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We took a FlixBus from Rome to Civitanova Marche. My high-school best friend Fabio was waiting at the bus stop by the shopping center. Our car rental, the only one we could book on a Saturday, wasn’t ready until 3 PM.

Two hungry people, one patient Italian, and two hours to kill. If you know how Italians treat meals, you already see the lunch-shaped solution.

We started calling our favorite restaurants in Civitanova. Fully booked, every one of them. In late May, the first tourists are already back, and every well-reviewed table on Google was gone.

Even in a region most foreigners can’t place on a map, in Italy, it is wise to make reservations.

Running out of options, we did what any reasonable local would do. We drove out into the hills, ten minutes inland, searching for a rustic restaurant off the beaten path.

That place was Mangia. I've thought about that meal several times since, and I still struggle to identify what a Michelin-starred restaurant could have done better.

Meet Mangia

The name means “Eat!” After a half-day of travel on an empty stomach, we didn’t need to be told twice.

The restaurant sits on a hillside by Civitanova Marche Alta, the old town. Civitanova Marche itself, the one with fully booked restaurants, sits by the sea.

As you drive up to Mangia, you’ll see a villa that doesn’t even look like a restaurant from the outside. The back has ample space for parking.

We entered from the beautiful garden full of fruit trees. The owner, Antonella, warmly welcomed us herself, dispelling the suspicion that we had accidentally wandered into a neighbor's villa.

It’s a rustic setting, but in a refined way. The kind of countryside venue you’d book for a fancy wedding. Think stone walls with beautiful decor, among a green garden. A real slice of Marche’s quiet and relaxation.

Rustic, yes. But someone put real thought and money into making it look elegant. That someone is Paolo (the Chef) and Antonella (his wife, who by the way, speaks some English).

A reassuring menu

You can usually get a sense for the restaurant you’re in before food is even served. Mangia sent all the right signals from the beginning.

They brought us menus, took our drink orders, and brought us bread. Service wasn’t just polite. It was warm. As if the owner invited you to their villa and was genuinely happy that you were dining there.

The bread, typically an afterthought, set the tone for the kind of dining experience we would have.

It wasn’t your typical sliced-up loaf. There were multiple kinds of bread. They even brought us onion-flavored handmade grissini (thin breadsticks), which melted in your mouth. The spread was so impressive that I jokingly said, “That’s our meal right there.”

The menu itself was a tell. Two pages. A handful of primi (first courses) and secondi (second courses), not fifty. Reasonable, though not low prices. A set tasting menu (menù degustazione): appetizer, primo, secondo, and dessert, for 45 euros. Both pages strictly in Italian.

This is the kind of restaurant you want: located off the beaten path, short menu in Italian only, no pictures of the dishes, serving local seasonal food. The opposite of a tourist trap.

Authentic delicious food

I ordered the gnocchetti with sausage, almonds, and rucola (arugula). Fabio went for the grill.

Alicia ordered her first vincisgrassi, Marche’s signature lasagna-like dish, made with a ragù of pork, veal, and chicken giblets rather than the ground beef common in standard lasagna. The kitchen warned her about the organ meat, which can be an acquired taste.

She tried it anyway, but didn’t like the texture of the giblets. Nevertheless, she loved the rest of the dish and finished it without complaints.

Try it at Mangia or elsewhere, when you’re in the region, but do try it. It’s a genuinely old dish, originating in Macerata (Civitanova’s province) since the 1700s. As of 2022, it carries EU protected status as a Specialità Tradizionale Garantita (Traditional Specialty Guaranteed), joining the likes of Neapolitan pizza and amatriciana.

Fabio and I both enjoyed our respective meals, which were authentic and delicious. Had we ordered the vincisgrassi, I’m confident we would have loved them too, since, unlike Alicia, we grew up eating it.

What followed was unusual. We ordered lunch for three people. The kitchen seemed determined to feed six.

The meal we mostly didn’t order

The food didn’t stop there. And here’s the thing: we didn’t order them.

Paolo and Antonella kept showing up at the table with small morsels of food they wanted us to try, explaining each time what they prepared for us, sourcing the food from local farmers or their own land.

Olive oil, smoked over carbon, made in-house. A sushi roll built around ciauscolo, the soft, spreadable salame the Marche is known for. (Alicia and I were big fans.) Fried veggies. Grilled wild boar sausages in a marinade with unmistakable Asian notes. Chocolates filled with a mousse of berries from their own garden.

It felt like half of what we ate at that meal was never billed. All of it was researched and had a unique twist on something traditional. All delicious.

For the record, at the time, nobody there knew I wrote about Italy, and Fabio had no history with the place. This was just how they treat a table of three random people walking in on a Saturday.

Michelin-like on a budget

The entire dining experience was superb and reminiscent of one-star Michelin restaurants I’ve dined at before.

