they enforce.

Statistics often fail to appropriately capture the lawlessness that casts a shadow over aspects of society in the south.

One last thing

If you are visiting Italy, simply worry about pickpockets. Get a borsello or sling, wear it across your front, and keep a hand on it in tourist hotspots and on the metro.

If you are moving there, crime should be a real filter for you. Both in terms of the type of crimes you are sensitive to (I’m personally partial to not being killed) and your tolerance for visible cues of criminal activity.

But it should be one filter, among several others. Italy is a relatively safe country. Safer than the United States and France on the Global Peace Index, with the lowest homicide rate in the European Union alongside Slovenia.

And if crime is still a major concern to you, the statistics are clear: focus on small, quiet provinces, not on north versus south.

Oristano has spectacular beaches.

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Pop quiz: who built the first programmable desktop computer?

It wasn’t a company in America. It was one in a humble Piedmontese town of 22,000 people.

The machine was the Programma 101 (shown below), widely credited as the first. It entered the market in 1965, years before Xerox PARC built the Alto and more than a decade ahead of the Apple I. Before Silicon Valley even had a name.

It weighed a hefty 35.5 kg (78 lb) and cost $3,200 (roughly $32,000 today), yet it sold a respectable 44,000 units. The majority of sales were to the United States, and even NASA bought ten. Programma 101 was used by engineers working on Apollo 11 calculations.

The real story of Olivetti is how a factory in Ivrea produced it. For sixty years the place was run as if it were a city, and by an industrialist who was elected mayor to test his own theories. The technology fell out of the philosophy, not the other way around.

Who founded Olivetti, and why in Ivrea

The Olivetti company was registered in Ivrea, a town in the Turin metropolitan area, on 29 October 1908. Camillo Olivetti, the founder, was a Jewish electrical engineer born and raised in Ivrea.

Camillo’s creativity and entrepreneurial tendencies ran in the family. His father, Salvador, was a textile trader, while his maternal grandfather was a banker.

His father died when Camillo was only 12 months old. Despite the challenges, his mother Elvira provided him with a good education, sending him to boarding school and eventually technical school, where he excelled.

His aptitudes and education led him toward industrial engineering, fluency in English, and extensive travel abroad. On his trips, he even met Thomas Edison.

His final stretch of time in the US was spent at Stanford in the 1890s as an assistant electrotechnical engineer before returning home to Italy and starting his company.

He built typewriters in a red brick workshop that he designed himself. The first model, the M1, was shown at the 1911 Turin Exposition and is now a coveted rare find among collectors.

Ivrea sits in the Canavese, a landscape of rivers and Alpine foothills below the Aosta Valley. A strange place to build an industrial future, but Camillo chose it because it was home.

Two values he held dear stand out. He raised his six children, with wife Luisa, on the idea that manual and intellectual labor were equal.

He demonstrated his respect for workers when the company nearly failed in 1914. He gathered them and explained there was no money. Instead of mass layoffs, he cut work hours in half while retaining the entire workforce. Many refused pay until the firm recovered.

Despite the travel, education, and influential people he met, everything Olivetti became started in that simple red brick factory.

Adriano Olivetti, the boss who became mayor

Camillo’s eldest son Adriano took over as director in 1932. He had extensively toured American factories in 1925, learning how to scale manufacturing, and returned home with a strange idea.

He wanted the factory not only to produce products, but to demonstrate a political argument.

In 1947 he founded Movimento Comunità (Community Movement). In 1956 he was elected mayor of Ivrea, and in 1958 he entered the Italian Parliament.

He wasn’t merely a benevolent boss who dabbled in politics. He was running an experiment about how people should live and work, and the company was the embodiment of that idea.

This innovative model didn’t lack critics. Some saw his approach as a form of enlightened paternalism: pro-worker, humane, even generous, but still built on the idea that a powerful employer and its management get to decide what’s best for the community.

By the early 1960s, from its humble red brick beginnings, Olivetti had grown substantially, employing around 36,000 people, more than half of them abroad.

Olivetti’s productivity secret

Olivetti offered many perks to its employees, including a nursery, library, evening classes, five-day weeks, wages above union standards, and free healthcare decades before it became universal. In 1930s Italy, these benefits were essentially unheard of.

As the company grew in size, they moved from the workshop to a glass factory (known as “la fabbrica di vetro”). Floor-to-ceiling windows allowed workers to see the Alps and passers-by to see the workers. The light and transparency were the goal.

Adriano made it a condition of taking over, one which many CEOs would struggle to sign their names to, that he would never fire an employee for financial reasons. He put the reasoning in print: “We must go beyond separations between capital and work, industry and agriculture, production and culture.”

It might seem a threat to the bottom line, but it’s a philosophy that yielded concrete results. By the late 1950s, Olivetti workers were among the highest-paid in Italian industry... but also the most productive.

The model wasn’t doing charity. It was a strategic approach.

From Lettera 22 to Programma 101

The Lettera 22 (designed by Marcello Nizzoli) is one of the most recognizable symbols of Italian design. It won the Compasso d’Oro in 1954. Five years later, the Illinois Institute of Technology named it the best-designed product of the previous 100 years. Light, stylish, and effective.

Joan Didion drafted Run, River on one. Cormac McCarthy wrote much of his work on the Lettera 32, the successor of the 22. Amusingly, he auctioned it at Christie’s in 2009 for $254,500, only to buy a replacement for $11.

But the typewriters undersell the rest of the company’s catalog. In 1959 Olivetti shipped the Elea 9003, one of the first fully transistorized commercial mainframes anywhere and the first built entirely in Italy. The lead engineer was Mario Tchou and the designer behind the console was Ettore Sottsass, who also designed the Olivetti Valentine typewriter displayed at MoMA.

Olivetti also entered the semiconductor industry, and helped found SGS in 1957, which later became STMicroelectronics, today one of Europe’s largest chipmakers.

In 1965, the Programma 101 was built by Pier Giorgio Perotto with a team of five. Affectionately known as the “Perottina”, it is widely considered the first desktop computer. At its New York debut, visitors assumed it was a terminal wired to a hidden mainframe and had to be told that the small box was the whole computer. It is also in the permanent collection of MoMA.

Between 1954 and 2001, Olivetti won 16 Compasso d’Oro awards, more than any company in the history of the prize. In 1986, it became the third-largest PC maker in the world. The 1990s then saw Olivetti become the largest in Europe.

Yet today, nobody owns an Olivetti computer or mobile phone. This story has no happy ending.

How Olivetti collapsed

Tragedy struck two key figures in the Olivetti empire less than two years apart. Adriano died of a heart attack on a train to Switzerland in February 1960, at age 58. No autopsy was performed despite the attending doctor asking for one.

Then Mario Tchou, the engineer running the Elea program, died in a head-on crash on the A4 near Santhià (Vercelli) in November 1961, at age 37.

Italian journalists called it “il giallo Olivetti” (the Olivetti mystery). Speculation is rampant, though most historians reject the conspiracy theory. Even the declassified CIA files on Adriano never produced a definitive answer.

What is not a mystery is what the state did as the company faced pressure: nothing.

In 1964, with the founders deceased, Olivetti’s bankers forced a sale of the electronics division to General Electric as a key condition to issue new operating loans.

Other European nations fiercely protected important companies on the verge of collapse. France protected Bull. Britain did it for ICL. West Germany, with Siemens. Yet, Italy did nothing to protect Olivetti.

Olivetti didn’t lack technology or talent. It had both in spades. The collapse was a combination of factors exacerbated by the passing of Adriano and Tchou. Sure, there were financial pressure and strategic mistakes, but the real death blow came from the absence of a national industrial policy to defend such a strategic Italian company.

Italy failed Olivetti far more than Olivetti has ever failed Italy.

The Programma 101 itself only hit the market because Perotto’s team, in typical Italian fashion, pulled a fast one. They cleverly reclassified the computer as a “calculator,” keeping it out of the GE deal. “Una furbizia” (a clever trick), a bureaucratic loophole really, allowed the first programmable desktop computer to survive.

The rest of its demise was slow death. Compounding bad decisions and failure to adapt. A late return to scale in the PC years, thinning margins, and then a pivot into telecoms. Finally, the loss of identity with the absorption into Telecom Italia in 2003. Olivetti ceased to exist as an independent company. By then, the part worth saving had been gone for forty years.

Ivrea today, and what tourists miss

In July 2018, UNESCO inscribed eighteen Olivetti buildings across Ivrea as World Heritage Site #1538, Italy’s first site recognized specifically as 20th-century industrial heritage.

You can walk it in an afternoon and visit the glass factory, workers’ housing, canteen, original red brick workshop, and open-air architecture museum. It still stands like a memorial to its accomplishments. Many older Italians share memories of the products they recollect, or wonder what could have been if they had held on longer.

However, those who remember are fewer every year. Almost nobody comes for this heritage site. Most visitors show up in February for the Battle of the Oranges, the carnival where the town splits into teams and pelts each other with three hundred tons of citrus. If you prefer a contemplative moment to step into another era of technology, rather than being pelted with oranges, this is the more interesting visit.

Why Olivetti still matters

The easy reading of all this is nostalgic, and at times tragic. A beautiful European moment ended; we mourn it, we move on.

Despite the demise of Olivetti, it has a form of immortality beyond its historical contributions to technology, as a concept. It is a case study for one specific claim: humane working conditions and frontier technology are not in tension.

A company built on the premise that they reinforce each other outproduced companies built on the opposite premise. It worked commercially right up until Italian bankers and Italian government inaction took it apart, while everyone else in Europe was doing the opposite.

Italians would call this “un’occasione mancata,” a lost opportunity. The phrase is far too small, however, for a loss so great. What was lost wasn’t an opportunity. It was a working argument in motion, already proven, that a factory could be a city and still build the best machines in the world.

Adriano saw the objections coming. He had a line for it:

“Often the term utopia is the most convenient way to liquidate what you do not have the ability, or the courage, to do.”

Olivetti wasn’t a tech company that happened to care about people. It was a project about people that happened to build some of the most important technology of the century.

Italy used to know the difference.

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After Marche, Tuscany, Veneto, Campania, and Abruzzo, today I’m covering Piedmont.

For those unfamiliar with this series, I analyze each region looking for towns that are good candidates for relocation.

I do so by applying a framework I designed to screen out towns that would be problematic or at least suboptimal for most people.

Too big, too small, depopulating, in a seriously dangerous seismic zone, no ER nearby, and so on. We want to end up with città di provincia, cities that are livable, human-sized, and have all the key services we need.

For generous regions with many surviving candidates, we narrow it further with additional filters that affect quality of life. For regions with few comuni (municipalities), I don’t apply these additional filters and, in extreme cases, even relax the core criteria.

Piemonte (Piedmont) is very generous with its 1180 comuni. Being strict, I was able to screen it down to 20 viable towns worthy of consideration.

Torino, the first capital of unified Italy, has incredible appeal to me personally. When I think of culture and elegance, I think of Torino. But it’s an ill fit for what this series is meant to surface. It’s just too big.

The beautiful, and somewhat famous, Langhe region is mostly out as well due to the opposite end of the population filter. Its towns are often too small to qualify, outstanding wine and hills notwithstanding.

So Barolo, La Morra, Neive, Monforte, and Serralunga are all out. Two Langhe cities survive and are worth considering if wine and white truffle appeal to you.

So 20 it is, spread across almost every province, with a healthy concentration in the province of Cuneo in particular.

You likely never heard of most of them, which is where the value of this exercise lies. I’m finding places you wouldn’t have thought of yourself and ensuring they are hidden gems rather than hidden nightmares.

What Piemonte is actually like to live in

Piemonte has 4.26 million people spread across seven provinces plus the Città Metropolitana di Torino, which replaced the old province in 2015. In practice, it works like a regular province as far as a resident is concerned.

The economy

Piemonte is industrious, with its economy largely divided into three sectors.

Post-industrial Torino is the huge one. With its hinterland, it employs two million people, many of whom are still in the aerospace and auto industries.

The province of Cuneo to the south has a strong agro-industrial economy. Think fruit and wine, the Italian capital of white truffle, and where Ferrero was founded.

The east is less prosperous but still has industry, including Biella’s wool, Casale’s cement, and Valenza’s gold.

The quality of life

The Il Sole 24 Ore and ItaliaOggi 2025 quality of life indexes agree that most of Piemonte’s provinces are middling. They flip the verdict on two of them: Torino and Cuneo.

Il Sole 24 Ore places Torino at 57th out of 107 provinces. ItaliaOggi has it at 26th, in the top third. The opposite happens with Cuneo, placed 27th by Il Sole 24 Ore and only 41st by ItaliaOggi.

My read is simple: Torino and Cuneo are both viable cities but have different pros and cons mostly due to their sizes. Torino is the big city option. Cuneo, the quieter one.

Don’t expect to move to Piemonte and get by with English alone. Outside central Torino and the tourist areas around Lago Maggiore, you'll need Italian. (Linguetto can help.)

The air quality

Piemonte has two shortcomings: there is no sea, and the air quality can be genuinely bad. As it’s often the case in the Po Valley, the cities on the plain are affected the most.

Torino had 39 days over the PM10 daily limit in 2025. 35 is the legal allowance for exceeding days. And 2025 was a good year. Settimo Torinese, nearby, hit 48 days. Other cities on the plain, including Alessandria, Asti, and Vercelli, do generally better, and certainly did this year, but they are still not ideal for sensitive populations.

The solution is altitude and the edges. In fact, Piemonte also has fresh alpine air. Just not at sea level.

I don’t have a filter in place for air quality, due to lack of reliable data at municipality level. However, I’ll point out for you when a surviving comune has air quality concerns so that you can choose with your eyes open.

Applying the filter to Piemonte

To recap our core framework to screen towns, we have: a population between 15,000 and 100,000, no seismic Zone 1, a full pronto soccorso (ER) within a 25-minute drive, a high school, a real supermarket, fiber-optic Internet, and a population decline below 5% on the 2014-2024 ISTAT window.

With Piemonte, which has more comuni than any other region except Lombardia, the population filter does the heavy lifting for us. We quickly go from 1,180 towns down to 45.

Torino and Novara are too big, and the rest of the comuni filtered out were all too small. I explained why tiny towns are not ideal for most people before.

You’ll be happy to learn that the seismic filter is useless here. It doesn’t screen out any town. Earthquakes are not a major concern in this region.

The services filter is also not helpful here. This is the efficient north, and virtually every town that has at least 15,000 people will have supermarkets, a high school, fiber Internet, ERs within 25 minutes, and so on.

Depopulation, even for the right-sized comuni, is a concern mostly in the east of the region. Venaria Reale (-6.58%), Casale Monferrato (-6.56%), Valenza (-5.81%), Acqui Terme (-5.49%), and Ciriè (-5.14%) are all out because they are slowly but surely emptying.

We are down to 40 viable options. Far too many to recommend. So the bonus filter I’m applying is the so-called “conurbation” criterion. I treat Torino’s belt as one metropolitan orbit with no distinct identity. They are dorm towns for Torino commuters. So they are out. Twenty of them, from Moncalieri to Volpiano, are out on this judgment call. They get the same air quality as Torino without the fancy architecture and culture Torino offers.

This leaves us with 20 comuni, which is plenty to choose from. Here they are.

1. Cuneo

• Province: Cuneo (CN)

• Population: 55,747

• Seismic risk: Zone 3S (low)

• Stability: -0.65% (2014-2024)

• Price range: €1,700-2,100/m²

• ER: In town (Santa Croce e Carle)

• Train station: In town

Cuneo is a great choice. The sensible one. It sits at 545 meters, which means the air quality is significantly better than Torino. It’s wedged between Alpine valleys (Cuneo means wedge in Italian), giving you access to literally 12 different valleys for hiking, fishing, and exploring nature.

The city itself has all the services you might expect in a medium Italian city of the north, and its porticoed streets allow you to walk the city under cover, rain or shine. Its square, Piazza Galimberti, is one of the largest in Italy.

Both quality of life indexes agree that Cuneo’s province is in the top half of Italy and its capital city is certainly a good representative of that. It even ranks third in Italy for young people’s quality of life.

What you get is an affordable, calm, tidy, and faintly Alpine city that can reach Torino by train in just a bit over an hour. It is also quite stable population-wise, so it’s not emptying.

The downside? Its winters are cold by Italian standards and quite snowy. If you’re okay with that, Cuneo will leave little to be desired.

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If you are trying to learn Italian, one of the best tools at your disposal is comprehensible input or something not too far from it. Without getting fancy with definitions, this means reading and listening to Italian content you mostly understand, but not quite 100%.

That’s how learning and all growth happen. One foot and a half in the known, half foot in the unknown.

So the fastest way from A2 to C1, and even C1 to C2 in Italian, is reading lots. Reading books, essays, news; the stuff Italians actually read. And doing the same with audio and video. Italian immersion in your own living room.

In this article, we’ll talk about the reading part. Specifically, how to get Italian books from abroad and which device to read them on. And, in next week’s follow-up, which books to actually read and in what order, using a framework you won’t find on the usual lists.

Buying Italian books from abroad is not so simple

You might think it’s easy to buy Italian books from, say, North America or Australia. It’s not.

Here are some of the issues you’ll run into:

• Locally, you’ll find very few Italian books available. Even major book chains in large cities will have few Italian titles.

• Many sites will not ship abroad or accept foreign credit cards.

• Those that do ship to you will often charge excessively.

• Local digital catalogs have little Italian inventory.

• Buying digital books abroad often runs into geo-blocks and payment issues.

So let’s see how to approach this and get you some Italian books.

Buying physical Italian books abroad

The most obvious choice you might think of is Amazon.it. It can work. However, shipping to North America tends to be very expensive.

For example, I added 7 books (novels, paperbacks) to my cart and shipping to Canada would have cost me close to $100 CAD. That’s $14+ per book. You’re doubling the cost of each book. Plus, whatever import charges your country imposes on books from Italy.