So, did the Michelin guide try the place and pass it? I don’t know. Michelin’s presence in Marche is relatively limited compared with regions such as Lombardy, and most of the region’s starred restaurants are concentrated in the center-north of the region, along its coastline.

Inland, up in these hills, the Michelin inspector’s presence is anyone’s guess. So it’s not that Mangia is hidden from the locals in Civitanova. Fabio mentioned a friend having a baptism party there once. A few locals were chatting in dialect within earshot of us. It’s just hidden from English-speaking visitors and tourists. Whether it’s hidden from Michelin, too, I can’t say. What I can say is it has no star, and over a long lunch, I never once felt the absence of one.

I’ve eaten at quite a few starred restaurants. The kind of places where the meal is the first event and the bill is the second one. The authentic, local, and tasty food was the only event here.

Mangia might not have a Michelin star, but it’s a hidden gem worth visiting for authentic Marchigiano food. The drive into the hills is the price of admission, and a small one at that.

Getting there

• Where: Mangia, Via Pitignano 50, Civitanova Marche Alta (MC). About ten minutes inland from seaside Civitanova Marche.

• What to order: The menù degustazione (appetizer, primo, secondo, dessert) at 45 euros is the right choice if hungry. The vincisgrassi, if you have never had it, is worth trying.

• Reservations: Book the table. Don’t chance it on the day of. Even off-season.

• Parking: Ample space behind the villa.

• Contact: +39 0733 890053

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Montappone is a village of 1,780 people in the Marche hills. Its claim to fame is being the European capital of hat-making.

Over half of all hats made in Europe come from there. A tiny village beating every city across forty-four countries.

I was back in the Marche this May, wearing a beret. Peaky Blinders look, a winter weight, slightly too large. Somewhere between Rome and the Marche region, I left it behind.

Staying in the Fermo area and knowing about Montappone, I figured I’d make the short drive and get a new one at the source.

Alicia came along. She has a hard time finding hats that fit and was skeptical that Montappone would help. I grew up ten minutes away from it. I knew it would.

Getting there

The drive to get there is a beautiful traversing of paved, winding roads among green hills with a view of the Sibillini mountains in the distance. No scary cliffs or sketchy moments. Just a relaxing countryside drive.

Just before reaching it, you’ll see it perched atop a hill, golden-amber glowing: Montappone.

We arrived at Cappelleria Dichiara in the morning. It wasn’t clear which driveway we should get into, and if we could. An older lady passing by asked us where we were going.

She told me “Sua moglie è proprio bella” (your wife is so beautiful) and proceeded to indicate the way. Not with her finger. Physically walking ahead of the car all the way to the shop. Then told us where to park. She had no affiliation with the shop.

That’s just what Marche hospitality is like. Tuscany before millions of tourists arrived.

Meeting Alessio

Arrived there, perhaps alerted by his small dog barking with excitement, the owner (Alessio) came downstairs to greet us and invited us in. He’s the son of Fabrizio, who started it all decades ago.

The hats are stored upstairs in a room in their house. The lab where the magic happens is on the main floor.

By North American standards, this might seem a rather non-industrial setup. And that’s because it isn’t. It is a family and artisanal business, and a rather common setup around these parts.

Alessio was very friendly and spoke a rather workable English (for Alicia’s sake). He explained how their shop operates and how the hats are made. They do most of their sales online and sell both retail and wholesale.

Choosing some hats

I chose Cappelleria Dichiara because of its reputation. They have many happy customers, and local friends recommended them. Their 4.9-star rating on Google clearly confirms the recommendations. They didn’t disappoint.

What I enjoyed about the process was the lack of sales pressure or rush. Alessio showed us dozens of options before we picked our new hats.

We started with berets for me. The two main models were Berretto Peaky, in the classical Peaky Blinders newsboy style, and Coppola Duck, which is more Sicilian looking, has no button on top, and a slimmer profile.

Then each of these models has a slew of color, pattern, and material choices.

I settled for a navy and a beige Coppola, both in linen, one of the best materials for the summer heat. They look stylish in my opinion and are very comfortable.

The trouble was that my head sits between sizes. Their 59 was too tight. 61, way too loose, like the beret I misplaced on my way to Marche.

Alessio reassured me that it wouldn’t be a problem. He summoned his cousin Alessia, who quickly adapted the two hats so that they’d fit me. The 59 became, de facto, a perfect 60.

I test-drove the navy one on a sunny day in nearby Ascoli Piceno, and it performed brilliantly. It protected my bald head, didn’t feel warm, and I forgot I was wearing a hat most of the time.

For Alicia, there were even more hat types to choose from. The model that caught her eye (and mine) was the Pamela Melange e Rafia. In blue and in green.

Alessia and Alessio proceeded to adjust hers too in front of us in the lab downstairs until they fit Alicia’s head perfectly.

You might be forgiven for mistaking hats made in Italy by a local family, custom-adjusted to fit you, for an expensive ordeal. It was not. Alicia’s hats were 29.90 euros each. My linen ones, 45 euros. I’ve paid more for ill-fitting, mass-produced hats ordered off Amazon.

Zia Maria gave us a show

Walking in, we noticed on the side of the lab a bunch of golden hats drying in the sun.

We had to ask. They were straw hats made by Alessio’s aunt Maria. The process of producing them requires the straw to be wet. So they must be air-dried before the finishing workflow can start.

After paying for our four hats (which Alessio slightly discounted), Zia Maria offered to show us the process by quickly producing a hat from scratch. She even gifted us the raw hat as a souvenir.

I recorded the impressive process for you below.

She got it done in less than four minutes. Even at her age, she works at a speed that explains why she and other local artisans manage to produce so many hats in a tiny village. Her degree of hat-making experience is unmatched outside of her postal code.

If I were to start organizing experiences in the Marche region (something I might do in the future), I would definitely include a visit to this hat shop.

Alessio mentioned that they have on occasion done workshops for small groups of tourists interested in trying hat-making themselves, so it might be something you’ll be able to arrange with him if planning to visit with your own group.

You can visit or contact Cappelleria Dichiara at:

Via Saletto 14, Montappone (FM)

Tel: +39 (388) 697-0683

Email: info@cappelleriadichiara.it

Tell them Italy with Antonio sent you so you’ll get special attention. I’m not an affiliate or anything; I just want you to have a great experience, and I’m happy to see this family rewarded for their hard work.

It’s the kind of authentic small-town Italy experience I’ll continue to promote in this new Hidden Gems of Italy series. Subscribe so you don’t miss them.

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Two truths and a lie about Italian-American speech:

1. Gabagool comes from capocollo.

2. Mutzadell comes from mozzarella.

3. They are both gibberish.

Number three is the lie. They are both Italian-American.

Italians will tell you that those words and their pronunciations are incorrect. Stupid even. (And so does Grammarly, which is screaming at me with red underlines.)

Language is a living body, constantly evolving beyond the textbook shackles of how it should be.

Those words are the linguistic evolutions of the southern dialects spoken by immigrants in the early 1900s. (This evolution is actually slower than the one in Italy, as we’ll discuss in a moment.)

Start with the Neapolitan “muzzarell”, add over a century of a community developing their own customs and linguistic choices independently from the motherland, and you’ll easily end up with “mutzadell.”

It’s not Italian, mind you. But neither was the original. Very few immigrants in 1905 knew standard Italian. They knew Neapolitan, Calabrian, Sicilian, and Apulian dialects. Languages, in their own right, that were close enough to enable understanding among the southern immigrants.

Italians are quick to dismiss the culture of Italian-Americans. At times, en passant, I have regrettably done so myself. But it’s a case of ignorance more than malice. Upon reflection, I think we Italians born and raised are wrong on this one.

The dismissal is reflexive, not researched

Aside from distaste for words that have evolved enough to sound distorted to native Italian ears, Italians take issue with those who identify as Italians.

In forums, you’ll often see threads from Italian-Americans asking how Italians see them. The universal answer is “Americans.” It’s not that they dislike you for being Italian-American. It’s that to them you’re simply American and no different than Irish-American or Polish-American.

On the podcast Cresciuto Italiano, authored by a few stereotypical Italian-Americans from Brooklyn, “Zero Italian in the whole room” is a common comment from native Italians.

The basic Italian reaction to “I’m Italian” is “Ah, sono italiano anch’io, di dove sei?” And the second the Italian-American has no idea how to respond, the native Italian will feel proud of having proven their lack of “italianità.”

Our North American cousins will either speak very little Italian or will typically do so with an American accent. Understandably so. To Italians, that’s proof you’re American, not Italian.

The truth is that Italians are generally not very knowledgeable about the culture Italian-Americans built in North America.

Because it is a culture. Different from the Italian one but born from a related ancestor.

So the dismissal is almost a knee-jerk reaction, not a researched assessment and consequent rejection of their culture.

Had they spent time studying the culture, they could have found genuine vehicles of attack. The cosplaying of mobsters by some is a fair target for criticism. So is the guy who calls himself Italian because his great-grandaunt once removed was from Sicily, and that’s the extent of it. Sorry, one distant relative and nothing else doesn’t count. This isn’t 23andMe.

But none of this is the part Italians actually mean when they perform the dismissal. They mean the food, the language, the accent, and the gestures. The entire inheritance which has genuine cultural value.

Part of the rejection of Americans who identify as Italian has its roots in dynamics that have nothing to do with them.

Italy is still a country where many northerners dislike southerners. Neapolitans are still characterized as barbarians by many in the north. Terrone, the slur word for a person from the south, is still commonly heard.

The same people calling anything south of Tuscany “Africa” are not going to classify as Italians the remote descendants of southerners who, to boot, don’t speak the language and don’t live in Italy.