The better site, I found, is Libraccio. Their shipping costs are much more reasonable. Their selection and prices are better as well, and they carry used books, which in itself can offer you real savings.

Libraccio ships the same 7-book order for 11.60 euros (about $19 CAD). A fraction of Amazon’s shipping cost. For these specific books, they even throw in a free bag from the publisher. Plus, they give you reward points you can use for free books in the future.

For in-stock books, they arrive quickly via courier. Think a week, two max, not a month.

After trying several Italian alternatives over the years, for the paper route, Libraccio is my recommendation.

And here’s my take on paper. It has its place: illustrated editions, art books, photography tomes, specific titles you want on the shelf, or books that you can’t find digitally.

For everything else, digital is faster and cheaper. And getting to C1 is a volume game.

Why going digital

Digital is indeed faster. You can have books on your e-reader within minutes. That’s an advantage.

An even greater advantage is the built-in dictionary. You can hold a word on the screen and have it translated into your language.

I got my English foundation that way. I had a desktop version of software that would allow me to highlight words in English, and it would tell me what they meant in Italian. It was called Babylon. I probably learned my first 10,000 English words that way.

However, digital also means more complications, so I’m going to spend some time making recommendations that simplify the process for you.

Can you use an iPad or your phone to read? Absolutely. But an e-ink device is vastly better for your eyes and sleep. Plus, a device that buzzes every ninety seconds is the enemy of the deep reading that actually moves your level. Get e-ink.

Of course, you do you, but know this: reading a book on an iPad is screen time. Reading the same book on an e-reader is far closer to paper than to screen time.

Kindle vs Kobo for Italian books

Both ecosystems are fine. Both devices are great. However, in my opinion, Kobo has the better software, and Kindle has the better hardware.

By better software, I mean that Kobo gives you more options. Their devices are more open, philosophically speaking.

You can rent books from the library; on Kindle you can’t. You can read Adobe DRM ePub books on it (more on this below); on Kindle you can’t.

Instapaper is built-in on Kobo (it replaced Pocket in 2025), allowing you to add articles as you browse the web (like my own articles) and then read them in batch on your e-reader. For free. You can do that with Kindle, but it requires paying for Instapaper Premium each month in order to use their send to Kindle feature.

Kobo Plus has a subscription option that includes unlimited audiobooks as well. Connect Bluetooth earbuds or headphones, and you can listen to them from your Kobo device or the Kobo app on your phone. A great choice to double down on your Italian immersion.

The catalog is not huge, but it includes Italian books simplified for foreign learners as well as many classics from literature giants such as Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo, Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco, and so on. Amazon has Audible, and you’re paying by the book.

Where Kindle has the edge is in the device itself. Even though they use the same technology, Kindle manages to deliver a slightly sharper, crisper text with more even lighting.

If you already have one of these, or a more niche alternative like Boox or PocketBook, keep what you have.

If you don’t have one or wish to get a more modern version, opt for the Kobo Clara BW, or if available in your market, PocketBook Era for its larger screen.

PocketBook is a legitimate third option, with the widest format support of any device, including native reading of Adobe-DRM files. The problem is getting one. In Canada, at least, they’re harder to find and usually pricier than the equivalent Kobo.

Kindle can work; I own two, but the ability to read Adobe DRM ebooks present on other devices gives you a degree of flexibility not (legally) available on Kindle.

Acquiring Italian ebooks legally

You can be a pirate... arr... and get ebooks for free from various illicit sources, but you shouldn’t.

Thankfully, there are legitimate ways to buy Italian ebooks from abroad.

Being lazy, the most convenient place to look is the regular digital marketplace you use to buy ebooks in English (or whatever native language you speak).

If you use Kobo, the Kobo store in your country will have some Italian books. If you use Kindle, your localized Amazon site will offer some Italian digital books as well.

The problem is that it’s usually a fairly limited catalog. If you just want to read something in Italian, it’s convenient. Even Kobo Plus and Kindle Unlimited, the respective all-you-can-read monthly subscriptions, include several Italian titles.

But at some point, you’ll want specific books. You’ll hear a recommendation from me or a friend, and you’ll want to read that one. That’s when Kobo and Kindle’s native catalog for your region will likely fail you.

If you’re thinking of setting your device country to Italy to access Italian ebooks, it won’t work because both Kobo and Kindle have ways to check. It’s not even something you can easily solve with a VPN, because they require a credit card with Italian billing. I’m not saying a workaround is impossible, but it’s likely not worth your trouble, and it sits in a gray area legally.

If you have a Kobo device and a library card, you’re likely able to rent ebooks from the library as well via OverDrive. Again, you won’t generally find a ton of Italian titles, but it adds to the ones your local digital marketplace already offers you. For free.

Plus, classic Italian books are often available through projects such as Liber Liber and Project Gutenberg. Their copyright has expired, so they are legally available for download for free. The Italian within classics tends to be high-sounding by modern standards and antiquated at times, but it’s a free option.

The real bounty of Italian ebooks, however, comes from Italian bookstores.

Where to buy Italian ebooks abroad

There are plenty of Italian ebook stores. The challenge is getting them to accept your money.

Most geo-block you. You can use a VPN to appear as if you visited from Italy and still get rejected on account of your credit card’s foreign billing address.

I’ll mention three bookstores that should accept your hard-earned money.

My pick is Librerie.coop. It’s a popular chain of bookstores in Italy, and their ebook store accepts PayPal and most credit cards.

Then there’s IBS.it and Feltrinelli, giants who will happily accept your foreign card (though not Amex). They’re perfectly fine, but there is a catch: the type of files they issue. Which brings us to an important point about ePub formats.

Social DRM vs Adobe DRM

DRM is the lock a store puts on a file to ensure you don’t distribute it freely.

The two main types are Social DRM and Adobe DRM.

Social DRM is not really a lock. The files embed your name and email in subtle ways to ensure you don’t spread the ebook around. It keeps you honest but doesn’t impose any practical limit on the file. Any reader, software, or app will read it. You can freely transfer it from device to device, upload to Kindle to convert it, and so on.

It’s a gray ethical area, but in practice, you can pass it along to your spouse or kids as well with zero repercussions.

Where DRM gets really serious is Adobe DRM. Technically, you’re not even buying an ebook. You’re buying a license and downloading a .acsm file. You then need to install special software on your computer (Adobe Digital Editions), create an ID account, and authorize both the computer and the specific device you want to transfer the book to.

So Adobe DRM is actually locked, and the road to reading these ebooks is often peppered with obstacles. Let’s start with the fact that Adobe is offloading their ebook operation to a Wipro-run outfit called ByteBooks, so we are in transition.

Adobe IDs are actively migrating to ByteBooks accounts as of mid-2026, and new installs or device authorizations now require one. The software itself is being retired in favor of something that will replace it, at some point.

Users constantly report issues with the software failing to authorize computers, devices refusing to read the books, licenses appearing invalid when they shouldn’t, and so on. Adobe DRM can work fine, but far too often it’s a pain to deal with.

Kobo will generally work with Adobe DRM if you go through the song and dance of transferring the ebooks via the Adobe software and you don’t run into issues. PocketBook devices do an even better job, since they have built-in support for Adobe DRM. Kindle is out.

One concrete example. La volpe che amava i libri by Nicola Pesce, a short, modern novel, costs €3,49 on Librerie.coop with Social DRM. The same book, for the same price on IBS, is wrapped in Adobe DRM.

Here’s the annoying part: most recent, popular titles are Adobe DRM. The big publishing houses (e.g., Mondadori, Einaudi, Rizzoli) mandate Adobe to protect their intellectual property, and the stores simply oblige.

If the publisher is okay with Social DRM, it then comes down to the store preference. Take Amélie Nothomb’s Stupore e tremori: Social DRM on Librerie.coop and directly from the publisher Voland. It sells as Adobe DRM on IBS and Feltrinelli. The two big chains wrap everything in Adobe.

Librerie.coop honors the publisher’s lighter protection and prints the DRM type on every book page.

So the rule is simple. Buy Social DRM whenever the book offers it, which in practice means selected books on Librerie.coop or straight from reader-friendly publishers. Save the Adobe acrobatics for a title you genuinely can’t find any other way, and go in knowing what you signed up for. And if you read on a Kindle, skip Adobe altogether. Buy the paper copy instead.

In summary

In short, here is what I recommend you do:

• Look in the native catalog for your device and hook up your local library to see what it has in Italian. (Skip the library for Kindle.)

• If a title you want isn’t there, search Librerie.coop and other Italian ebook stores, and opt for a Social DRM copy whenever it’s offered.

• If a title exists only as Adobe DRM, do the song and dance to transfer it to your Kobo or similar device. If you read on a Kindle, skip Adobe and buy the paper copy from Libraccio instead.

• Use Instapaper to read online articles as if they were a book. With Calibre, you can even fetch Italian news and transfer the resulting ePub to your device.

Reading is still the work. Rewarding work, but still work. Nobody will transfer the book into your head. Access alone won’t make you C1. The reading will. But the excuse of not having access to Italian books is gone, and the work can begin.

Do this enough, and your reading comprehension will climb to C1.

Next week, I will publish a ladder of Italian books I recommend to my students. When you reach its last ranks, you’ll be able to reach past any vocabulary or complexity wall.

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We were done having dinner when my sister turned toward me and said, “By the way, should you ever return to Italy, don’t move to the south of Marche. There is f**k all there.”

I have a very good internet connection at home. 1.5 Gbps of fiber-optic. Rarely down. Recently, while staying at a guesthouse in Assisi, my fiancée Alicia asked me, “Is the Wi-Fi slow for you as well?”

“Yeah, a bit,” I replied. I checked. 42 Mbps. Forty-two through fifteenth-century stone walls in a hilltop town is just short of a technological miracle. Yet, it felt slow and frustrating.

The internet connection I use most often has skewed my perception of what fast and slow mean. How quickly we adapt.

From my sister’s point of view, living in Pesaro, a relatively large city by Marche standards, the south of the region does appear to have “un cazzo di niente” (f**k all).

Was she right? Let’s contextualize what nothing means, through my adoptive North American eyes. Because it matters when you relocate from abroad. Are you moving to “nothing”?

F**k all vs Un cazzo di niente

Alicia and I love day trips. We also have a problem. Every time we consider going somewhere for a day trip, we realize that even driving 3 hours straight, there is essentially nothing.

Now, the Okanagan in British Columbia is beautiful. People pay good money to come to this area on holiday. If you love fishing, boating, hiking, drinking wine, there is lots to do.

I’m not arguing that there is nothing to do here for the right person. But it’s all mono-thematic. It’s a good place for the outdoors.

Within a 3-hour drive, you get Salmon Arm, Vernon, Kelowna, Kamloops, Merritt, Osoyoos, and Greenwood (the smallest city in Canada).

Towns that are essentially larger or smaller versions of Penticton, where we live, with not much to do outside of the aforementioned outdoor activities.

If you like art, history, theater, music, beautiful bookstores, culinary experiences, cultural events, exploring cities on foot, and so on, the Okanagan becomes a desert metaphorically as well. Kelowna has a gallery and a university. Granted. But the culture is thin.

And that’s with a car. There are no trains available locally.

F**k all, as we were saying.

My sister characterized the south of Marche in similar terms. I’ll concede that there are more lively places, especially for young people. Pesaro is certainly more vibrant than a small town in the province of Fermo.

But “un cazzo di niente” is not quite rural North American “f**k all.” And the Okanagan, compared to many parts of this country, is hardly rural in the first place.

The Fermo, Macerata, and Ascoli Piceno provinces preserve most of the outdoor playground options available in the Okanagan (with the sea in place of lakes). And they add a whole lot more.

Ascoli Piceno is cut from travertine; its Piazza del Popolo is among the most beautiful squares in the country.

Macerata keeps one of Italy’s oldest universities and fills a nineteenth-century open-air arena, the Sferisterio, for a serious summer opera festival.

Recanati was Leopardi’s town; the hill of “L’Infinito” is still there to experience.

Fermo hides Roman cisterns beneath its streets, and a frescoed library and cathedral at its top.

Nearly every town of any size holds onto its own historic theater. Marche is known as “la terra dei cento teatri” (the land of a hundred theaters).

Then there is the food. You don’t even need to drive anywhere, because ciauscolo, vincisgrassi, olive ascolane, and some great wines are all in town. Plus all the sagre (food festivals) nearby.

So my sister is right: Fermo is quiet. It is. But quiet is not nothing. And when you move from abroad, you don’t live only in a town. You live in what it can reach.

Within a 3-hour window of, say, Porto San Giorgio in my own Fermo province, you have:

• North: Ancona, Pesaro, San Marino, Rimini, Ravenna, Bologna.

• West: Urbino, the caverns at Frasassi, Assisi, Perugia, Spoleto, Orvieto, Arezzo, Rome.

• South: Termoli, Pescara, L’Aquila, Foggia.

Some by car, but most even via train or bus. Yeah, the list above includes Rome. The Rome. The antithesis of nothing.

You can also reach half a dozen UNESCO World Heritage sites in less than 3 hours.

From Penticton, I can reach the COSTCO heritage site in Kelowna, since it moved and was replaced by a Canadian Tire.

Access to such cultural depth is missing in much of rural North America. Something that can’t be easily replaced.

To my starved North American eyes, “un cazzo di niente” in Italy is quiet and peaceful, with culture and excitement not too far away.

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This post is part of a series of articles meant to help you find Italian towns worth moving to.

So far I covered:

• Marche

• Tuscany

• Veneto

• Campania

This time around, we’ll explore Abruzzo.

In this series, we apply strict filters, region by region, and see what comes out. The surviving municipalities are usually livable cities, neither too big nor too small. It is the framework I would use myself if moving back to Italy today.

Our framework does something interesting to Abruzzo: it completely erases the mountains.

Don’t get me wrong, the mountains are arguably the most beautiful part of Abruzzo. The real issue is that we are looking at potential relocation spots and when the postcards and the safe choices are far apart, we must opt for the latter.

The eight surviving cities in Abruzzo are all coastal. Let’s put on our swimming goggles and dive in.

What Abruzzo is like

Abruzzo has 305 comuni (municipalities). Actually, make that 303 since Pescara is about to swallow two neighbors in 2027.

It’s home to 1.27 million people, spread across four provinces: L’Aquila, Teramo, Pescara, and Chieti. That relatively small number of people is going down each year.

Whether Abruzzo is central or southern Italy is a contested topic. Geographically, it is central. Culturally and economically, it is slightly more southern. My take is that it’s both.

The 7% tax haven

What matters more is that Abruzzo qualifies for the 7% retiree/passive income tax like southern regions do. It’s a fantastic fiscal deal, so I’ll be pointing out which towns on our list qualify for it.

It’s worth mentioning that Abruzzo has the most participants in the program. The number of people who took advantage of it to date is relatively small (hundreds, not thousands), but Abruzzo was their first choice. In fact, it has more people retiring there (on this tax haven program) than Campania, Calabria, Basilicata, and Molise combined! That should tell you something about the region’s value proposition.

Two regions in one

Abruzzo is essentially two regions in one. Coastal Abruzzo is the one spread along the Adriatic, with its flat sandy beaches, warm climate, busy summer, and jobs.

Behind it, the gorgeous Abruzzo of the high Apennines, the Gran Sasso and the Maiella. Postcard-worthy. A dream if you like the mountains and hiking.

For most people, living in Abruzzo means living in the first one. The second one, despite L’Aquila being the regional capital, is best reserved for visiting.

“Antonio, let me get this straight: I get the beaches, the mountains, the 7% tax rate if retiring there; where is the catch?” I hear you ask.

There are two honest catches.

Seismic risk

The first is that Abruzzo is one of the worst regions of Italy for seismic risk.

This is not theoretical. In 1915, in Avezzano (L’Aquila), 30,000 people died in a single morning. In 2009, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake killed 308 people in L’Aquila itself. The region’s own capital is still rebuilding fifteen years later. In 2016 and 2017, the Teramo mountains were hit hard. And in January 2017, an avalanche caused by an earthquake buried a luxury hotel in Rigopiano, killing 29 people.

Thankfully, we have our seismic filter in place. It will eliminate all of the riskier places for you. And if that means getting rid of the mountains, so be it.

The economy

The second catch is the economy.

Tourism is real but mostly seasonal. There is some light manufacturing in the north and an auto industry around Atessa, where Stellantis runs the biggest van factory in Europe.

Most of my readers won’t be able to rely on local jobs. I suspect you’ll either retire here, move with passive income, or work remotely from a laptop.

So for you, the lack of jobs mostly shows up as a cheap cost of living. It’s an unfair advantage, but as long as you pay your taxes, you are helping a depopulating region, and the locals won’t resent you for it. I have seen countless testimonies of people who moved to Abruzzo, and they are almost universally happy.

Quality of life

Because of Abruzzo’s few jobs and business opportunities, all four provinces score middle of the pack or worse on Il Sole 24 Ore’s quality-of-life index.

Namely:

• Teramo (68th)

• Pescara (40th)

• L’Aquila (69th)

• Chieti (62nd)

Out of 107 provinces. Pescara in particular ranks respectably, on top of being first in Italy for cultural shows per capita.

By the way, language-wise, don’t expect Abruzzo to speak English. You might hear it on occasion in Pescara in August, but this is squarely Italian-is-a-must territory.

Crime

Abruzzo is safe, but a small degree of visible crime does exist. For example, Pescara is 31st in the country for crime, with car theft being particularly prominent there.

Teramo is 53rd (5th for prostitution exploitation). Chieti, 79th (3rd for loan-sharking, but it’s a very small sample of only four reported crimes).

L’Aquila is 86th but 3rd for attempted homicide and 10th for smuggling.

On the whole, crime is not a major concern here.