This is relevant because Italian immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s were overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno (Italy’s south). Sicily, Campania, Calabria, and Apulia sent most of the Italians who emigrated to the US.

In Italy, we have a word to describe the distrust and prejudice against people from other regions and cities: campanilismo. The word comes from campana (bell), the attachment to one’s own bell tower. It runs deep.

So the dismissal of Italian-Americans is a form of campanilismo extended across the ocean. With the added benefit that the people on the other side are too far away to fight back. Plus, they might not even know the word polentone (a milder derogatory term for people in the north).

The cousins are not a metaphor

I referred to Italian-Americans as cousins. This might seem out of politeness, since many of my readers will indeed be Italian-Americans. It is actually a factual claim. The 17 million Americans of Italian descent are very much related by blood to the Italians who stayed behind.

A surprising number of those who emigrated are from a small number of southern villages. It was a chain migration process. A couple of sons from a family would go abroad, then get the rest of the family to come along too. Then, inspired, the neighbors would eventually send their own kids to the States or Canada.

So, entire neighborhoods of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Montreal came from small towns in Campania, Sicily, Calabria, and Puglia.

The “cousins” label is often literal.

Gabagool is Naples 1905, preserved

Many young Italians do not speak dialects today. They have a regional accent, they know some words, but long gone are the days when they spoke dialect as a first language.

This is a relatively recent development, however. Until the 1950s, most Italians did not speak standard Italian. They spoke dialects that are really regional languages related to Italian. And Italian was, at best, their second language.

That matters because terms like gabagool are not a random corruption of standard Italian. They are evolutions of southern dialect words.

Capocollo becomes gabagool. The same process gives you mutzadell from mozzarella, rigot from ricotta, and manigot from manicotti.

Italian-American speech has essentially become its own ethnolect. Not an invented language, like Esperanto. Rather, it’s partially a time capsule. A preserved version of southern Italian pronunciation from 1905, plus some natural evolution over time.

The irony is that the Italian-Americans preserved the same dialects that the Italian government marginalized in favor of standard Italian for a good part of the 20th century, through schooling and television programs.

So Italians now mock a “language” that is derived from the dialects Italy tried to bully out of the kids from the south.

Beyond the language, Italy evolved quickly after World War II, especially with the economic boom in the late 50s and early 60s. Traditions were lost. The hyper-local focus was dismantled by a public TV (RAI) that united and standardized Italy across the regions.

In North America, many traditions froze in place instead. Think saint feasts, Sunday meals, village loyalties, etiquette, etc.

The diaspora certainly drifted away from Italy, but Italy too drifted away from the version of itself it exported.

Chicken Parmesan is evolution, not an invention

Take chicken parmigiana. It is not fake Italian food. It is an Italian-American adaptation.

Parmigiana di melanzane already existed in southern Italy. My mom made a legendary one, in fact. So likely did her great-great-grandmother.

Italian-Americans simply made their own version, substituting eggplant with chicken when meat became affordable in America.

You’ll see this pattern constantly, and it explains why Italian-American food is richer and more caloric than that from the motherland.

Southern Italian cucina povera met the American abundance, and produced decadent versions Italians no longer recognize.

Much like the language, the recipes have evolved. They were not invented from nothing.

The slap of March 2025

Italians dismissed Italian-Americans from a social standpoint. They always questioned their italianità. However, in March 2025, Italy made this formal with a legal rejection.

The Italian government passed a decree, the so-called “Tajani decree”, that became Law 74/2025 in May 2025, limiting who can receive Italian citizenship.

In March 2026, the Constitutional Court rejected the first major challenges to the law, making it clear the reform is not going away anytime soon.

Before this law, most people with a distant Italian ancestor (like a great-great-grandma) could often receive Italian citizenship. Under the Tajani decree, eligibility is mostly limited to the descendants of Italian parents or grandparents.

Millions of Italian-Americans became ineligible overnight. The opposition deputy Nicola Carè called it “a deep, painful, and unjust wound.”

The message was clear: the cultural distance is now formalized into legal distance, too.

My personal theory, knowing how Italian ethno-nationalism works, is that Italian-Americans were essentially a casualty of Italy keeping out South American cousins.

The backlog of applications for juris sanguinis (citizenship by blood) was overwhelmingly from South American applications. Politicians have mentioned in multiple instances how Brazilians and Argentinians were using Italy as a way to obtain an EU passport to then go look for better opportunities elsewhere in Europe.

As much as they don’t see Italian-Americans as actually Italian, most Italians genuinely don’t take issue with an American 28-year-old girl dreaming of the Amalfi Coast. Neither do they have a problem with the Canadian, Australian, or British retiree deciding to spend the last two decades of their lives in the hills of Tuscany.

Some do take issue with people getting their EU passport through Italy and then heading straight for Germany.

So, on the surface, the law looks neutral. Everyone without an Italian parent or grandparent is cut off. In practice, the spirit of the law has uglier roots.

What we owe the diaspora

And here is the thing: Italy often acts as if Italian-Americans owe everything to Italy. Especially, cultural legitimacy.

In reality, Italy owes the diaspora a great deal, too.

Before the economic boom, emigrants sending money back to the south of Italy for decades genuinely helped the weak Mezzogiorno economy.

Italian-American restaurants helped globalize Italian cuisine long before Italy made food a key tenet of its tourism strategy.

Hollywood’s image of italianità, for better or for worse, was largely built by Italian-Americans.

The global brand of Italy abroad was not created by Italy alone. The diaspora did some heavy lifting, too.

How to actually find the cousin

You can hide your Italian roots and simply say “I’m American” or “I’m Canadian,” and Italians will embrace you with no suspicion. Or you can run with it. Because the divide is fixable.

Find the town where your ancestors are from. Do some research and go there. In many cases, you’ll be able to trace living relatives after looking at a few records and having local conversations.

The Italian government, new decree notwithstanding, still runs a turismo delle radici (roots tourism) initiative, and towns like Sambuca di Sicilia, Mussomeli, and Pacentro run programs specifically aimed at descendants.

For fellow Italians from Italy, here is my advice: replace the dismissal with questions. Ask which village. Ask for the surname. Ask who left and when. Be curious, not judgmental, as Ted Lasso put it.

Because often, the connection is still there.

Italian-American culture is not fake Italian culture. It is one branch of Italian culture that evolved separately after migration.

The cousins did not invent their identity out of thin air. They preserved parts of Italy that the country itself abandoned.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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That matters for what comes next, so I figured I’d ask directly.

I embedded three polls below. They should only take a couple of minutes of your time, but provide me with real direction that will shape the writing to come.

One last favor. If you could leave me a comment answering the following question:

What’s one topic or question about Italy you wish I’d cover?

If nothing comes to mind, feel free to tell me what got you hooked on Italy in the first place.

Either answer will help me figure out what to focus on in the future.

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If you think Walmart has a lot of pasta options, you haven’t been to a random grocery store in Italy.

Both sides of an entire aisle, every shelf dedicated to nothing but pasta. Dozens of brands, hundreds of shapes, and regional specialties you’ve never heard of.

To a casual observer, they look interchangeable and a little overwhelming. To the Italian cook, these are specific tools for specific jobs.

Italians don’t have an innate ability to find the best pasta, as the Lagotto Romagnolo (the truffle-hunting breed from Romagna) does with truffles. We just cook more pasta than anyone else in the world. We put in the reps.

Buying pasta like an Italian is not gastronomic science. You don’t need decades of practice. A handful of principles will get you most of the way there.

Surface and color of the pasta

Let’s start with one of the most important tells. The texture and color of the pasta itself. The window on pasta boxes is there exactly for this purpose.

The most reliable tell is the surface. If it looks glossy, smooth, and very uniform, it’s industrial. If it looks matte and the surface is slightly rough, it’s artisan or close to it.

Color is a secondary signal, and much like Facebook relationships, it’s complicated.

On the one hand, high-quality Italian durum wheat has a high yellow index, the technical term for its carotenoid content. Good wheat is naturally more yellow.

On the other hand, fast, high-temperature industrial drying processes will caramelize the pasta, also making it yellower.

The trick: bright, plasticky, uniform yellow is the hallmark of cheap pasta. A deeper golden tone usually means high-quality wheat.

The surface difference comes down to trafilatura, the process where the dough gets pushed through a metal die to take its shape.

Cheap pasta gets pushed through Teflon dies quickly and smoothly, yielding perfect-looking pasta.

Higher quality pasta goes through bronze dies, which scratch and rough up the surface of the pasta, making it more imperfect.

Bronze-cut pasta has thousands of little ridges that grab onto the sauce. Teflon-cut pasta is smooth, letting the sauce slide right off.

On the label, look for “trafilatura al bronzo” or “trafilata al bronzo”.

Industrial pasta has to be produced fast, so it is dried at high temperatures between 80 and 100°C in just 2-3 hours. Slow-dried pasta takes a day or two at 40-55°C.

Slow drying, labelled “essiccazione lenta” or “essiccazione a bassa temperatura,” keeps the wheat’s natural aromatics and doesn’t fall apart as easily when cooking.

In short, on the shelf, the surface of the pasta matters more than the exact shade. Matte and slightly rough is what you want. Whether the underlying yellow is pale amber or warm gold depends on the wheat, and both can be excellent.

What semolina actually is

There are two main kinds of wheat flour. Soft, mostly used for bread and pizza. And hard, used for dry pasta. Soft wheat is unsuitable for pasta as it wouldn’t survive boiling.

Soft wheat is called grano tenero in Italian. Hard wheat is called grano duro. (In English, durum wheat.)

The flour milled from hard wheat is called semolina, or in Italian, semola di grano duro.