Climate and Cost

As we were saying, Abruzzo really is two regions in one. The mountains are cold and snowy. L’Aquila is one of the coldest regional capitals in Italy, and Roccaraso is a legitimate ski town.

Conversely, the coast is mild in winter, and hot and humid in the summer.

As you can expect, it’s more expensive than the interior. That said, by Italian standards, Abruzzo remains cheap. Even coastal Abruzzo. Asking prices for the Chieti coast rarely clear €1,700 per square meter. The regional average looks big because it’s inflated by ski resorts demanding north of €2,700 per square meter.

I personally see the coast as the preferable option, plus the whole “house won’t fall on me during an earthquake” thing it has going for it.

And always remember that the asking prices you see on the portals are rarely what the sellers end up getting. It’s a buyer’s market. Especially in Abruzzo. Offer 20% below listing price and move from there.

Running the filter on Abruzzo

Abruzzo is not densely (or very) populated, so the population filter does most of the screening for us. Apply the 15,000-100,000 range and 288 comuni get dropped in one pass.

Pescara has over 100,000 people, and Montesilvano and Spoltore are joining it in January 2027, so all three are out.

Abruzzo really is four cities, and then small towns and semi-empty villages.

The seismic filter kills L’Aquila, Avezzano, and the incredibly charming Sulmona on the spot. You can go live there if you want, but do so with open eyes. Pay attention to the seismic retrofitting measures of a given property you’re considering.

The depopulation filter takes out most of the remaining comuni that won’t ultimately make the cut. Chieti is down 7.2% since 2014, well above the 5% filter threshold. Teramo down 6.2%. Ortona, 6.9%.

What we are left with is eight towns, all on or beside the coast.

1. Vasto (Chieti)

• Province: Chieti (CH)

• Population: 40,400

• Seismic risk: Zone 3

• Stability: 0%

• Price range: €1,300-2,200/m² (average: ~€1,640)

• 7% eligible: No (over 30k)

Vasto is coastal but doesn’t simply behave like a resort. It’s closer to being an actual city. At over 40,000 people, you start to have the advantages of larger towns, including self-sufficiency and services like a first-level hospital and ER. You also get seismic Zone 3, the lowest hazard level available in the region.

The downside for retired and passive income folks is that it’s too big to qualify for the 7% tax rate. But if you are still working, its size is mostly an advantage for you.

Like many cities on the Adriatic Sea, Vasto is somewhat seasonal. It has an old center on a hilltop that remains stable and a newer coastal marina area that gets busy during the summer months. Choose according to taste and budget. The seafront can be quite a bit more expensive than the old town.

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The US Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a former heroin addict. He also knows how to fix the American drug crisis.

I envy his certainty, never letting nuance get in the way of his ideas.

Because the man does have one idea worth discussing.

RFK Jr.’s blueprint for the drug epidemic is a vineyard in the peaceful hills behind Rimini. He has been enamored with Italy’s San Patrignano, the largest drug-recovery community in Europe, which he sees as the template for a national network of “wellness farms.”

He has talked about children being “reparented” on such farms, and has described San Patrignano as a beautiful place with 2,000 children working the land. When challenged later on, he said he did not recall using the word.

The wellness farm concept is not new. In the Victorian era, this approach was a common mental health treatment that spread across the UK and North America.

“Asylum” or “pauper farms” were large agricultural estates that were self-sufficient due to the labor of their patients.

Dairy, meat, vegetables, and other goods were produced to feed the large numbers of staff and patients who lived on site. They were almost like towns unto themselves with many self-contained services.

Mental health experts at the time saw this as not just an economic advantage, but a chance to teach its residents self-discipline and practical skills. Additionally, physical labor and exercise were seen as therapeutic.

Just like San Patrignano, these farms’ approach looked holistic. Common sense-driven. Even idyllic. However, this treatment came as a smooth-coated pill that’s easy to swallow but leaves a bitter aftertaste for decades.

To correct claims RFK has made: there are around 850 residents, not 2,000. Most of them today are adult men, not teenagers.

Reporters inquired, and the community itself showed surprise at the attention. They had no memory of Kennedy ever visiting or contacting them.

The reason the model appeals to him is clear: it echoes his own recovery. What he and his administration keep missing is that San Patrignano was never a model.

The long-standing argument around it is still alive. Italy has been debating it since 1978 without ever reaching a verdict.

What San Patrignano is

Much like the Victorian farms, San Patrignano is also, in essence, a self-contained village located on an extensive amount of land (i.e., 700 acres).

It sits in the comune (municipality) of Coriano, an inland town in the province of Rimini. The community has everything it needs, including a vineyard, horse stables, multiple kitchens, and dormitories. It also features dairy, leather, and textile workshops.

Residents do not stay for the standard short-term treatments of 28 days, but for approximately three to four years. They develop a routine of waking up on schedule, working all day in one of the production sectors, and nothing is owed for their stay.

The whole community runs on their labor, and the generous donations of wealthy donors well known to their founder.

The method is total abstinence, strictly enforced. No prescriptions of methadone or buprenorphine, the two medications most addiction doctors consider the standard of care for opioids.

Recovery is peer-led by graduates of the program, not by physicians. For many years, there were barely any doctors on site at all. A fact that would later lead to many questions of safety.

So if you’ve been imagining a posh wellness retreat with Italian sun, recalibrate. Kids of celebrities have been here, but this isn’t celebrity rehab. It’s a working community. One whose exit was controlled for decades by a single man: its founder, Vincenzo Muccioli.

Before Italy built a system, it built Vincenzo

To understand why San Patrignano came into existence, one must understand how heroin found its way into the homes of everyday Italian families with a death grip that no one could seem to loosen.

Heroin arrived in volume in the mid-1970s and then suddenly blew up. Estimates placed the number of opiate users in 1977 at 28,000. The number tripled in five years. In the following decade, over 5,000 people died from drug use, most of them from heroin.

As a child in Ostia (Rome), I remember having to step carefully due to the large presence of needles on the sidewalk and playgrounds. Everybody knew someone whose kid was addicted.

What users did not anticipate were the consequences of sharing needles. AIDS came as the unintended passenger and finished what the overdoses started.

The state did little in response to the bodies piling up for decades and the families screaming for help.

In fairness, it’s a hard problem to crack. But in 1975 Italy’s drug laws were some of the most relaxed in Europe. Public addiction services, the SerT clinics, did not exist in nationwide organized form until 1990, when a law created them.

Into that desperation walked Vincenzo Muccioli. Burly, mustachioed, magnetic. A hotel-family businessman, farmer, natural-health enthusiast, and fringe spiritualist with no medical training and total conviction. He started taking addicts onto his farm and getting them clean by force.

Desperate parents worshipped him for setting boundaries and speaking to their loved ones in ways that they could not. He became, on Italian television, a kind of secular saint, or a strong father figure for those who wandered and found themselves lost.

Italy didn’t design a response to its heroin generation. Instead, its desperation built a well-spoken hero, and then it felt the problem was contained safely within his hands.

That is the classic role Italians recognize instantly, and Americans typically don’t: the padre-padrone (father-master). That is the strongman whose methods we might not like, but he gets it done when institutions won’t even dare to touch a problem. And for his trouble, he demands absolute obedience.

Muccioli wasn’t so much running a clinic; he was running a patriarchal society. A frightened country was grateful to let him wrestle an enemy it did not yet understand. He was their David, as they waited anxiously for Goliath’s head.

The chains, and the body wrapped in a blanket

The trouble with handing one man absolute authority over thousands of people (who are essentially captive) is that it works only as well, and as compassionately, as the benevolent dictator who runs it.

Within a few years of its opening, both success stories and rumors of abuses began to emerge. In 1983, the first official scandal was prominently featured in the newspapers: il processo delle catene (the Chains Trial). Muccioli was accused of chaining residents.

Detoxification is a complex procedure that is normally medically supervised. The process is brutal, and without proper oversight it can turn dangerous, or even deadly, fast.

San Patrignano had almost none of that oversight. It was focused instead on keeping residents from leaving and returning to the streets, by any means necessary.

Muccioli was convicted at first instance in 1985, then acquitted on appeal and cleared definitively by the Cassazione in 1990. Former residents nonetheless testified, in detail, to being chained, and described a community where someone was tasked with hunting down those who escaped and beating them.

The violence they applied at San Patrignano had a logic. A twisted one. One you wouldn’t assume. But a logic nevertheless.

For most residents, what got you chained was not using again. The mortal sin was attempting to leave before Muccioli arbitrarily decided you were ready. By and large, the beatings were reserved for those trying to escape or refusing to show enough reverence towards Muccioli. Much of the documented abuse appears to have centered on refusal to bow and assimilate.

Then, it happened. It was bound to. A body appeared.

In 1989, a former resident, Roberto Maranzano, was beaten to death at San Patrignano, his body then dumped near Naples, five hundred kilometres away, wrapped in a community blanket.

In 1993, recordings surfaced in which Muccioli discussed having learned of the killing and not reporting it, the conduct he would be convicted of covering up.

He was convicted of helping to cover up the death of Maranzano. In 1995, at 61, he died with the case still on appeal. The family never publicly disclosed the cause of death and, as one would expect, many speculative theories have been born.

We are not here to judge a dead man, who, drunk on power or not, ultimately tried to help a lost generation. We are here to judge his approach.

And the approach is stripping people of everything, locking the gate, removing any agency, demanding absolute compliance, and giving one charismatic father figure unchecked, medically unsupervised power over them. The abuse is not a bug. It’s the logical conclusion of the design.

Why Italy still argues about Vincenzo Muccioli

Italians are often split on matters of public opinion. That is not unique to us. What’s slightly more unique is our television culture that builds heroes and then tears them down.

We certainly did with Muccioli.

In the 1980s, the talk shows couldn’t stop talking about this saint saving our addicted youth. The big names of Italian TV all put him on. The donations rolled in, most of them from one family. The Morattis, the oil dynasty behind Saras, would pour in something like €286 million over the years. Celebrities sent their own kids who struggled with drugs.

When the trials came, the same cameras swung around and filmed him in a much less favorable light.

This is yet another case in which giustizia spettacolo, justice as television, plays out just as it did in the Cogne murder case. The audience becomes the judge of the court proceedings replayed as a prime-time melodrama on TV. One that reaches its verdict well before all the evidence is even presented.

In 2020, Netflix dropped SanPa: Sins of the Savior, a scathing documentary that allowed a whole new audience to judge.

Muccioli’s heirs sued for defamation. His son wrote a book calling the portrayal biased and one-sided. Former residents published their own accounts, some damning, some grateful, all of them certain, and all adding to the confusion that is “SanPa.”

Forty-plus years on, there is still no agreed story. Italy does not metabolize its past and move on. It argues about it, loudly, indefinitely. In the end, the public jury is perpetually a hung one. San Patrignano is just one of the louder arguments.

Is San Patrignano still open today?

Yes. It runs today, but in a smaller and quieter form. Here’s what changed:

• Muccioli has been dead for 30 years;

• His family stopped running San Patrignano in 2011;

• It admits a much smaller number of addicts and only those who are no longer in active withdrawal;

• There is no credible evidence that chains or beatings are used today.

What changed is the coercion, not the model. The long stays, the abstinence-only approach, the unpaid work.

We can argue about what’s left, but the chains and the blanket thankfully belong to a man who has been dead since 1995.

San Patrignano, by its own account, has taken in more than 25,000 people across four decades. It sells goods to keep itself going, such as wine, cured meats, and leather goods. It’s also perfectly possible to visit, eat there, or order a case of its Sangiovese.

The community publishes the numbers that make Kennedy and others swoon: 72% of graduates stay off drugs, and 92% find work. Treat those as claims, not verified findings.

Long-term abstinence rates are notoriously hard to measure and harder to compare across programs. Take those stats with a grain of salt, as an organization that grades its own homework is not peer-reviewed research.

Actual researchers, meanwhile, warn that an abstinence-only model with no medication is exactly the wrong tool against fentanyl, where medication is often the only thing keeping people alive long enough to recover.

The most honest take on the community, arguably, came from a firsthand witness: Pierfrancesco Villaggio. He’s the son of Paolo Villaggio, the actor every Italian knows as Fantozzi.

Pierfrancesco started shooting heroin at seventeen. By age twenty-two, his family had burned through a fortune trying clinics in Switzerland and California with no success.

In 1984, his father got him through the gate at Coriano by deception, allegedly an Oscar-worthy performance involving a rented car. He stayed there for three years.

He claims the place saved his life. He has also admitted to being beaten there, and that things close to torture happened. He claimed that of all of the men he detoxed alongside, a couple got clean, but sadly most are dead.

Both halves of this argument are him. When asked years later whether he’d send his own child to Muccioli, he didn’t blink or hesitate: yes, without a doubt.

That is the whole complicated story in one man. Not a column of pros and a column of cons to be added up.

The same gate, the same hero (or monster) and the same three years that broke people and freed them, sometimes the very same person.

What RFK Jr. gets wrong

Kennedy’s idea was publicly challenged in April 2026, when Senator Angela Alsobrooks questioned him for his remark about “reparenting” children on these wellness farms.

He said he apologizes if he used that term, but doesn’t recall using it. He still stood firm on the idea, which at times he's floated for more than just addicts, including kids he says have been harmed by the overprescription of antidepressants.

RFK Jr. treats San Patrignano like an Italian recipe America could cook at home. The main ingredients: grapes, work, and abstinence. Perhaps a strong man in charge. A real man. Like Vincenzo. Or himself.

What he doesn’t see is the whole picture and the place's history. San Patrignano wasn’t engineered. It emerged out of a specific catastrophe: a dying generation, an absent government, and parents frightened enough to surrender their kids to a man’s total authority.

The farm was the visible front of the deal. The respectable one. The desperation and unchecked power, the invisible one. At times, the deadly one.

The community itself, notably, has not been campaigning to become America’s blueprint. It seems to understand its own story better than its loudest American admirer does. It operates quietly and wishes to distance itself from the controversial past.

San Patrignano’s own medical director, Antonio Boschini, told NPR the model can’t be safely scaled to a national program: when the community tried to expand in the 1990s, he said, it went out of control, and someone was killed.

The vineyard is the easy part to copy. Anyone can plant grapes on a hillside and set recovering addicts to work among them. Implementing this model compassionately in a way that’s aligned with current evidence on addiction treatment is the real challenge.

The stories from SanPa and the echoes of abuse from the Victorian past do not help to get the public on board with another attempt at this model of treatment.

The saddest part is the absence at the center of it. A generation was dying, the state had gone quiet, and a country was frightened enough to hand its children to one large, certain man and call whatever he did to them love.

In the end, Italy got the man it needed and asked for. Whether he was a hero or a villain depends on whom you ask.

For decades, the country has tried its best to decide whether to thank him or to condemn him for what he built, somehow managing to do both.

Now, an ocean away, another certain man wants to try the same.

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In 1998, in a popular episode of Seinfeld, a robber grabs Jerry’s small leather bag. A cop nearby asks him to describe what was stolen. He hesitates. He uses euphemisms. He squirms. Finally, he relents and loudly admits that it’s a purse. He carries a purse.

For the entire duration of the episode, his defense was that it’s not a purse. It’s a European carry-all.

Jerry was actually right. It was European. He was wearing a borsello, the Italian man bag. He was just twenty years too early to win that argument in North America.

Because, believe it or not, the man purse won. Quietly, worn slightly differently, and under an assumed name, but it won. Many North American men carry one even if they would physically fight you for calling it a purse.

The women reading this, meanwhile, solved the whole problem around the invention of the handbag and have probably been watching men reinvent it ever since.

What is a borsello?

A borsello is a small men's bag. The word comes from borsa (bag), and the masculine diminutive marks it as a men's item.

Italian has a remarkably specific vocabulary for bags. Portafoglio is a wallet. Borsellino is a coin wallet or very small bag. Marsupio is a belt bag, what North Americans call a fanny pack. The tracolla is any bag worn crossbody. The pochette is a flat clutch bag carried in hand (rare among straight men, even in Italy). A zaino is a backpack.

Size-wise, a borsello sits in between a portafoglio and a zaino. It has a strap that you wear on your shoulder or across your body.

Inside you’ll typically find a phone, keys, wallet, tissues (virtually everyone in Italy carries pocket tissues), and other small accessories.

Italian trousers are cut close, and we really care about style in Italy. So the borsello emerged as a solution to the problem of bulging pockets wrecking the line. Form leading to function. Very Italian.

Why North American men rejected the man purse

Ask an Italian man why he carries a borsello, and he’ll be puzzled by the question. Where is his stuff supposed to go?

Ask the same question to a guy in rural Alberta, and you’ve just questioned his masculinity. Fighting words.

The gap is cultural, not practical. North American culture spent decades mocking any man carrying a bag without a laptop in it.

Seinfeld is the documentary record. So is Friends, where Joey insists his man bag isn't a purse. And so is The Hangover, for that matter, where Alan insists he’s not wearing a purse. He’s wearing a satchel. Indiana Jones wears one.

In three of America’s most prominent examples of a man with a bag, the guy scrambles to explain that the thing on his shoulder isn’t what it obviously is.

Here’s what they were dancing around: the bag was never the issue. The word purse was.

An Italian man doesn’t need a cover story. Carrying your things in a bag is culturally normative for both men and women. Nobody will question your sexuality because of it.

A man in Naples with a leather tracolla reads as put-together and well-prepared, not soft. So if you’re visiting and you’re worried that a bag would make you look unmanly, stop. The locals dropped that anxiety roughly half a century ago.

The sling bag is a man purse with a rebrand

Centuries ago, both men and women wore purses. Then men’s clothes began to have pockets, and men stopped wearing them while women continued.

The need to hold things never went away. North American men simply remedied it with bulging pockets. But the amount of stuff we need to hold has grown over time. Phones alone take a full pocket. Our keys include car key fobs. In the summer months, having sunglasses with you is handy. You get the gist.

So the moment it became socially acceptable to have a bag, many North American men flocked to it. The clever trick was rebranding the bag.

It was no longer a man purse, a murse, or a men’s bag. It was a sling: one strap, worn across the chest or back, marketed within an inch of its life. The fastest-growing men’s bag in North America.

Go to Amazon, and the bestsellers in the men’s category aren’t labelled as purses. They are “sling bags”, “tactical sling bags”, “technical sling bags”, “anti-theft crossbody bags”, and “EDC chest rigs” (EDC being everyday carry, a whole hobby around things you keep on you just in case).

The product is a small bag you wear on your body. Which is to say, a borsello! The marketing just bolted on some webbing and called it gear.

The man purse in North America started calling itself tactical (for the blue-collar crowd) or technical (for the white-collar one). Both groups, the same ones who'd have mocked Jerry, now buy theirs in coyote brown or solid black.

This isn’t me projecting. Industry numbers show a men’s luxury bag market north of $10 billion in 2025, and the broader chest-and-sling category has been growing at double digits year after year.

Google Trends shows an 80% worldwide growth in search interest for the keyword “sling bag men” over 2025. And it doubled in the United States. “crossbody bag men” grew 300% in the US over the same period.

Sling vs borsello in Italy

In Italy, the keyword “borsello” is up 10% over 2025, a modest number justified by a more mature market and the diversification introduced by sling bags. “borsa sling” grew over 5,000%, and it’s a breakout keyword in Italy.

In North America, a generation of men decided pockets weren’t enough and found a word that gave them permission. “Sling” was the magic word, one that is starting to appeal to Italians too.

The split between borsello and sling in Italy is geographic and demographic.

Younger men, especially in the north, are embracing slings or a slim tracolla, often by well-known designers (Gucci, Lacoste, etc.). Older men, especially in the south, tend to prefer the traditional borsello option. In the north, the borsello is starting to have zio (uncle) energy.

I’m 45 and an actual uncle, so I’m perfectly fine with my preference for the traditional borsello.

A good bag solves a real problem (pockets are small, cities have thieves, men carry phones now) without announcing itself as a fashion statement or a gender role argument. The bag, whether a borsello or a sling, is just a bag.

Jerry, Joey, and Alan were mocked for carrying a man bag. Two decades later, men everywhere carry a small bag to the gym, the office… even the club. What changed is the product name and the price tag.

Italians skipped all of that. They looked at a small bag that holds things and figured it was useful and stylish. So, they never felt the need to come up with a cover story.

Sometimes carrying a purse and calling it that is the most confident thing a man can do.

Appendix: my borselli

I’m not a prepper. You won’t find a basement full of canned beans, just in case. But I do like to be ready, and I'm into the everyday-carry hobby to some extent. A multitool, flashlight, pen and notebook, tissues, the medical basics… that kind of thing.

They have to live somewhere. So over the years I’ve ended up with more borselli than a man strictly needs. Alicia doesn’t feel judged for doing the same with her purses, so our addiction to bags is something of a family bonding activity.

The one I bought in Assisi (depicted above) is the truest form of borsello: Italian leather that creases and darkens with age, vertical in cut, with room for just the essentials. Pure zio energy.

The one that makes me look like a tourist is a gray Pacsafe with lockable zippers, an RFID pocket, and a slash-proof strap with embedded steel wire. It’s my travel one. The ultimate borsello for the borseggiatori (pickpockets) problem. Form following fear.

But any bag worn across your front with your hands on it offers an effective defense. Wear it on your back, and you’ve just gift-wrapped it for the borseggiatori.

The other borselli I own, in case you’re curious, are from Tumi, Piquadro, Tom Bihn, and WaterField. All four brands make remarkably good borselli, and I highly recommend them.

Finally, the bag on me most days is made of nylon. A Fjallraven Vardag 6 (in coal black). Not leather, not Italian, horizontal instead of vertical, but still a borsello.

That is a man purse. I carry a purse, officer.

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This post is part of a series of articles meant to help you find Italian towns worth moving to.

We apply strict filters, region by region, and see what comes out of the other end of the sieve. The survivors are typically livable cities, neither too big nor too small. Towns and cities that are generally worthy of consideration. It is the framework I would use to choose a town myself.

So far, I covered Marche, Tuscany, and Veneto. Today, we are discussing Campania: the region of Napoli (Naples) and the Costiera Amalfitana (Amalfi Coast).

Where to live in Campania turns out to be a tougher question than the postcards suggest.

A disclaimer

I’m biased when it comes to Campania, and it’s not just the food. My entire family is from near Napoli.

I love the region despite its many flaws. My parents spoke to us in Neapolitan at home, and I grew up on Neapolitan songs and movies. I still have more relatives in Ischia (near Napoli) than in Roma or the Marche.

There is a romantic part of me that would move there. I won’t let it affect my judgment. This series is about applying rigorous filters to each region, so I’ll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly, even for regions I’m partial to.

What it’s actually like to live in Campania

Campania has 550 comuni (municipalities) and about 5.6 million people, one of the most crowded regions in the country.

Nearly three million of those people live near Napoli. So the region is certainly densely populated, but in a lopsided way.

Along with its capital Napoli (one of 15 metropolitan cities), Campania has four additional traditional provinces: Caserta, Benevento, Avellino, and Salerno.

Campania has the Tyrrhenian Sea, a beautiful climate (especially near the coast), and amazing food (some of the best in the whole country). The people are warm, friendly, and genuinely funny.

Dialect is heavily used around these parts, but the hospitable nature of the local population means they'll do their best to speak Italian with you. You’ll need Italian outside of tourism hotspots, and over time, you’ll pick up some of the local dialect. Integration in this region should not be particularly challenging.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. We are in the south, after all. There are problems. Big ones. So I’ll spend a little more time than I normally would to warn you about them before you pack your bags and move there. I’ll even introduce some ad hoc filters to spare you the worst this region has to offer.

First and foremost, Campania’s unemployment rates are among the highest in Italy. Youth unemployment around Napoli is 43%. The national average is 16.9%.

If you show up with retirement income or a remote job, this is mostly background noise. If you arrive hoping to work locally, these statistics should give you ample pause.

And so should the rankings of the Campania provinces in Il Sole 24 Ore’s latest quality-of-life table (for 2025):

• Caserta (101)

• Benevento (76)

• Napoli (104)

• Avellino (77)

• Salerno (90)

Those rankings are out of 107 provinces. So all five “provinces” are in the bottom third, and Napoli is almost dead last (a dishonor that consistently belongs to Reggio Calabria).

Residents can’t get jobs and don’t feel safe, and this is reflected in the provinces’ rankings. Sadly, there are bigger, related issues that deserve their own section.

The Camorra, the fires, and the water

I cannot in good conscience write about living in Campania without mentioning the Camorra. The Napoli-based mafia is not a highly hierarchical structure but rather a group of fighting clans sustaining themselves through pizzo (protection money), drug trafficking, public contracts, waste, and counterfeiting.

Let’s go beyond what you see on Gomorrah and look at what the Camorra actually means for you. If you are an ordinary resident with a salary or working remotely, the Camorra is not going to be a major problem. They affect everything in the territory and the local economy, don’t get me wrong, but they won’t shake you down on your way to the local bar.

If you open a cash business, on the other hand, you can count on a member of the local clan coming knocking and asking for a monthly protection payment or “else.”

Yet, for you, a retiree or remote worker, the waste management is the bigger problem. For decades, various clans dumped and buried toxic waste across the region, particularly on the plain between Napoli and Caserta. This stretch is known as Terra dei Fuochi (Land of Fires) because of the burnings used to destroy waste.

Years of contamination have led to well-documented high rates of cancer in this zone. In January 2025, the European Court of Human Rights found Italy in violation of the right to life for its decades-long failure to address toxic waste contamination across the Terra dei Fuochi zone. If you find cheap real estate around those parts, that’s the reason.

And then there is water quality. The Domizio coast (in northern Caserta) has a long record of bathing bans. The Sarno river is among the most polluted rivers in Europe. Il golfo di Napoli has polluted, busy waters.

If you go south down to Salerno, the coast cleans up nicely, and you’ll even find Blue Flag beaches. The good news is that most of the towns that survive our filters cluster around that area.

The expanded filters

For Campania, I used the core filters we always use: a town between 15,000 and 100,000 inhabitants, an ER within 25 minutes, a high school in town, a full supermarket, fiber internet, outside of a seismic Zone 1, and not depopulating fast (up to a maximum 5.0% loss over the past decade).

The population and depopulation filters do the heavy lifting here. Southern Italy is emptying. Remember the lack of jobs? The youth are leaving for better opportunities in the north of Italy or outside the country altogether.

The world-famous Sorrento? It's beautiful but has lost almost 10% of its population over the past decade.

All these criteria screen out most cities in Campania, but not quite enough to hand you a list.

On top of these standard filters, in generous regions, I have also applied the optional filters: train station in town and within 30 minutes of a provincial capital. Here, they do virtually nothing to further screen the candidate cities.

Instead, I added three extra filters that help you distinguish livable from problematic towns.

1. Terra dei fuochi

I excluded any comune on the official list of Terra dei fuochi municipalities. I will simply not send you to a town controlled by the Camorra with toxic waste all around you. Yes, real estate is incredibly cheap there. It’s still not worth it.

2. Volcanoes

You’re likely familiar with the story of Pompei and Ercolano. The volcano that caused all that? It’s still there.

Our original filters focused on seismic risk, since it’s a much more common issue across Italy. But in Campania, volcanic activity is a key concern, and I must introduce a special filter to exclude the most critical areas.

Campania has two zone rosse (red zones, mandatory evacuation areas). I treat them as if they were seismic Zone 1, because the risk profile is similar.

The Vesuvius red zone removes 17 towns by itself, including Torre del Greco, Portici, Ercolano, Pompei, and Torre Annunziata.

The second red zone is Campi Flegrei (Phlegraean Fields), a supervolcano that has shown a lot of activity lately, including consistent ground uplift (bradyseism). This removes Pozzuoli, Bacoli, and Quarto.

The latter in particular is at risk not only from volcanic activity but also from earthquakes. I am not sending anyone to live on top of that.

3. The towns that pass every test and still aren't places

The third special filter is qualitative rather than quantitative, but it exists because I’m very familiar with the Campania region and I don’t want to steer you in the wrong direction.

A town fails this filter if it is swallowed up into a “district” (technically, a so-called conurbation) rather than a place. I’m talking about dense rings around major Campanian cities.

These include the ring north of Napoli (Casoria, Afragola, Arzano), the Agro Aversano around Aversa, the Caserta belt, the Agro Nocerino-Sarnese, and the Nocera-Pagani-Angri-Sarno corridor toward Salerno.

Even if these comuni pass most filters, they are still not cities in the way this whole framework intends them.

A bit of backstory will clarify the issue. Napoli grew fast after World War II. The overflow had to go somewhere. And it ended up on the flat farmland on the outskirts through abusivismo edilizio (build first, get it condoned later), with the roads and sewers arriving many years later.

Eventually, these became comuni, all very similar to each other. The boundaries between them were fields at some point. Eventually, housing went up, and the line between comuni with different names became blurry. A road sign indicating the boundary was the only distinctive feature between one town and the next.

In Italian, we call this saldatura urbana (the welding of separate towns into one mass). Move there, and you inherit the density, traffic, bad air, and the Camorra’s footprint of a big city. In exchange, you get… none of the payoffs of a real city like Napoli or Salerno, or a real città di provincia.

Speaking of big cities, it might be worth briefly mentioning what rules out all the capital cities in Campania:

• Napoli and Salerno: too big (population ceiling).

• Benevento (seismic zone 1).

• Avellino and Caserta: (depopulation).

Eight comuni survived all this, six on the mainland and two on an island. Let’s review them.

1. Montoro

• Province: Avellino (AV)

• Population: 19,437

• Seismic risk: Zone 2

• Stability: -1.00% (2014-2024)

• Price range: €850-1,050/m²

• 7% eligible: Yes

Montoro is an agglomerate of fifteen villages, scattered across the Irno valley, between Avellino and Salerno.

It’s not particularly pretty, but it’s functional. You get cheap property, a quick commute to both Avellino and Salerno, all the services of a larger comune, without much of the chaos.

The real downside is that it’s not really an historic town with a beautiful piazza. And on occasion, you’ll catch the smell of the Solofra tanneries a few kilometers away.

In my mind, Montoro is a consideration if you need a tranquil, well-positioned area that is not affected by major issues and can still be had for sub-€1,000 per square meter.

You’re choosing convenience over character, and your wallet is rewarded for it.

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Montroz (in the town of Cogne) is a hamlet in the Aosta Valley. Think peace, fresh air, and snow-capped roofs.

A three-year-old was bludgeoned to death here.

A little after 8 am on the morning of the 30th of January 2002, a local woman named Annamaria Franzoni started the usual school-day ritual of taking her eldest son for a short three-hundred-meter walk to the school bus stop.

At 8:28 am, she frantically called for an ambulance. She also placed a call to the family doctor who lived next door. When she had returned home, she went upstairs to discover a gruesome scene. Her three-year-old son, Samuele Lorenzi, was in bed upstairs, covered in blood.

That heartbreaking phone call opened the Delitto di Cogne (the Cogne Murder). It also led to the most followed crime story Italy has ever seen.

Cogne is the case that taught Italian television a trick it never unlearned: how to turn a dead child and a wrecked family into a cardboard model of a house wheeled onto national television.

The events in Cogne on 30 January 2002

The facts are simple, but the timeline is crucial to the whole case.

Stefano Lorenzi, Samuele’s father, had left for work. Annamaria stayed home caring for their two young boys like any other day. The six-year-old, Davide, went off to school while little Samuele stayed home in bed.

By her own account, Franzoni walked Davide to the bus stop, was away only a few minutes, and came back to find Samuele clinging to life in the parents’ bed with severe head trauma.

His little body had been brutally struck seventeen times. The walls, bed linens, floor, and surfaces of the bedroom were sprayed with blood in the savage attack.

Curiously, there was blood in a basin of water that someone had used to wash his face. Samuele was urgently flown to nearby Aosta by helicopter, but tragically, he was declared dead at the hospital.

Here is the fundamental problem that three courts and the public spent six years debating. The family home showed absolutely no evidence of a break-in. No items of value were taken, damaged, or even moved. The only adult inside the home that morning was Annamaria.

An even more challenging aspect of this case was the narrow window of time in which a stranger could have entered, killed a sleeping child, washed the boy’s face, and slipped away unseen. This was, depending on whose stopwatch you trust, somewhere between approximately eight minutes and almost none.

The defense built everything on those eight minutes. An intruder, in and out undetected, in the time it takes to walk a kid to the bus.

The prosecution built its case on this timing and the mother’s blood-stained pajamas and clogs.

The part that outlived the trial

Within weeks, the case stopped being an investigation and became a television format. The case was discussed in bars, living rooms, and every piazza. Every week, more details and speculation were released like a weekly episode in an ongoing crime drama.

On Rai 1, the journalist Bruno Vespa wheeled out a plastico (a scale model) of the Lorenzi home. This detailed model featured rooms, stairs, and a small bed. The model home was built in such a way that a studio audience could easily follow the competing theories like a board game.

His show, Porta a Porta, had found its signature object. Vespa would go on to build plastici for half the tragedies of the next two decades, from Avetrana to the Costa Concordia. Cogne was just the first.

After initial reluctance, Franzoni did the talk-show circuit in an effort to plead her innocence to an entire country. She freely wept on camera. On the Maurizio Costanzo Show, the host drew out of her, on live air, that she was pregnant again. This pregnancy came less than a year after Samuele died.

After one televised interview, with the camera still running, she was overheard asking the crew whether she had cried too much. This very question followed her into the courtroom.

We Italians have a phrase for what this became: giustizia spettacolo, justice as show business. Criminologists turned into regular household names from their TV appearances. The studio became a second courtroom for the viewers, louder than the first and bound by none of its rules.

It’s the same public and argumentative streak that makes Italy relitigate its own twentieth century out in the open. Only here it was targeted at a family in the worst week of its life, with many forgetting it is a real case with a real victim.

If you’ve ever wondered why Italian true crime feels so theatrical next to the American variety, this is the headwater. Cogne is where the country learned it couldn’t look away, and decided it shouldn’t have to.

The pajamas, the clogs, and a forensic first

In Italian, an unresolved crime is a giallo, a “yellow,” after the yellow covers of the cheap Mondadori paperbacks that began in 1929. These affordable paperbacks provided a steady diet of mystery to their hungry audience of readers.

Cogne quickly became il giallo di Cogne without the flimsy cover. Except, legally, it wasn’t a mystery at all. Annamaria was convicted in Aosta in 2004, again on appeal in Turin in 2007, and definitively by the Cassazione (Italy’s supreme court) in 2008.

Franzoni was not taking psychiatric medication and reportedly suffered a panic attack a few hours before the killing. Whether that was significant remains impossible to know. What convicted Annamaria Franzoni, however, was blood, and according to the prosecution’s forensic experts, the specific pattern of it.

The morning of the murder, she had been wearing a set of light blue pajamas and a pair of zoccoli (clogs), and both carried Samuele’s blood. The Carabinieri’s forensic lab, the RIS unit from Parma, argued the stains were spatter, thrown off at the moment of the blows.

According to the prosecution’s forensic experts, these were not the smears of a distraught mother picking up her son, but the telltale signs of a full-blown assault.

To prove this theory, they used bloodstain pattern analysis. They read the size, shape, and angle of each droplet to determine where everyone stood. This technique had barely been seen in an Italian courtroom before.

This made Cogne the case that popularized bloodstain pattern analysis in Italian courtrooms. That’s the part that ages well. The circus that forgot the murdered young victim in favour of television drama is the part that dated badly.