The only ingredient on the label should be semola di grano duro. If the label is in English, durum wheat semolina. That’s it. (OK, water can also be listed.)

If you see additional ingredients such as vegetable oils, stabilizers, “modified starch,” or anything else, put it back on the shelf.

Good dry pasta has high gluten content. Gluten is a protein, so as a proxy, you can look at the protein grams on the nutritional label. High-quality pasta can often hit 13-14 grams of protein for 100 grams of product. Even if you slightly overcook it, it won’t go mushy or become una colla (a glue) as we Italians put it.

If the pasta you’re considering has low protein content, put it back.

One last check you should do is the source of the grain. Aim for grains fully sourced in Italy. If you see “EU and non-EU sources,” you’re buying a mish-mash of Italian, Canadian, and Ukrainian wheats. Whatever was available and cheap.

Italian durum varieties of wheat (Senatore Cappelli is an ancient variety and a particularly good one) tend to behave better when boiled.

Pasta all’uovo: when to buy egg pasta

Pasta all’uovo is egg pasta. To be more exact, it’s a combination of egg and semolina.

The home-cooked ratio is typically one egg per 100 grams of flour. For commercial pasta all’uovo, Italy actually has a law that sets the minimum ratio to be able to legally label the pasta as “all’uovo”. It takes at least 4 whole eggs (or 200 grams of egg) per kilogram of flour.

Most quality brands will have a higher ratio and advertise it on the package.

Look for “uova fresche” (fresh eggs) over “ovoprodotto” (pasteurized egg liquid or powder). The former is more expensive for a reason. Real egg pasta uses fresh whole eggs, and you can taste the difference.

Historically, pasta all’uovo was particularly dominant in the north and center, particularly in Emilia-Romagna.

In terms of pasta shapes, pasta all’uovo is popular for lasagna, filled shapes (ravioli, tortellini, agnolotti, cappelletti), and flat ribbon types like tagliatelle and fettuccine.

Egg pasta is more delicate than regular semolina pasta, but it’s also more flavorful and has a richer, softer texture.

If you’re going to make a ragù alla bolognese, the perfect pairing is tagliatelle all’uovo.

If you are feeding a crowd, plan to have leftovers for a couple of days, or the main star of the meal is a classic sauce like cacio e pepe or aglio e olio, stick to regular semolina pasta.

Fresh vs dried

Dried pasta is firm, holds its shape better, and it survives a busy stove or a partner running late to dinner.

Fresh pasta is softer, more fragile, and cooks in just two or three minutes.

Italians are famous for making fresh pasta from scratch, and there are definitely some advantages. But don’t assume we do so on a daily basis. Fresh pasta is for Sunday meals and special occasions, if you are blessed with a cook in the house who loves to make it.

Most days, we simply use dried pasta, and it works just fine. The one exception is filled pasta like tortellini. You really want fresh pasta. Dried versions exist, of course, but you can taste the difference in texture.

Understanding pasta shapes

Italian pasta comes in all sorts of shapes. Each shape has properties that make it suitable for specific dishes.

The basic idea is that different shapes have different mouthfeel and interact with the sauce in different ways. Food isn’t simply about taste; it’s also about texture.

Let’s have a quick tour of the main families. The list is by no means exhaustive, but it will give you the lay of the land.

Long thin pasta

Capellini: Extremely thin pasta. Think angel-hair. Ideal for delicate broths and light oil sauces. Heavy sauces tend to overwhelm them.

Spaghetti: The all-rounder. One of the most versatile shapes of long pasta, suitable for almost everything.

Spaghettoni: Thicker spaghetti, favored over regular spaghetti for Roman classics like cacio e pepe and carbonara.

Bucatini: Very chunky spaghetti, with a hollow center that holds sauce inside. Fantastic with amatriciana.

Long ribbon pasta

Linguine: Spaghetti is long, thin, and round. Linguine is the slightly flattened counterpart, traditionally paired with pesto, clams, and seafood.

Tagliatelle: Flat ribbons traditionally served with ragù alla bolognese.

Fettuccine: Broad ribbons suited for rich, creamy sauces. Tagliatelle and fettuccine are very similar, but fettuccine is narrower and thicker, making it less delicate.

Pappardelle: Very wide ribbons made for hearty game sauces (boar, hare), mushrooms, and slow-cooked meats.

Tubes

Penne: 1.5-2 inch tubes cut diagonally at both ends. They come rigate (ridged on the outside) or lisce (smooth). They hold sauce well (as all tube pasta does), and they are very common for arrabbiata, vodka, and pesto sauce.

Rigatoni: Same length as penne, but not diagonally cut. Also, much larger diameter and always ridged on the outside. Built for thick meat sauces and many Roman classic sauces.

Mezzi rigatoni: Shorter rigatoni with the same hearty sauce-holding capability.

Mezze maniche: Chunky, short, ridged tubes popular in Rome for carbonara and gricia. In essence, slightly squished mezzi rigatoni.