Two things in this case were never settled. The weapon was never found, and theories ranged from a ladle to a fireplace tool, a pan, and just about every other household item imaginable. People speculated for years, but nothing was ever found, and no one established why. The courts convicted her without an established weapon or motive.

People hear “weapon never found” and reach for reasonable doubt. In Cogne, it cuts the other way. The judges reasoned that an outsider to the home would have no reason to carry the weapon off the property and every reason to run. On the other hand, someone living in the house had every reason to make it vanish. Absence became supporting evidence.

My own thoughts after researching (for what it’s worth): the idea of the eight-minute intruder always asked too much. A stranger walks into a locked house, in a hamlet where everyone knows every car, kills a sleeping toddler, leaves not a trace of himself, and takes the weapon, all inside the time it takes to come back from a bus stop. Three courts didn’t buy it, and I don’t either.

That doesn’t mean every question was answered, only that the alternative explanation always required greater leaps of faith.

But I’d rather tell you the science was strong than pretend the case had no holes. To be fair, it had them, and Franzoni has spent twenty years living in them.

Her husband and family, to this day, proclaim her innocence. Stefano never left her side or showed any feelings of doubt about his wife’s innocence.

The villagers turn on the family

Cogne, on any ordinary day, is considered a great place. Shy of fourteen hundred people, it is the gateway to Gran Paradiso (Italy's oldest national park) and sits in a region that lands near the top of Italy's annual quality-of-life rankings for safety and calm.

The village was accustomed to welcoming ice climbers and trail runners, not television crews and crime reporters. That stark contrast is part of why the case detonated the way it did.

Another forgotten aspect was that the Lorenzis weren’t from the valley. They were residents there, but did not have deep roots in the community. Husband and wife both came from the hills around Bologna, hundreds of kilometers south. They had met in Cogne and settled in to start their family. To the villagers, they were new arrivals, not natives.

A remote Alpine community closes fast when locals begin to be pulled into the crime. When the family lawyers began pointing at neighbors, suggesting a local had done it, the village’s sympathy went cold fast.

Feelings of betrayal formed as the new arrivals they previously welcomed began to point fingers at native residents. Franzoni accused a neighbor of direct involvement. A court convicted her of calunnia (criminal slander) at first instance, a verdict later wiped out on appeal when the charge timed out. The baseless accusation went nowhere, but the damage didn’t.

Cogne, for its part, got the kind of fame no quiet village wants. People drove up to photograph the infamous house. The family eventually left, likely realizing they were no longer embraced by the community, and to be closer to relatives in the Bologna area.

If you visit Cogne today for the majestic Gran Paradiso, the ibex, and the eighty kilometers of cross-country trails, you will quickly discover no locals will bring the delitto up.

In 2014, after her release, Mayor Franco Allera stated, “The news leaves us absolutely indifferent; it is the last of our thoughts. Our community has left this old story behind.”

The place spent twenty years becoming a hiking destination again instead of a crime scene. That’s the local version of justice: being allowed to be a place with its own unique identity again.

Where Annamaria Franzoni is now

Franzoni served approximately six years in prison in Bologna. In 2014, she was moved to house arrest in her family home in a mountain village 40 km away from Bologna.

By 2019, her sentence was formally over, and she has been a free woman for years. At various points, she has assisted the family business by running an agriturismo (a working farm that takes paying guests) with her family. She remains married, and their two surviving sons are now grown men.

She has never confessed. Not once, across three trials, a published book, and a small library of television appearances. Her line has always stayed constant: an intruder killed Samuele.

The Cogne villa has stayed in the family, through a bitter fight with her former celebrity lawyer (the controversial former undersecretary Carlo Taormina) over unpaid fees that at one point put the house under threat of a court-ordered auction.

She has gone back to it periodically. There are reports of her returning to the house where it happened, flowers in the windows, and the garden kept.

The law is finished with the delitto di Cogne. It decided what it could decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, and left the question of “why” frustratingly unanswered.

Sadly, what lingers isn’t the verdict but the plastico. A country watched a scale model of a dead child’s bedroom get wheeled around a television studio and decided it wanted more of that, not less.

Following this, every Italian crime since has arrived with its own model, its own studio criminologists, and its own audience of amateur investigators. “Tutti criminologi” (all criminologists) is a common criticism on social media for the latter.

Cogne is where Italy learned to watch a private and horrible event as a national television spectacle and call it news. The murders are always the story, and the victims the main characters, but sadly, they become secondary to the theatrics.

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Two bottles of balsamic vinegar are sitting on the same shelf. Both are labeled Modena. One costs a mere 5 euros. The other costs a staggering 90 euros, holds 100 ml, and comes in an attractive little bulb-shaped bottle.

The designer of that bottle? Giorgetto Giugiaro, the genius behind the DeLorean.

The legal difference between them is only three letters.

The cheap one is labeled IGP: wine vinegar mixed with grape must, ready for sale after 60 days. Caramel coloring is allowed.

The expensive one is labeled DOP because of its strict production requirements. It contains only one ingredient: cooked grape must. Nothing else. It is also aged a minimum of 12 years in a series of wooden barrels under specific conditions.

Understandably, anything that takes that long to make is going to be expensive. I made the mistake of introducing my fiancée to the DOP stuff. “Big mistake. Huge.”

Both bottles are from the province of Modena (famous for its balsamic vinegar) and have the same name on the label. Yet, there are two distinctly different experiences inside the bottles and at the cash register.

Welcome to the world of Italian food and wine labels: DOP, IGP, DOC, DOCG, STG. An alphabet that decides what a product can be called, where it can be made, and how much the consumer will pay for it.

This article is essentially a cheat sheet I designed to guide you through the confusing wilderness of Italian product labels.

I’ll spoil the surprise before the acronyms start: these labels certify origin and method. Not necessarily quality. A mediocre producer who follows the rules to the letter will get the same stamp as a top-notch one.

What the letters will tell you is that a wine comes from Montalcino and was made the Montalcino way. And that’s something, but whether it’s any good has much more to do with the individual brand and your palate for that particular style of wine.

Italy holds more protected names than any other EU country. Nearly 900 products across food, wine, and spirits. An economy worth north of 20 billion euros a year.

Let’s start with food.

Food labels: DOP, IGP, and STG

The following three labels cover the food side.

DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta, the EU’s PDO) is the strictest label. Everything (from raw material to finished product) happens inside a defined zone following the disciplinare (the legally binding production rulebook).

As an example, Parmigiano Reggiano DOP can only be produced in five provinces around Parma. Any identical-looking wheel made even just 30 km outside the line is legally generic hard cheese, no matter its quality.

Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP must come from water buffalo milk in designated areas of Campania and a few neighboring areas. Same idea for Prosciutto di Parma, Gorgonzola, and, of course, Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena.

Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are both DOP and are not interchangeable. Grana’s rules permit silage feed and lysozyme, an egg-derived preservative. Parmigiano costs more as it doesn’t permit it.

As for “parmesan”: inside the EU, a 2008 court ruling reserved the word for Parmigiano Reggiano. In North America, it can mean almost anything, including the shelf-stable dust in the green can.

The Marche has a few less well-known entries here, too. Casciotta d’Urbino DOP, the soft sheep-and-cow cheese Michelangelo reportedly adored, and Cartoceto DOP, an olive oil from the hills behind Fano.

Olive oil comes only as DOP or IGP. Italy has around fifty such oils. Since oil is the most counterfeited product in the Italian pantry, the letters earn their keep here more than anywhere else.

IGP (Indicazione Geografica Protetta, PGI in English) is less strict. At least one production phase must happen in the area, and the product’s reputation must be linked to it. The recipe must be local, too. But the ingredients don’t need to be.

Mortadella Bologna IGP is made the Bologna way, but the pork can come from elsewhere. Bresaola della Valtellina IGP is cured in the Valtellina, often from beef raised in South America. That’s not cheating as it’s exactly what the label permits. Ciauscolo IGP, the delicious spreadable salami of the Marche, also sits in this tier.

So, when the origin of the raw material matters to you, always look for DOP. When you mostly care that the method used is authentic, IGP is sufficient.

STG (Specialità Tradizionale Garantita) is unique among the labels as it protects a recipe and not a place. Anyone in the EU can produce an STG if they meticulously follow the registered method.

Italy has only four: Pizza Napoletana, Mozzarella, Amatriciana Tradizionale, and, since 2022, Vincisgrassi alla Maceratese, the traditional lasagna-like baked pasta of my home region.

Wine labels: DOC, DOCG, IGT

Wine received its own pyramid decades before the EU food system even existed, and Italy never gave up on it.

There are over 500 wine denominations across IGT, DOC, and DOCG. Let’s see what they each mean.

DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) ties a wine to a particular zone, approved grapes, yield limits, and aging rules. DOCG adds the G of Garantita. It enforces much stricter rules, lower yields, a government tasting panel, and the numbered paper strip (the fascetta) glued over every cork like a tax stamp.

Examples include Barolo and Barbaresco in the Langhe, Brunello di Montalcino, and Chianti Classico with its black rooster. In the Marche region, Castelli di Jesi Verdicchio Riserva DOCG is arguably the most underpriced serious white wine in Italy.

IGT (Indicazione Geografica Tipica) covers much broader areas with more relaxed rules: Toscana IGT, Marche IGT.

Below that sits the plain vino da tavola (table wine), which has no stated geographic origin or year of production.

Following the 2009 EU reform, DOC and DOCG are both legally DOP, and IGT is IGP (yes, the same labels as food). Italy was allowed to keep the old wine-specific initials, I assume, in part because nobody in the industry was going to write “Barolo DOP” with a straight face.

When Italy’s best wine was table wine

Labels and quality loosely track each other, if only because the rules tend to attract careful producers. But the presence (or lack) of classification doesn’t tell you as much as you’d think.

In the picture above, you’ll see a Chianti DOCG for just above one euro a bottle from the Eurospin discount grocery store. Fairly decent for a euro, but not the top-tier bottle the DOCG label implies.

Conversely, a lack of three (or four) letters doesn’t imply a lack of quality. One of the most interesting Italian wine stories illustrates this point.

In the 1960s and 70s, a few Tuscan producers decided the label rules were too limiting. Sassicaia planted Cabernet Sauvignon in coastal Bolgheri, where no prestigious denomination existed.

Tignanello dropped the white grapes that Chianti’s rulebook required and aged the wine in small French oak barrels (barriques), which imparted a richer flavor.

Both could only be sold as vino da tavola (table wine), the legal bottom of the pyramid.

Then, in 1978, Decanter ran a blind tasting of various Cabernets from around the world. The 1972 Sassicaia won. A humble table wine had just beaten the great Bordeaux estates.

Italy was reluctant to do anything about it for years. It finally relented in 1992, when it introduced the IGT category, in large part to give these wines (now nicknamed Super Tuscans) a respectable label.

In 2013, Sassicaia got something no other Italian wine has: its own appellation. Bolgheri Sassicaia DOC is essentially a DOC designation for a single winery.

The prestigious Tignanello remains a humble Toscana IGT, even though it sells for more than most DOCGs (something like US$180 for a 0.75-liter bottle).

The lesson is short and sweet. The pyramid ranks rule compliance, but the market ranks wine. When the two disagree, trust the producer’s name over the letters under it.

Spirits: one tier only

Spirits are a special case. They don’t get a pyramid like wines, from IGT all the way to DOCG. Instead, they have a single label: Indicazione Geografica (IG, or GI in English).

A bottle of spirits either earns the IG label or it doesn’t. No tiers hint at superior bottles.

What it protects is a place. A name tells you where the spirit was made, and by whose rules. You can distill grape marc in Germany or Canada, but you can only call it grape marc spirit. To put Grappa on the label, the pomace must be Italian, and the distilling and bottling must happen in Italy.

Below the national name sit several registered regional grappas, and a producer based in one of those regions who follows its rules may use the name.

But IG is not just about Grappa, of course. Brandy Italiano, Mirto from Sardinia, and Limoncello from Sorrento are all examples of IG protected spirits that must be produced locally.

Interestingly, Modena doesn’t simply have DOP for balsamic vinegar. It also has the IG label for Nocino di Modena, a dark walnut liqueur.

The same principle as before applies here too. The IG letters tell you that it’s an authentic walnut liqueur developed in Modena. Whether the spirit is any good is up to the producer and your perception of it.

The 5,700 unlabeled EU products

Beyond the standard Italian/EU certifications lies a register most people outside of Italy have never heard of: PAT (prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali, traditional agri-food products).

It’s a large registry of over 5,700 qualifying products. To be added, a product needs at least 25 years of documented tradition in its territory. No consortium, no official EU seal, and no fascetta. Just a simple line in a national list kept by the agriculture ministry.

In practice, the absence of a DOP seal does not mean the absence of pedigree or tradition. Some of the best foods you’ll eat in Italy carry no label whatsoever for a variety of reasons. Maybe there are too few producers, or they are too small, or uninterested in the paperwork required to form a consortium.

The PAT list is the real treasure map of such niche products.

Buon appetito

Italy built the world’s most elaborate machine for writing place names on food.

It runs on a very Italian idea: the conviction that the next province over simply can’t be trusted to do as good a job. Use these labels as we Italians do. Let them tell you where a thing comes from and how it was made.

The verdict on whether it’s good was never the state’s job. It’s yours, and it’s one job Italy happily gives out.

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This article is part of a series of posts that help you find cities to relocate to in Italy. We do so by applying strict filters to screen out most unsuitable towns and cities within a given region.

What survives are livable cities that are neither too big nor too small. It’s the kind of framework I would use if I were to choose a town in Italy myself.

Marche and Tuscany are already done. In this article, we’ll deep dive into Veneto.

What Veneto is actually like to live in

4.9 million people call Veneto home. They mostly do so with pride, embracing their heritage, traditions, and dialect.

The Veneto economy is solid. The GDP per capita is well above the Italian average, and unemployment is well below it.

The northeast industrial model works well. It’s a web of small and medium-sized manufacturers clustered by sector around specific locations.

For example, eyewear is in Cadore, textile and gold around Vicenza, furniture around Treviso, and outdoor sportswear in Montebelluna (also in the province of Treviso).

Everyone under 60 knows and speaks standard Italian. You’ll hear the local dialect more than you would in many other regions, especially west of Venezia (Venice) and from the elderly. You do not need to speak it or learn it. However, outside of Venezia and Verona, you’ll need Italian for even basic communication.

I’ll keep it very short for you: Veneto is one of the best regions of Italy, flat out.

Remember the quality of life index by Il Sole 24 Ore? In 2025, here is how each province did (out of 107 provinces):

• Venezia (53)

• Verona (7)

• Padova (9)

• Vicenza (18)

• Treviso (6)

• Belluno (33)

• Rovigo (63)

Three provinces in the top 10! That’s remarkable.

The quality of life in Veneto is unquestionably high. The people are hardworking and friendly (by Northern standards), and the food and wine are top-notch. You’ll also find dramatic landscapes, a wealth of art, and all the services you could possibly need.

There are only two real concerns.

Air quality. Veneto sits in the Pianura Padana (the Po Valley), one of Europe’s worst hotspots for air quality. The main plain cities (Padova, Venezia, Vicenza, Verona, Treviso) all routinely blow past the WHO limits. From November through February, the fog looks romantic, but it’s pollution wearing a costume. The foothills of the mountain breathe measurably better.

Flooding. Most of the region doesn’t need to worry about earthquakes, but flooding is a concern. Any city in proximity to the Adige, Piave, or Brenta rivers (not to mention the lagoons near Venezia) carries some flooding risk.

The Pedemontana is the foothill zone along the base of the pre-Alps, and it’s arguably the sweet spot of the region. You get higher ground, cleaner air, beautiful views, and real towns. The deep plain is cheaper and flatter, but you’ll pay for it in air quality and flood risk. The mountains would be great for air quality, but most of their comuni get cut out by the seismic filter.

These considerations help you apply an informal filter to the surviving comuni.

Applying the filters to Veneto

If you read the original framework post, I warned you that some regions are chock full of suitable comuni (municipalities). Veneto is a prime example of such regions.

We start with 563 comuni, spread across the metropolitan city of Venezia and the other six provinces (Belluno, Padova, Rovigo, Treviso, Verona, and Vicenza).

Applying the population filter (i.e., between 15,000 and 100,000 residents) narrows it down to 59 suitable candidates. In most regions, the population floor and ceiling do most of the work. Not in Veneto.

It’s worth noting that the 100K cap, in particular, removes the four big capitals: Verona, Venezia, Padova, and Vicenza. The latter is just past the top end of our range, at roughly 110K people. So consider Vicenza as well, if you don’t mind a larger urban center.

Veneto also has excellent services. Every town in our size range has a high school, a full supermarket, fiber internet, and an ER within 25 minutes. Services don’t filter anything in the efficient northeast.

Population stability doesn’t help much either. Cities this size, in Veneto, are not emptying. Of the 59 survivors, only Chioggia and Adria fail the ten-year depopulation test (at 5.15% and 5.89%, respectively, just past the 5% threshold we set).

We are down to 57. Apply the seismic Zone 1 filter, and we lose Belluno and Vittorio Veneto. 55!

The optional train station and being 30 minutes away from a provincial capital don’t filter anything here, either. Veneto is well-connected.

But I’m not going to hand you a list of 55 towns. It’d be barely any help in deciding where to live in Veneto.

So I’m applying a special criterion only reserved for regions this generous: the dormitory filter. We are going to cut out the comuni which are genuine dorm communities for the largest cities they are attached to. They are effectively first-ring suburbs, often without a town center of their own.

I admit this last filter rests a bit on personal judgment rather than a statistical lookup. I’ll name the 21 towns that were cut by this filter at the end so that you can argue with each call, if you wish.

At the end of all this screening, we are left with 34 towns. I will give you the full list, but feature ten that are worthy of particular consideration for one reason or another.

1. Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza)

Bassano del Grappa is the flagship among the foothill towns. A real working city of 42,000 people, with a historical covered wooden bridge (rebuilt a few times), the Brenta passing through it, and the Monte Grappa as a backdrop.

The air is some of the cleanest in Veneto, the economy is real (grappa, ceramics, and light industry), and the population is steady (only down 2.45% over the past decade).

It isn’t cheap at around €1,800-2,200 per square meter. That's well above the provincial average of about €1,600, but it's the kind of picturesque, high-quality town that warrants the premium.

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I was recently in the lobby of the Hilton Rome Airport, waiting to check in. An American tourist approached the bellhop and asked him where to catch a taxi.

“Where are you headed?” he asked the tourist. The man mentioned a place nearby. “Oh, that’s only ten minutes on foot. You don’t need a taxi for that,” the bellhop replied.

The American, taken aback, insisted, “Well, yeah, it’s ten minutes away, so I’d like a taxi.”

The bellhop stared at what looked like a perfectly fit young man with a mixture of amazement and disgust.

I didn’t laugh at their cultural clash. Twenty years ago, when I moved from Italy to Canada, I would have been on the bellhop side of that conversation, puzzled by a culture that spared me every possible step.

North American life is convenient

Currently, that clash is trending on TikTok. The 2026 World Cup has a new generation of Europeans discovering the real America, beyond what they read in the headlines. What they are finding, with the same childlike wonder I once had, is America’s incredible convenience.

Because middle-class life in North America is, frankly, astonishing. We live lives that are more comfortable than those of kings just two centuries ago, and we’re so used to it that we don’t even recognize it anymore.

The stores are larger than piazze and stocked as if rebuilding civilization depended on them. Portion sizes are huge, and the variety is simply unthinkable in Europe (except for the pasta aisle).

I’m reminded of Boris Yeltsin, who wandered into a random Texas supermarket in 1989 and was so staggered by the abundance he witnessed that it quietly broke his faith in the Soviet system. He even, for a moment, questioned whether the grocery store was set up that way specifically to impress him.

The cars are giant and automatic. The gas is cheap compared to Europe, and the roads are wide and easy to navigate. So Americans drive everywhere.

There’s a drive-through for everything, even in small towns. In most cities in Italy, there’s essentially one: McDonald’s. The word “drive-through” doesn’t exist because it all comes down to one of them, so they just call it the McDrive. A friend of mine recently said to me, “Non penso che il Burger King locale abbia il McDrive.” (I don’t think that the local Burger King has the McDrive. He meant the drive-through, of course.)

In North America, we use dryers to make wet clothes dry in just an hour, whenever we feel like it. And if we get bored with our own food, we can easily try something new since we’ve imported dozens of cuisines from all over the world.

In a small Italian town, your options are Italian, a kebab shop where you’ll be greeted with “sciao belo,” (the sweetest sound when you’re hungry), and a Chinese-run all-you-can-eat sushi place. That’s essentially it.

Italy would never, but here you can order dessert in a cup and call it coffee. At 4 pm, if you’d like.

Life in North America is stressful and expensive, but it’s also gloriously abundant and convenient.

Convenient doesn’t mean better

Here’s the thing. Convenience is friction removed, but a lot of that friction is useful work.

Take walking. The everyday walks an Italian takes to many third places are exercise they never need to schedule, and it’s rarely skipped.

In North America, we engineered it out of our existence and then bought treadmills to put it back. Or joined gyms we drive to, only to park as close as possible to the entrance.

I have some anecdotal evidence. This past May, I spent two weeks in central Italy. I ate like a pig when I really shouldn’t have. Pasta, pizza, porchetta, pasticcini and cornetti (plural) at breakfast, you name it. I came home bracing for the weigh-in, ready for the worst. Surprise! Down eight pounds. Mostly water, I know, but not gaining an ounce after eating like that is the real tell.

I credit fourteen days of 10,000+ steps, mostly through narrow hilly streets. And higher quality food. My body did the arithmetic I had refused to do for years.

The walks don’t just help your body and your mind. They aid the soul as well. Because as you do the same passeggiata every evening, you’ll meet the same faces. Soon enough, they stop being strangers, and they become nods, then names, and in some cases even friends. Remove the piazza, the corner bar, and the places you reach on foot, and you eradicate key social infrastructure.

North America is lonelier than it should be, and part of the reason is simple: we drive past everybody.

And then there is the food. The hyper-palatable, highly processed stuff that’s so convenient to grab is so tempting because it’s engineered to override the signals that tell us to stop eating. They are not poison in a dramatic sense. They just work on us a little better than they should.

I’ll make one exception: air conditioning. Colpo d’aria (the fear that a draft makes you sick) be damned, that artificial breeze is a gift straight from God. Europe is simply wrong on this one.

So yes, Italy is inconvenient. You’ll walk when you’d rather ride, pray for sunshine to dry your clothes, sweat in buildings without air conditioning, and be forced to dine out late because no reputable restaurant will serve you dinner at 6 pm. The inconvenience is real.

But this type of inconvenience is an honest bill paid up front. North America takes a different approach. It mails you the charges later, with interest, to your knees, your blood pressure, and eventually the realization that most people on your street don’t know your name.

I’ve lived both lives, and I believe the inconvenience is the better deal. Not objectively, and not for everyone. But for most people, paying in steps is the better choice.

I’ve seen the consequences of convenience on my weight and my health. Yet, here I am, still on the convenient hemisphere of the world. So I’m not here sanctimoniously telling you to choose Italy’s inconvenience.

Because here is the trouble with convenience: it’s awfully convenient. It’s an addiction, and like all addictions, one that’s hard to give up.

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You’re having dinner with Italian friends. One of those that lasts three hours. You’re proud of your ability to understand most of what’s being said. You participate. You’ve studied and obtained your B1 certificate. You earned this.

Then somebody says “un fiorino!” and everybody bursts into laughter. You smile to fit in, but you have no idea what just happened. “Why is it funny?” you think, but don’t dare voice. Your B1 level allows you to understand the word, but it doesn’t make sense in context.

That gap is the real citizenship language exam. Italy may test your imperfetto at the consulate, but whether you belong is tested at the dinner table. And the dinner exam is written in cultural references that largely originate in Italian comedies.

So here are a dozen seriously funny Italian comedies. Not necessarily the best twelve comedies according to critics. Films that have achieved cult status in Italy. Largely, the ones that are still quoted at dinner.

I’m presenting your dinner-table survival kit in chronological order, mostly to avoid the fights that would ensue from trying to rank them.

1. Un americano a Roma (1954)

Italians romanticize America. Americans romanticize Italy. It’s not a new trend that emerged on TikTok this decade. Un americano a Roma (An American in Rome) is a comedy that opens on the premise that Europeans dream of going to America, while Americans dream of Rome.

Nando Moriconi (played by the legendary Alberto Sordi) is a young man from Trastevere who worships America. Not quite the real America, the one in his mind. So he walks like a sheriff, speaks English like a cowboy, or what he thinks a cowboy sounds like, and eats what he believes is American food.

Alberto Sordi spent his half-century-long career playing the average Italian, with self-irony and honest candor. This is the comedy that crystallized and consecrated his act.

The most quotable scene, likely one of the most famous in all of Italian cinema, takes place at a table. Nando rejects his mother’s spaghetti because he wants to eat like an American. So he attempts to eat bread with yogurt, jam, and mustard washed down with milk, because in his mind, this is what Americans eat. One bite, one gag, and “‘mazza che zozzeria!” (how disgusting!)

And he goes back to the pasta with the iconic line, “Maccarone, m’hai provocato e io te distruggo!” (Maccarone, you provoked me, and now I’ll destroy you!)

It truly is one of the first iconic Italian comedies. Italy went as far as putting it on the very exclusive list of 100 films to preserve.

If you squint enough, you might see the reverse of your own fascination with Italy. However, yours, as a reader of mine, will be a lot more grounded in reality.

2. Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina (1956)

Next, Totò, the man Italy calls il principe della risata (the prince of laughter). Almost 60 years after his death, he’s still worshipped in Naples and appreciated throughout Italy.

Antonio De Curtis (the short version of his full noble title, which includes 13 words) filmed nearly a hundred comedies. Backed by Peppino De Filippo, another Neapolitan comedy giant, Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina (Toto, Peppino, and the Hussy) is one of his most popular films.

Two southern brothers travel to Milan to rescue their nephew from a malafemmina (a no-good woman). The provincial vs big city contrast is made obvious in various ways, including a scene where they ask a vigile (municipal police) for the woman’s address, as if Milan were a village of 600 people. They also pack fur coats in summer, because they were told Milan has fog.

But the most quoted scene remains the threatening letter that Totò dictates to Peppino. It’s a grammar horror show with absurd punctuation spelled out literally as dictated. “Punto, punto e virgola, punto, e un punto e virgola!” (Period, semi colon, period, and semicolon!) Italians quote it the way the British recite the dead parrot.

Totò’s wordplay is not for the faint of heart. Even Italians who are not from Campania struggle with it, and translated subtitles fail to capture its true essence. What survives, however, are his iconic facial expressions and humorous mannerisms.

If this movie can make you laugh despite the language barrier, you’ll have ninety-some more films to look forward to. If it doesn’t, no harm, and you can always revisit it when your mastery of the Italian language has improved.

3. I soliti ignoti (1958)

I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) is often considered the start of the commedia all’italiana, and it features an amazing cast of some of the most famous Italian actors, including Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Totò, and Claudia Cardinale.

A crew of broke Roman amateurs plans the perfect heist. Only, it’s a comedy of errors that leads to hilarious mishaps.

Vittorio Gassman plays a boxer with CTE, Marcello Mastroianni minds a baby between crimes, and Totò acts as the safecracking consultant who lectures on a terrace with the authority of a tenured university professor.

All of it two years before the first Ocean’s Eleven (with its own incredible cast) appeared. A genuinely funny movie that earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

The humor is situational, so English subtitles don’t lose much, and the Criterion’s ones are particularly good. Just know there is more than just laughter here. Bonus: postwar Rome acts as the co-star.

4. Divorzio all’italiana (1961)

Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style) is a comedy that hides its true criticism of society behind light entertainment.

The premise is simple. At the time, first-degree murder gave you, at a minimum, a sentence of 21 years in prison. Article 587 offered a major discount in case of an honor killing. Pietro Germi looked at that gap and made a comedy around it.

Mastroianni plays a Sicilian baron with brilliantine who is infatuated with his first cousin. He wants to marry her, but the obstacle is not so much that she is a cousin. The problem is that he’s in an unhappy marriage at a time when divorce is still illegal in Italy.

So he comes up with an idea. He tries to lure his wife into an affair, enabling him to kill her at a deep penalty discount. The plan had a few hiccups, but the movie itself worked, and the screenplay even won an Oscar.

For the record, divorce arrived in Italy only in 1970, and the honor discount survived for another twenty years after the movie came out. It was comedy, but also journalism.

5. La ragazza con la pistola (1968)

Remember Article 587? This is the other end of the gun. Assunta is a Sicilian woman seduced and then abandoned by a man who flees to London to avoid marrying her.

Since her family has no men left to avenge her honor, she packs a pistol and follows him all the way to Britain.

Monica Vitti was the face of elegant despair at the time. Monicelli bet that the saddest woman in Italian art cinema was actually its funniest, and won.

She took a Nastro d’Argento and a David for her role, while the movie got an Oscar nomination. She also established herself as one of the biggest box-office draws in Italian cinema for two decades.

6. Amici miei (1975)

Amici miei (My friends) is a comedy about five friends who fight off mortality and their midlife crisis with zingarate (elaborate pranks). Instead of looking at the tragedy of their daily lives, they escape on little side quests full of childish but hilarious behavior that affects their families and the people around them.

Their pranks include slapping the faces of strangers leaning out of departing trains or convincing a widower at the cemetery that his wife was cheating on him.

Perhaps their most notable prank is inventing a plausible-sounding but nonsensical language: the so-called supercazzola.

Delivered with total confidence, the five friends use supercazzola to confuse the authorities who question their antics. A half-century later, it even entered the official Treccani vocabulary, and Italian politicians accuse each other of supercazzole on the parliamentary record.

I find these movies (it’s technically a trilogy) hilarious but also bittersweet. They say most people live lives of quiet desperation. These friends certainly do.

7. Fantozzi (1975) and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (1976)

(OK, technically two films, one entry.)

It all began with Paolo Villaggio performing a chronically unlucky everyman in his TV sketches in the late 1960s. The character, Ugo Fantozzi, spilled into short stories Villaggio wrote for magazines like L’Espresso and L’Europeo, then a best-selling book.

From 1975, it became a film series, with Villaggio himself as the narrator and in the role of a corporate accountant abused by his employer and life itself.

On the surface, this is all very silly. The comedy has many slapstick elements. The genius of Fantozzi, however, lies beneath the surface. Under the veneer of surreal comedy, you’ll find a sharp satirical critique of Italian society in the 70s and 80s. A society that didn’t offer many prospects to the majority of the population.

It’s a comedy saga by all means, but it’s tragicomic. The tragedy is always there like a shadow of the comedy. We laugh at Fantozzi far more than we laugh with him, but feel bad for it. In part due to empathy towards him and in part because deep down we find a bit of Fantozzi within us.

His surname became a dictionary adjective: fantozziano. Every Italian workplace indignity you will ever suffer has already happened to him, worse.

Fair warning: this is humiliation comedy. If the British Office gives you cramps, stretch first.

8. Febbre da cavallo (1976)

I grew up around the racetrack since most of my family worked there. So Febbre da cavallo (Horse Fever) was particularly funny and meaningful to me.

Interestingly, it flopped when it came out. It only earned 200 million lire at the box office (roughly 100K euros, not adjusted for inflation). Critics shrugged it as well. Yet, decades of late-night TV reruns allowed it to achieve cult status.

Gigi Proietti is Mandrake, and Enrico Montesano is Er Pomata. Both Roman nicknames for two gamblers with the habit of ruining their lives and finances at the trotting racetrack. In the process of trying to find funds to gamble, they engage in all sorts of scams and side quests.

It all ends up in a courtroom where gambling itself effectively goes on trial.

The film even gave Rome a new word, the mandrakata, for an ingenious hustle pulled off against all odds. If you want to understand Roman humor specifically (broke, boastful, endlessly clever), this is foundational material.

9. Bianco, rosso e Verdone (1981)

Take producer Sergio Leone, add scores by Ennio Morricone, and bring over Mario Brega straight from the Dollars trilogy. What you get is not another “Western” but a classic of Italian comedy.

It’s election day, and three radically different men across Italy head for the voting booth. Carlo Verdone plays all of them:

• Furio is the pedantic husband who is insufferable to his wife, two children, and ultimately anyone around him.

• Pasquale is a rough emigrant who barely speaks (and when he finally does, he does so in a Southern dialect). He gets robbed piece by piece on his trip from the border to the voting polls.

• Mimmo is a bit of a simpleton/softie who escorts his grandmother, played by Sora Lella (a real institution in Rome).

Verdone and the spaghetti-western A-Team built a legendary comedy about voting that is still quoted in Italy 45 years later.

Quoting Furio, I occasionally annoy my fiancée by asking her: “Alicia, tu mi adori?” (Alicia, do you adore me?) to which she’ll reply, “Sì, Antonio,” and I’ll finish it off with, “Allora lo vedi che la cosa è reciproca.” (Then, you see that it’s reciprocal.)

10. Non ci resta che piangere (1984)

To me, Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing Left to Do but Cry) is the perfect comedy featuring two giants from very different Italian schools of comedy.

The Tuscan humor of Roberto Benigni meets the Neapolitan humor of Massimo Troisi in a time-travel film chock-full of funny sketches.

The two wake up in 1492 and must survive in a very different time. Their first thought is that all their modern knowledge could help with scientific and technological advancement, so they seek out Leonardo da Vinci.

They quickly realize they don’t actually know how anything modern works, from the bulb to the toilet. So they end up attempting to teach him how to play modern card games instead. Hilariously, a genius like Leonardo struggles to follow the rules, frustrating them.

Among other side quests, they end up writing a letter to Savonarola in an attempt to stop Columbus from discovering America. Yes, this is an open homage to the Totò and Peppino letter from entry two.

The “un fiorino” joke from the dinner above? It comes from this movie as well. A fiorino is a florin, the Renaissance coin, and in the film, there is a scene where a border guard mechanically asks for one each time someone passes by. They keep losing cargo and passing by to put it back on their cart, triggering the guard who keeps asking for “un fiorino.”

Italians have muttered “un fiorino” when passing the highway toll booth for forty years. Or maybe it’s just my friends and me.

Benigni and Troisi became close friends after this movie. The two different styles of comedy shouldn’t have worked together, but somehow they contrasted in hilarious ways.

Sadly, Troisi died at only 41, twelve hours after the final take of Il Postino (1994, The Postman), which won an Oscar for its score and earned Troisi two posthumous nominations. He postponed his heart surgery to finish shooting the movie, and that cost him dearly.

If you enjoy his mannerisms and humor, watch his earlier work in Ricomincio da tre (1981, I’m Starting from Three) as well.

11. Tre uomini e una gamba (1997)

Aldo, Giovanni e Giacomo are the most popular comedy trio in Italian history, and Tre uomini e una gamba (Three Men and a Leg) is their breakout comedy.

Three hardware store workers take a road trip from Milan to Puglia since Giacomo is getting married to the hardware store owner’s daughter. As a favor to the father-in-law, they need to carry a hideous wooden leg sculpted by a fictional artist named Garpez.

As you can imagine, they manage to screw it up, and in the process, gift us many laughs. The subtitles are helpful here, but much of their comedy is physical and translates well without much aid.

12. Quo vado? (2016)

Checco Zalone is a controversial comedian in Italy. My brother-in-law said to us, “I cannot stand his right-wing humor.”