Ziti: Long, smooth tubes broken by hand before cooking. Popular in the south of Italy. Often baked with ragù and cheese.

Paccheri: Large Neapolitan tubes that are excellent with seafood, meat sauces, or stuffing. They essentially look like larger mezze maniche, but they are smooth, not ridged, and they collapse when cooked, unlike mezze maniche.

Cannelloni: Large tubes that get stuffed, often with spinach and ricotta, and baked. They are a Sunday lunch classic just like lasagne.

Twists and curls

Fusilli: Corkscrew pasta and one of my favorite pasta shapes. The helix design grips chunky vegetable sauces, pesto, and ricotta-based sauces.

Casarecce: Twisted Sicilian pasta shape with grooves that trap rustic sauces.

Trofie: Small Ligurian, irregularly twisted pasta. The best shape for pesto alla genovese.

Busiate: Long Sicilian coils famously paired with pesto alla trapanese. Busiate are longer and more rolled than trofie.

Small concave shapes

Orecchiette: “Little ears” from Puglia that scoop up greens, sausage ragù, and chunky sauces. Orecchiette con cime di rapa e salsiccia are legendary, and so are the famous (and now legally embattled) nonne selling them in Bari.

Conchiglie: Shell-shaped pasta that captures sauces (and seafood) inside its hollow center.

Farfalle: Bow-tie pasta that resembles “butterflies.” The texture changes from the center to the edges. It’s a delicate pasta that shouldn’t be overwhelmed with heavy, meaty sauces.

Pastina

Pastina is a group of tiny pasta shapes used for broth and soup. Stelline (tiny stars) are the classic comfort food for sick Italian kids. Ditalini (little tubes, rigate or lisce) are the canonical shape for pasta e fagioli and other legume soups. Anellini are small rings; larger versions appear in Sicilian baked pasta dishes.

Sheet pasta

Lasagne: Wide sheets layered and baked in dishes like lasagna (and vincisgrassi in the Marche region).

Filled pasta

Tortellini: Small and ring-shaped, they are traditionally filled with meat and served in broth.

Tortelloni: A larger version of tortellini, often filled with ricotta or vegetables and served with sauce.

Cappelletti: “Little hats” often served in broth, especially in Romagna and Marche. A legit alternative to tortellini.

Ravioli: Flat stuffed parcels with endlessly varied regional fillings.

Agnolotti: Piedmontese stuffed pasta, especially famous in its delicate “plin” version.

The dry pasta brand hierarchy

At risk of starting a civil war in Italy, I’m going to recommend a few brands I personally trust at various tiers and price points.

This is an informed opinion, shared by many Italians. But it is an opinion. Please try them and form your own opinions about which brands work best for you.

As a reminder, aside from personal experience, the dividing lines are characterized by:

• Teflon vs bronze dies

• Fast industrial drying vs slow low-temp drying

• Commodity grain vs curated/Italian/single-origin grain

• Industrial consistency vs artisan flavor

The difference shows up in how the sauce binds to the pasta and the taste of the pasta itself. This isn’t snobbery. You can genuinely taste the difference.

I’m including the price of a pack of spaghetti for the cheapest brand in the group, to offer a reference point.

Cheap industrial pasta brands

• Barilla (standard line)

• Divella

• Granoro (standard line)

Price example: $1.84 for Barilla Spaghetti 1 lb/454 g.

They’re not bad. They’re industrial Teflon-cut and dried fast, but they work. Millions of Italians use them as they are cheap. A step up from grocery-store brands.

Good supermarket pasta brands

• De Cecco

• Garofalo

• Voiello

• Rummo

• La Molisana

Price example: $2.78 for De Cecco Spaghetti 1 lb/454 g.

A significant improvement over the cheap ones, while remaining affordable. Arguably the sweet spot.

Take La Molisana, for example. They use bronze dies and wheat from Italy selected for its high protein content (never below 14%). It’s also tested in their own labs and milled in their mills. It’s industrial, yes, but they do a seriously good job, and it shows.

If you asked me which widely available brand to buy in North America, I would suggest La Molisana or Rummo (in that order, subject to your local availability). If you can’t find them, order them online or look for De Cecco, which is an acceptable, if less ideal choice.

Artisan pasta brands

• Di Martino

• Rustichella d’Abruzzo

• Felicetti

• Faella

• Pastificio Gentile

• Verrigni

• Mancini

• Martelli

• Pastificio dei Campi

• Benedetto Cavalieri

• La Fabbrica della Pasta

Price example 1: $5.00 for Di Martino Spaghetti 1 lb/454 g.

Price example 2: $10.50 for Faella Spaghetti 1.1 lb/500 g.

From Di Martino’s own page: “Our pasta is PGI Certified Gragnano Pasta, bronze-die, slowly dried at low temperatures, made with 100% Italian durum wheat semolina and local spring water. Contains a minimum of 14% protein, firm to cooking, and highly digestible.”