Alicia and I find him hilarious. Here’s where the split happens: Checco plays a boisterous Southern character in every movie he’s in. Some people will see him as satirizing the tamarro (a tacky/flashy/boorish guy), and others will see him as flattering him.

He himself has said that he appeals to the dumbest and the smartest people in Italy, and it’s the middle group that can’t stand him.

Well, the box office numbers show that he’s more appreciated than he gives himself credit for. Quo vado? (Where Am I Going?) earned over 65 million euros and sold about 9.3 million tickets, roughly one Italian in six.

It held the record as the highest-grossing Italian film until this January, when Buen Camino passed it and then overtook Avatar to become the highest-grossing film of any kind in Italian box-office history.

The premise of the movie is pretty simple, but it perfectly captures many Italian traditions and attitudes. Checco has the one sacred Italian possession: the posto fisso (a permanent job with the government). When the state tries to make him resign, he refuses. They offer him money, and he refuses because “il posto fisso è sacro!” (The permanent job is sacred!)

They try to mob him. “Come mi rilassa il mobbing!” (Mobbing really relaxes me!) Nothing, Checco won’t resign. So they eventually transfer him to less and less desirable places, including the North Pole, where he meets a romantic interest, leading to him becoming more Northern European-like.

If you want to know what Italy laughs at now, not what it did in 1962, start here. Checco is actually a talented musician as well, so the satirical songs in the movie are half the act.

What about Perfetti Sconosciuti?

I’m intentionally leaving out Perfetti Sconosciuti (2016, Perfect Strangers).

It holds an unusual Guinness World Record: the most remade film in history, adapted two dozen times and counting (yes, the Italian one is the original).

It’s a great movie, but it doesn’t make the top 12 because, to me, it’s less a comedy than an emotional knife fight. The Roman humor shines through, though, and you should still watch it.

The careful reader will realize I just included Pefetti Sconosciuti to some degree in the list. Consider it a baker’s dozen, then.

In conclusion

You really should look up these movies and try to watch them. It will greatly enhance your cultural understanding of Italy and what resonates as funny to Italians.

Generally speaking, these are all relatively easy to find online. Some are on YouTube. Some on mainstream streaming platforms. Others can be bought on Criterion. And a VPN will likely allow you to see them from places that are geography-restricted online (arr, not that I’m advocating it, matey).

For some, you’ll struggle to find versions with proper English subtitles. That, in itself, might be a bit of a mandrakata.

So the permanent fix is to learn enough Italian that you won’t need English subtitles. These twelve (well, thirteen) are the most enjoyable curriculum the language has to offer.

If you liked this article, subscribe (for un fiorino).

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Picture yourself in line at the Cagliari airport waiting to get through customs. Ahead of you, an officer is pulling a bottle from a suitcase with a look of suspicion. He holds it up to the light, examining the white sand inside. His unamused expression makes you think he has found contraband. Legally speaking, he has.

Many illegal things tourists do in Italy happen innocently enough, as they do not feel overtly illegal. Sitting on the Spanish Steps for a photo and a rest, buying an inexpensive bag, enjoying a drive through a medieval centro storico, or even pocketing a souvenir the beach was giving away free of charge.

The vast majority of tourists have no intention of breaking the law on vacation. Italy just tends to do things its own way, including the law, and then enforces it with creativity.

To save you that potentially embarrassing, or even financially punitive, moment during your vacation, I have created a ranking of fines based on severity. Hopefully, this will save you from having to practice your Italian with a no-nonsense officer.

How tourist fines in Italy actually work:

In Italy, fines have three layers, and knowing which one you’re in is key to understanding the severity of the infraction.

At the top of the hierarchy sit national criminal law and the cultural heritage code. Monuments, archaeology, counterfeits. At this level, lawyers will get involved.

In the middle, you are dealing with national administrative rules. These include traffic and transit. These are typically automated. Think speeding or driving through a ZTL. They are annoying but easily survivable.

At the bottom of the hierarchy lies the ordinanza comunale (municipal ordinance). It can be fairly random and unique to a city or town, as any Italian mayor can sign one. Which is why the rules change every time you enter a new city: things like smoking, loitering, etcetera.

Cities also carry a particularly severe enforcement weapon: the daspo urbano, a banishment order barring you from a city or selected areas within it. Venice issued roughly 1,300 banishment orders in 2024, though nearly half were for begging, rough sleeping, and drug use, not tourists in swimwear. Italian cities don’t just fine you; they can outright ban you for up to three years.

One key thing to remember: most administrative fines can be settled within 60 days for double the minimum (or a third of the maximum), whichever is the lesser. So the number on the receipt will rarely match the number in the headline that talks about you. Don’t want to be in the headlines? Read on.

Tier 1: The illegal things in Italy that will follow you home.

Putting graffiti on, or carving anything, into a monument.

A Russian tourist paid approximately €20,000 and took a four-month suspended sentence for carving the initial K into the Colosseum. The man behind 2023’s “Ivan + Hayley 23” risked five years’ jail time.

Since 2024, defacing any cultural site carries fines of €20,000 to €60,000, plus any required restoration costs. It’s simply not worth it and is very disrespectful in general.

Collecting sand, shells, or pebbles from Sardinia.

A regional law since 2017: €500 to €3,000. Airport scanners at Cagliari, Olbia, and Alghero are equipped to screen for it the way other airports will screen for narcotics. One sweep in 2021 fined 41 people and seized about 100 kg of beach. If you take enough, it quickly becomes a penal charge.

A famous example of this is the French couple who were caught with 40 kg in plastic bottles and faced one to six years. The beloved pink beach of Budelli has been closed since the 1990s because the pink sand was routinely being stolen, which has sadly diminished its pink colour. Biologists are hopeful this ban will help it recover.

Buying a fake bag with a “designer” label.

In Italy, the buyer shares in the offense too, not just the seller: up to €7,000 for purchasing any counterfeit goods. That €20 “Prada” being sold on a bedsheet outside the train station will end up being the most expensive bag you have ever purchased.

And, of course, this is not limited to bags. Watches, perfumes, and other designer items are all subject to protective counterfeit laws.

Freelance and amateur archaeology.

Everything old found in Italian ground belongs to the State. As any Italian metal detectorist will tell you, digging without a concession means arrest and a fine of €310 to €3,099. And ever since 2022, merely being caught holding a metal detector in an archaeological area is now a crime in its own right: up to 2 years. If you happen to find something by accident, you have 24 hours to report it, and the authorities will tell you what to do.

Public nudity (and public urination).

Italian law splits this into two categories.

Obscene acts (the explicitly sexual kind) carry administrative fines starting at €5,000 and remain a crime (up to four and a half years) when near schools or any minor persons.

Simple indecency, like nudity and public urination, used to cost nearly as much. For example, two Czech fans caught skinny-dipping behind St. Mark's in 2019 paid €3,000 each.

Later on, the Constitutional Court called these types of fines disproportionate and cut them to €51-309, possibly the only tourist fine in Italy that actually decreased.

Tier 2: The national rules accidentally broken by tourists.

Driving in ZTL zones.

A Zona a Traffico Limitato is a camera-enforced area found in many historic centers. Each pass under a camera is a separate fine of approximately €80 to €100. Your rental company will likely also add an admin fee of €30 to €70 per violation, and the letters can legally arrive up to a year later.

One absent-minded afternoon circling in search of your hotel can lead to four tickets. Florence collected €61.6 million in traffic fines in 2024, in a city of 380,000 people. If ZTLs are around, park outside the walls and historic city centres. Don’t chance it.

As painful as this rule can be, it is also why you can wander these centers on foot with almost no traffic.

The unvalidated train ticket.

Regional train tickets (note the emphasis on the word regional) purchased on paper need stamping in the validation machine (which, if you look closely, is shaped like the front of a train). You will see these machines all over the station.

If you skip it, the ticket is legally worthless, and you will owe €50 on the spot. This is a lesson many tourists learn on the slow train to their next destination.

The trap is that high-speed trains don’t require validation. Neither do regional tickets bought online. Read my article about Italian trains to avoid this and other pitfalls.

Driving solely with your home license.

Any non-EU licenses must travel with an International Driving Permit (IDP) or a sworn translation. They don’t cost much (less than $50) and allow you to avoid a fine of approximately €400 to over €1,600.

The rental desk may or may not check and refuse you the rental without it. The Carabinieri or Polizia di Stato will definitely check.

Foraging for mushrooms without papers.

Mushrooms and truffles require a regional permit called the tesserino. It comes with limits on quantity and even specifies the basket type. Fines will vary by region. The fines can range from the double digits to the thousands. Even porcini come with paperwork in Italy, but it is understandable due to the economic, environmental, and cultural importance of foraging.

Tier 3: The city-by-city variables.

This is the tier of the hierarchy focused on local ordinances. Differs in every comune (municipality), enforced by the local police, and can change seasonally.

Rome

The Spanish Steps are not a place to relax. Sitting on them can cost anywhere from €250 to €400 if you damage or stain them. Enforcement varies, but police routinely patrol with whistles and monitor the area daily.

This may seem obvious, but sadly, it’s a common problem. At any fountain (the Trevi included), wading, swimming, sitting on the edge, or eating there runs up to €450.

Fishing coins out of the Trevi is plain theft, as the money is collected by the city for charity.

There is also a midnight curfew for drinking outdoors: no glass on the street after 10 pm, no open-air alcohol at all after midnight, with fines around €150 to €280.

As romantic as it may seem to attach a “love lock” to Ponte Milvio, where the whole trend started, it will cost you up to €250. Rome has recently been at war with the trend since a lamppost collapsed under the cumulative weight of these locks in 2007. Florence charges €160 on the Ponte Vecchio, and Venice has an outright ban.

There is an urban legend that the fine is €50,000, but Italy is not that draconian for simple bylaw violations.

Venice

Eating or sitting on bridges, steps, and monuments will result in fines of approximately €100 to €200. Two backpackers who famously brewed coffee on the Rialto steps with a camp stove paid a whopping €950 and were promptly escorted out of Venice.

Swimming in a canal is not allowed. This fine is approximately €350 plus a 48-hour expulsion (the famous daspo from above). In 2025, a couple was spotted by gondoliers who reported them. They paid €450 each in fines.

Walking around in swimwear is a violation, too. It does not matter if it is hot: €250. Feeding pigeons or seagulls: €25 to €500, banned in Piazza San Marco since 2008. Bicycles: €100, even if being walked by the rider.

There is also an entry fee, introduced to fight overtourism. On 60 peak dates between April and July 2026, day-trippers pay €5 (or €10 if booked late), and arriving without the QR code can cost roughly €50 to €300.

Florence

Beyond the Ponte Vecchio locks, Florence bans eating at mealtimes on four streets, Via de' Neri, Piazzale degli Uffizi, Piazza del Grano, and Via della Ninna, from noon to 3 pm and 6 to 10 pm, with fines up to €500.

Via de’ Neri also happens to be where the city’s infamous schiacciata (flatbread sandwich) line forms. This means you cannot eat the sandwich where you bought it and will have to walk two minutes to a bench in another area.

Liguria

Hiking Cinque Terre in flip-flops is not only hazardous but draws fines ranging from €50 to €2,500, depending on what your mountain rescue ends up costing. The paths are mountain trails with a sea view and not a flat seaside boardwalk.

In Portofino, stopping in the marked “red zones” between 10:30 am and 6 pm in season costs €68 to €275. Portofino is a village of 400 residents with 10,000 daily visitors. The selfies were causing a traffic problem, so the red zones were put in place.

Campania

Sorrento does not allow bikinis and bare chests away from the beach, with fines of €25 to €500. Always bring a cover-up if you plan on leaving the beach area.

Capri’s famous “noisy clogs ban” is actually real, signed in 1960, and never repealed. The fine on the books is listed as up to 5,000 lire (about €2.58) in a currency that was replaced by the euro a quarter of a century ago.

The Capri ordinance that actually bites is the 1988 one against swimwear in town. Meanwhile, the island’s newest rule is a welcome one. Those who pester visitors (with flyers, menus, etc) now face fines up to €694. (Thank God!)

On the Amalfi Coast, the SS163 runs on alternate plates in high season: odd plates on odd days, even on even, 10 am to 6 pm on summer weekends and every day in August. It applies to rental, and hotel guests can get arrival and departure exemptions, but only with proof. If you get it wrong, you will pay a traffic fine.

Milan

Smoking outdoors has been banned almost everywhere since January 2025, unless you’re 10 meters from other people. This fine ranges from €40 to €240. E-cigarettes are exempt, for the time being.

The local trams run on trust plus roving inspectors. Thus, the €50 unstamped-ticket rule from Tier 2 applies to trams through Milan too.

Tier 4: not illegal, just strictly enforced at the door.

Churches will not fine you, but they can refuse you. You must dress modestly as these are often active places of worship. Shoulders and knees must be covered, no cleavage, no beachwear, and no bare feet.

St. Peter’s will check after security when you’ve already queued for an hour. Carry a scarf, wrap, or some kind of covering.

Things tourists think are illegal in Italy but aren’t

Driving in flip-flops or barefoot.

This has been legal since 1993, as confirmed by a Polizia di Stato circular. You can only be fined (about €42) if your footwear actually causes you to lose control of the car. There is a rumour of a €300 flip-flop fine, which doesn’t exist.

Cappuccino after 11 am.

Not a law or even a rule. Just a social faux pas that has been blown out of proportion by social media. The barista will slightly judge you, but still serve you the cappuccino.

None of this requires a law degree, as it is simply common sense and respect for the areas you are visiting. However, in some cases (like in particular cities and towns), it requires knowing the rules exist, so it’s worth searching for them before visiting.

In closing, the fines are Italy's way of saying it isn't a theme park. As well as asking you to respect the residents and the local history. And for once, I don’t think the country is being unreasonable.

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Run my relocation filter on Tuscany, and it spits out 34 towns. Tuscany has many comuni (municipalities), 273 to be exact, but 34 still feels like a laundry list. The whole point of this series is to hand you a shortlist.

It’s the opposite of the problem I encounter in many regions. Tuscany hands us three dozen places that clear the bar with ease. It's a nice problem to have, but still a problem. A list that long ceases to be useful.

So, for a region this generous, I’ll do the reverse of what I do with nearly empty ones. Instead of relaxing the rules, I’m going to make them stricter.

Specifically, the two nice-to-have criteria become mandatory for Tuscany. Namely, having a train station in town and being within 30 minutes by car of a capoluogo (a provincial capital).

This takes us from 34 to 18 comuni. Then, per the framework's rules, I'll pick the ten I'd shortlist for myself. And you still get the full list of 18 candidates for your perusal.

What Tuscany is actually like to live in

Toscana (Tuscany) has 273 comuni split across ten provinces. Technically, Florence is a città metropolitana, one of fourteen cities in Italy with a special designation rather than the ordinary provincial classification. But it’s essentially a province contributing shy of a million people to Tuscany's 3.66 million population.

Tuscany has a far more industrial economy than the wine-and-cypresses image would have you believe. Gold in Arezzo. Leather tanning in Santa Croce sull’Arno. Paper and tissue in Lucca and Capannori. Vespas in Pontedera. Pharma and banking in Siena. Fabric in Prato. And so on.

The jobs exist in Tuscany. It’s not Molise. But the catch is that the majority of good jobs are in Florence, and Florence will price you out. The rest of the jobs around the region are… well, Italian jobs. So relatively low.

If you can find an industrial job in a town not depicted in the postcards, you can swing it. But the framework is really created for people who have independent means, are retiring here, or bring a remote job with them. If you want a local job in the tourist towns, it’s even worse. The tourist economy pays peanuts and does so seasonally.

Quality-of-life-wise, Tuscany does pretty well. The 2025 Sole 24 Ore ranks Siena 21st of 107 provinces, the best in the region, and first in Italy for women's quality of life, for the fifth year running.

Pisa 29th, Florence 36th, Arezzo 44th. The rest sit mid-table or lower, Pistoia down at 66th.

Tuscany's air is clean in the hills, the countryside, and along the coast. Certainly, far better than the air in the Po Valley to the north.

That said, two big basins trap winter smog and can be a concern for sensitive populations: the Florence-Prato-Pistoia plain and the Lucca plain (Capannori above all).

Earthquakes are real here, too, but the risk is far more localized than in Marche. In practice, most of Tuscany is not a major seismic risk you need to worry about. The main exception is the northern mountain valleys (Garfagnana, Lunigiana, Mugello), which sit on active Apennine faults where earthquakes have killed people.

The weather follows a similar geographic pattern. Inland, summers are hot and dry, with cool winters, except for Florence, which stews in its own basin and gets muggy. The mountains are cold and snowy. The coast is milder in both summer and winter.

Outside Florence, and to a degree, Pisa and Siena, plan on needing Italian. The English you hear in the centro storico of a tourist town disappears the moment you need help from a plumber, commercialista (an accountant), or even a doctor.

Tuscans are warm and welcoming, even if, next to the more understated Marchigiani, they carry a reputation for a certain local pride. But to be fair, this is the region that gave Italy both the Renaissance and its language.

The good things, like food, wine, beautiful landscapes, etcetera, are all there, of course, but I don’t think I need to sell you Tuscany on those grounds.

The filter applied to Tuscany

As a reminder, the filter we are using includes:

• A population between 15,000 and 100,000

• A full emergency room within 25 minutes

• A high school in town

• A full supermarket

• Fiber internet

• A stable population (under 5% decline over the past decade)

• No extreme seismic exposure

Since this would yield too many towns, we are also enforcing the two nice-to-haves:

• A train station in town

• Within 30 minutes by car of a provincial capital (or one itself)

The seismic filter does nothing for us. No comune sits in Zone 1, and none is on the crateri disaster list. Flooding and landslides are more of a concern here, but even then, not a reason to cross off any towns.

The population floor kills a few of the postcard towns. San Gimignano has 7.5K residents and is out. So is Pienza with less than 2K. The decade-decline filter kills part of the coast and hill towns, including Cortona (down 7.7%) and Pietrasanta (5.9%).

We can screen the 34 survivors further by applying the train-station-in-town criterion. Not a tram to the city. Not a station that carries the town's name, but actually sits one town over.

And enforcing the 30-minute distance from a capoluogo (provincial capital) further narrows the field.

We are left with 18 cities, all independent and yet connected. I’ll list them below the fold and provide a quick overview of my ten picks. The ones I’d shortlist for myself if I were relocating to Tuscany.

Let’s start with an excellent first choice: Arezzo.

Arezzo: the city our strict filter is meant to find

Arezzo is an underdog. Tucked inland, it’s easy to overlook. Yet, it’s one of my first recommendations when people are looking for affordable Tuscany. It has a lot to offer for the price tag.

It’s a provincial capital of about 96,500 people. The decline is quite manageable at only 3% over the past decade. It has its own respectable hospital and really its own everything. The local industry is gold, and Arezzo handles a sizable chunk of the world's trade in it.

It sits on the main Florence-Rome train line, which makes it a well-connected choice. An hour from Florence. Two from Rome (though the occasional 1h 15 min ride exists).

You’ll also find an amazing antique market on the first Sunday of every month and the Saturday that precedes it. Fiera Antiquaria turns the entire centro storico into one of Italy's most celebrated antique markets.

It’s cheap for what it is. Asking prices run around €1,750/m² (idealista, spring 2026), in a dead heat with Pistoia for the cheapest Tuscan capital and barely over a third of Florence.

The catch is the basin: Arezzo bakes in August and fogs in January. Some will find it sleepy. But it’s sleepy with a fast train. And you’re not moving to Italy to live the Manhattan lifestyle, are you?

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A few days ago, I got an email asking for some Italian music recommendations.

I replied with a Spotify playlist I made a while ago, which includes a couple of songs from each of the most famous Italian artists before 2000. 234 songs in total. Essentially, the classic Italian hits most people over 40 know.

That got me thinking about Italian cantautori (singer-songwriters). How poetic they are. How clever. How key they are to really understanding Italian culture.

So I published a Substack Note listing ten classic cantautori from the golden era (say, 60s to 80s). It was well received, and it won a request for a more modern list. I added ten more, contemporary this time.

Then someone else hit me with: “Not a single woman on either list.” Hold on. He was right! The golden era was certainly dominated by men, but recent decades have produced plenty of cantautrici (the feminine form of the word). And even back in the day, there were women well worth mentioning. That needed fixing.

Which brings us to today’s article. I’ve included: ten classic cantautori, ten contemporary cantautori, and ten cantautrici. For each artist, I’ve added two songs to a unified Spotify playlist you can follow and listen to.

Ten classic Italian singer-songwriters

Let’s start with the original list of golden era Italian cantautori.

1. Franco Battiato: “La cura”, “Voglio vederti danzare”

2. Lucio Battisti: “Il mio canto libero”, “Emozioni”

3. Paolo Conte: “Via con me”, “Azzurro”

4. Lucio Dalla: “Caruso”, “L’anno che verrà”

5. Fabrizio De André: “La canzone di Marinella”, “Bocca di rosa”

6. Francesco De Gregori: “Rimmel”, “La donna cannone”

7. Rino Gaetano: “Ma il cielo è sempre più blu”, “Mio fratello è figlio unico”

8. Francesco Guccini: “L’avvelenata”, “La locomotiva”

9. Gino Paoli: “Il cielo in una stanza”, “Sapore di sale”

10. Luigi Tenco: “Mi sono innamorato di te”, “Vedrai, vedrai”

Yes, I know. No Venditti, no Pino Daniele, no Modugno, no Gaber. Ten slots is a brutal format. If it helps, tell me in the comments who you'd evict from my ten, and who gets the seat.

Fun fact: Conte was a practicing lawyer in Asti who co-wrote Italy's most famous summer song (“Azzurro”) for somebody else (Adriano Celentano) before anyone knew who he was.

Ten contemporary Italian singer-songwriters

1. Brunori Sas: “Quelli che arriveranno”, “La verità”

2. Calcutta: “Tutti”, “Paracetamolo”

3. Colapesce: “Totale”, “Musica leggerissima”

4. Lucio Corsi: “Volevo essere un duro”, “Situazione complicata”

5. Diodato: “Fai rumore”, “Che vita meravigliosa”

6. Niccolò Fabi: “Una somma di piccole cose”, “Costruire”

7. Gazzelle: “Settembre”, “Destri”

8. Max Gazzè: “La favola di Adamo ed Eva”, “Una musica può fare”

9. Mannarino: “Me so ‘mbriacato”, “Apriti cielo”

10. Giorgio Poi: “La musica italiana”, “Niente di strano”

Ten female Italian singer-songwriters

1. Alice: “Per Elisa”, “Una notte speciale”

2. Carmen Consoli: “Parole di burro”, “Confusa e felice”

3. Teresa De Sio: “Voglia ‘e turnà”, “Aumm aumm”

4. Cristina Donà: “Goccia”, “Invisibile”

5. Elisa: “Luce (tramonti a nord est)”, “Eppure sentire (un senso di te)”

6. Levante: “Alfonso”, “Tikibombom”

7. Madame: “Voce”, “Il bene nel male”

8. Nada: “Senza un perché”, “Tutto l’amore che mi manca”

9. Gianna Nannini: “Bello e impossibile”, “Meravigliosa creatura”

10. Margherita Vicario: “Abaué (Morte di un Trap Boy)”, “Pincio”

No Mina, no Mia Martini, no Vanoni. I know, I know. These are giants missing from the list, but the truth is, they are mostly interpreters. Amazing voices, not writers. This is a list of pens, not voices. The same standard I applied to the men's lists.

One last thing. There's a 61st track on the playlist: Giovanni Block. I can't justify him on any objective ground, and no critic will rank him with the names above. I don't care. Every list this long earns its author one indulgence, and he's mine.

Now, if you like, go follow and listen to the playlist.

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This is the first article in a series of region-specific articles on where to live in Italy. I grew up (from age 9 onwards) in the Marche, and I’m just back from a vacation there, so I feel motivated to cover it first. I’ll report on the other 19 regions at the rate of one per week.

As a reminder, the following are the criteria that we’ll use to screen for worthwhile candidates. Cities or towns worth considering for a move or for buying property.

The filters:

• A population between 15,000 and 100,000

• A full pronto soccorso (ER) within a 25-minute drive

• A high school in town

• A proper supermarket in town

• Fiber internet

• Not in seismic Zone 1, and not a wrecked earthquake-crater town

• A depopulation rate of less than 5% over the past decade

Having a train station and being near a provincial capital are nice-to-haves, but they won’t be used to screen out candidates.

7% make the cut

Located on the Adriatic Sea, Marche has 5 provinces, and its comuni are split as follows:

• Pesaro e Urbino: 50 comuni

• Ancona: 47 comuni

• Macerata: 55 comuni

• Fermo: 40 comuni

• Ascoli Piceno: 33 comuni

  

I applied our filters to every one of Marche’s 225 comuni (municipalities) and emerged with a list of 16 relocation candidates split as follows:

• Pesaro e Urbino: 2 comuni

• Ancona: 6 comuni

• Macerata: 3 comuni

• Fermo: 3 comuni

• Ascoli Piceno: 2 comuni

That’s roughly 7%, which is a lot more manageable than choosing among 225 towns. There will be regions where only 1 or 2% of comuni get through our filters. So 7% is still relatively high, but that’s because the Marche region is a very livable choice full of hidden gems. The large number of survivors reflects that.

The other 209 are largely charming towns that you should visit, but not move to. Most fail at the very first filter because they are just too small. And moving to tiny Italian towns is usually a mistake.

A few words about Marche

Before we jump into the specific municipalities, let’s have a brief discussion about Marche as a whole. Only what matters.

Marche offers much of what attracts people to Tuscany: rolling hills, medieval towns, excellent food, and varied landscapes, but at lower prices and with a fraction of the tourism. You get sea, sandy beaches, hills, and bona fide mountains, all in one affordable package.

Marche doesn’t live on tourism alone. It’s also one of the most industrious regions in Italy, built on small and medium manufacturing and best known for shoes, hats, leather, and paper (the latter being an exception, since it has been an industrial-scale business here for over a century).

Now, in the original article introducing the framework, I mentioned a few systemic problems in Italy. Let’s briefly review key issues and life quality factors as they apply to Marche.

Air quality: Marche is far enough from the Po Valley that it doesn’t suffer from poor air quality, with one local exception we'll get to.

Crime: Crime levels in the Marche region are very low. Violent crime is almost non-existent compared to most North American cities. Several Marche provinces rank among the safest in Italy. Annoyances like parcheggiatori abusivi (unauthorized parking attendants intimidating you into paying for free spots) are essentially non-existent here. There is some petty crime and, for my taste, a little too much residential burglary, the organized kind often run by foreign crews that travel in to hit houses when the owners aren’t home. But on the whole, Marche is incredibly safe.

Seismic risk: This is where Marche loses significant points. Marche is almost entirely Zone 2; a handful of Apennine comuni were bumped to Zone 1 in a 2022 update, and none of them survive our population filter anyway. The coast and selected inland areas are fine, especially if you're buying or renting a home built or retrofitted to seismic code.

Climate: The weather in the Marche is relatively mild, but do not expect a Mediterranean climate like Sardinia’s. You can expect gray and relatively cold winters (by Italian standards, by Canadian standards, it’s practically warm). Think a minimum of 2°C / 36°F on a cold day. Plus the occasional snowfall. Sticking to the coast keeps the temperature mild. Go inland towards the Sibillini mountains, and you’ll get both proper snow and below-freezing temperatures at altitude. The one exception is the southern corner around San Benedetto del Tronto. Temperatures there stay mild even during the winter. It’s also much drier in summer compared to the north of the region, where afa (mugginess) is common.

English: Outside of some university towns, English is patchy at best. Marche expects you to speak Italian. Broken Italian is fine, but Italian nonetheless. The accent of Marchigiani speaking Italian (particularly in the center and north) is fairly easy to understand for expats, which is a plus for learners. Their own dialect is another story, of course.

On the whole, si vive bene nelle Marche (you live well in the Marche). On Il Sole 24 Ore’s quality-of-life ranking, the Marche provinces sit mid-table, with Ascoli going as high as 22nd out of 107 provinces. Very respectable, especially when you consider that the ranking tends to skew in favor of northern cities with more economic opportunities.

Applying the filter to Marche

If you’re seriously thinking about moving to Marche, this is where that checklist earns its keep. Run those requirements across the region, and the bulk of towns get screened out.

The population floor does the heavy lifting for us, eliminating 205 comuni out of 225. The seismic filter removes just one more: Tolentino, still actively rebuilding after the 2016 earthquakes.

Finally, the depopulation filter erases three otherwise interesting choices: Ascoli Piceno (down 8% in the past 10 years), Fabriano (declining almost 10% due to factories closing), and Fermo (at 5.3%, just over the line).

I’ll stick to the rules and not include Fermo, the city (as opposed to the province), but I’ll leave it up to you whether to consider it as an edge case.

I’ll reveal the 16 comuni, one at a time, starting from the north.

Pesaro (PU) ~95,000

Pesaro is the capital city of the Pesaro e Urbino (PU) province. It’s located in the north of the region, not far from Rimini.

With 95,000 people, it’s on the larger side of our range and the second-largest city in the Marche region. It's still a city on a human scale that lacks nothing major.

My sister and her family live in Pesaro and are very happy there. During my recent visit, I asked cab drivers and other locals, and they all universally expressed pride for the city, as well as enjoyment for their vita tranquilla (peaceful life) in Pesaro.

Pesaro is often labelled the city of music, being the birthplace of Rossini. A lot of the cultural events are related to Rossini. And speaking of culture, it was the Italian Capital of Culture in 2024. It has a beautiful piazza with many shops nearby, as well as an impressive promenade by the seafront characterized by a giant Arnaldo Pomodoro sphere affectionately known as “la palla” (the ball).

The city also features an impressive bike-lane network known as the Bicipolitana (essentially, a “bike metro”), which is actively used by the locals and has won awards before.

In essence, you have a real city with a real beach, which doesn’t die when the summer is over. Something a lot rarer than you might think. The local hospital is very respectable, the tech infrastructure is solid, and the train station easily gets you to Bologna and from there, almost anywhere else you want.

Real estate is relatively expensive by Marche standards, but still affordable at around €2,350 per square meter.

If you want both urban and sea life in one place, this is a strong contender.

(I covered Pesaro before, if you want to dive in deep.)

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You decided to move to Italy. You’re both excited and scared. You might even have a region or two in mind. The real question becomes: where, exactly? There are almost 8,000 comuni (towns) in Italy to choose from.

Pick right, and your experience in Italy will be largely wonderful. Pick wrong, and the experience becomes far harder than it needs to be.

In a previous post, I argued that moving to a tiny village in Italy is almost always a mistake. In the process of writing that article, I developed a framework to identify worthy candidates for relocation. The target is città di provincia. Cities that are neither too small nor too big.

I refined that framework for this new series and will present it here with its rationale. You’ll then be able to use it yourself to find places to consider for your move to Italy.

In future posts in the series, I’ll do the work for you, saving you countless hours by applying the framework to each region, one post at a time. Each of the twenty posts will give you specific towns that passed all criteria for your consideration. I expect a handful or two of comuni per region to pass these filters, giving you a narrow shortlist of candidates.

Paid subscribers get the full homework, including details of the candidate cities. Free subscribers get the regional overview and the details for one candidate city. Subscribe if you don’t already, so you don’t miss it.

Italy’s main problems

Zooming out, Italy is a wonderful place to live. It also has a few systemic problems. In short:

• Bureaucracy

• Lack of jobs

• Stagnant salaries

• Depopulation and lack of public services in inland villages

• Aging demographic

• Lack of integration of new populations

• Seismic risk in some regions

• Air pollution in the Po Valley

• Organized crime in some regions

Our framework will address most of these, minimizing these systemic problems as much as possible.

Requirements for our candidate towns

No amount of filtering fixes all of Italy’s problems. But we can screen out cities and towns that make things worse for a would-be expat.

So here is a checklist I came up with, split into must-haves and genuinely nice-to-haves, but not mandatory.

Must-have

• Population between 15,000 and 100,000

• Not in Seismic Zone 1, or any current red-zone or active post-seismic reconstruction designation.

• A hospital with an ER (pronto soccorso) within 25 minutes

• A scuola superiore (high school) in town

• A full supermarket in town

• Fiber internet available

• A stable population: no more than a roughly 5% decline over the last ten years

Nice-to-have

• A train station

• Within 30 minutes of a capoluogo di provincia (provincial capital), or is one itself

Why these filters

Let’s review why these filters in particular:

• A population between 15,000 and 100,000 does most of the work for you. It’s a size that ensures neither big-city chaos nor a lack of community, while preventing you from living in a semi-abandoned village that lacks key services. Around the 15K threshold, most comuni begin to have essentials not explicitly listed in our filter, like pharmacies (plural), schools, full-time municipal staff, etc.

• The seismic filter protects you from the most dangerous earthquake areas.

• A real hospital no farther than 25 minutes away ensures true emergencies (e.g., a heart attack) are handled promptly. It’s also generally a proxy for the existence of specialists and other healthcare providers in the area.

• A high school in town is a good signal about the demographics. It means there are enough young people around to justify its existence, and you are not moving into a town where you’ll be the youngest resident at 35.

• Most towns will have a bar and an alimentari (a small food shop). But commuting to the next town over for proper grocery shopping gets old fast. Having a full supermarket like Conad, CRAI, Eurospin, etc. ensures your essential needs are covered right in town.

• Fiber internet being largely available in a city or town is important because the majority of people pulling off a move will do so as remote workers. If this isn’t you, you can ignore it. But I think it also acts as a proxy for other modern services and technology infrastructure investments in the area.

• The stability check is there as a ghost-town test. Even if a place has 15K people today, it could be a bad candidate because it has been bleeding people. This filter ensures spopolamento (depopulation) is not a major factor affecting your chosen town.

• The train station is a nice-to-have. Many lovely places in Italy won't have one. However, its presence gives you easier access to the rest of Italy. Trains in Italy are efficient, ubiquitous, and cheap. Having a train station right in town makes your weekends significantly more exciting. It enables countless day trips that would otherwise require a car.

• A provincial capital being nearby is a major plus. Whatever your little town lacks, the province nearby will have. Plus, the Questura (where you renew your permesso di soggiorno, that is, your residence permit) will be at a sane distance.

What is not on the list

The filters are admittedly missing a few important factors that cannot be reliably included in this filtering exercise.

Air quality. There is no monitoring for all 7,900 comuni. So I won’t pretend to know exact numbers and filter towns on this basis. In regions where this is an issue (mostly those around the Pianura Padana, the Po Valley), I will mention it at the regional level, and you can decide if it’s a factor for you.

English proficiency. It would be amazing to have reliable English-level proficiency data at the town level. But it simply doesn’t exist. Even regional English-level data is shaky at best. So I’ll let you know if a given region has particularly good or bad English proficiency, but we cannot filter towns on this basis. Assume that anywhere outside major cities will require Italian. (My site Linguetto can help you learn, by the way.)

Organized crime. It remains a factor in parts of southern Italy and other selected pockets of the country. I’ll give you regional context, since there is no reliable source for organized crime data at the town-level. There are some egregious examples (and I’ll mention them if they pass the rest of the filters), but it will mostly be a discussion at the regional level. And I’ll let you know if and how this affects you if you move there.

One rule for the whole series

Some regions will have few comuni that pass all our filters. In fact, some regions might have none.

When that happens, I will relax some of the criteria and explain why I chose those. I will disclose when this happens, and the fact that I had to adjust a given region should be useful information in itself.

Stay tuned for the first post in the series later this week.

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