PGI Certified Gragnano pasta is a big deal. You’re getting pasta made under strict traditional standards: bronze-die extrusion, slow low-temperature drying, single-source wheat, and production in Gragnano itself, the historic pasta capital near Naples.

For some of these brands, we are in diminishing returns territory. You’re the kind of person who must absolutely try the best and doesn’t mind paying over $10 for a pack of pasta. These are the brands to try.

Almost nobody in Italy spends 10 euros on a pack of pasta every day. It’s a special-occasion choice for genuine pasta connoisseurs.

(If you are in Italy, these artisanal pastas are still expensive, but they would be more affordable than when imported overseas.)

Best pasta all’uovo brands

• Spinosi

• La Campofilone

• Pastificio Alfieri

• Filotea

Price example: $8.10 for Spinosi Tagliolini 0.55 lbs/250g

These are the ones worth splurging for. Their dried egg pasta is top-notch. Other brands recommended in the sections above also have very respectable egg pasta lines that are generally more affordable.

Buy high-quality pasta and don’t overcook it

Stick to any of those brands, and you’ll get a decent, in some cases, amazing pasta that will impress even your Italian friends.

It’s your job to cook it al dente and not let it sit in the boiling pot for too long. But the prime material you are working with is genuinely good.

The pasta aisle is the most honest section of any Italian grocery store. The packaging tells you exactly what you’re buying, in detail, if you’re willing to flip the box over.

Most people don’t. They grab the brightest one and walk on.

Now you won’t.

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The Canadian healthcare system is in disarray. “La sanità canadese è allo sbando,” is what I told an Italian friend.

Canada does urgent care well. You get a heart attack, they’ll likely save you.

But at least in British Columbia, people sometimes go years without a general practitioner. The waiting times are horrific, even for potentially serious conditions.

Case in point, my doctor looked at the back of my hand and said, “that mole could be cancerous. I’m not sure. I’m sending you to a dermatologist.”

I’ve been waiting ten months. No news.

I call. The receptionist tells me, with the calm of someone reading off a weather forecast, that current waits for a dermatologist are one to two years.

Annamo bene, annamo, as we say in Rome. Going great.

This is the starting point for understanding how healthcare in Italy actually works. Not a theoretical comparison. A real one.

Italian vs. Canadian healthcare

In Italy, you’d also wait. Let’s not pretend otherwise. The public system has long lists for non-urgent specialist visits, and Italians complain about it loudly. You might still wait months. But not without a Plan B.

For around 80-150 euros, you’d see a private dermatologist within 2-3 weeks. Often in a matter of a few days. With no referral needed, since you are paying. Frequently it’s the same specialist doctor who works in the public hospital across town, just off their regular shift.

My late father once complained to me about waiting a whole week for an MRI. A week. From here in Canada, that sounds like science fiction.

There’s another thing that Canada has trained me to dread. Ten-minute appointments. “One issue only, please.” For someone with a few medical conditions, that’s a meaningful limitation.

In British Columbia, the “one issue per visit” rule feels like an assembly line for the soul. It forces a fragmentation of your own health, where a physical symptom is divorced from the mental stress or chronic context surrounding it.

Italian GPs might be a little too direct about your weight, but they don’t put a stopwatch on chronic illness.

There is a fundamental respect for human dignity in allowing a patient to explain how their back pain affects their sleep, which in turn affects their mood, without being cut off. It’s the difference between being a “case to be processed” and a human being to be healed.

So how does the Italian system work? Two systems stacked on top of each other. One you’re enrolled in by default, one you can pay for when the queue feels too long. Most Italians use both. That’s the part that gets lost in translation.

What the SSN Actually Is

Italy’s public health service is the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale (SSN), the National Health Service. Founded in 1978, modeled loosely on the British NHS, funded by taxes, run on a regional basis.

It covers every Italian citizen and every legal resident automatically. Not a private insurance market. Not employer-tied. You can lose your job and you don’t lose your doctor. You can be 75, broke, and have a hip replaced without selling anything.

The fact that confuses outsiders most: there is no opt-out. Italian residents are in the public system whether they like it or not. Any private care they buy sits on top, never instead.

The system runs on three layers. The Ministry of Health in Rome sets the rules and defines what every region must guarantee, called the Livelli Essenziali di Assistenza (LEA, the Essential Levels of Care).

The 20 regions run the hospitals, with Trentino-Alto Adige delegating to its two autonomous provinces, Trento and Bolzano. The local Aziende Sanitarie Locali (ASL, the regional health authorities) are the offices where you register, pick your family doctor, and book appointments.

Three layers, twenty-one different implementations. That’s where it gets messy.

What Healthcare in Italy Costs

Free at the point of use, mostly.

Walk into a public hospital with chest pain and nobody asks for your insurance card. Emergency care is free for everyone. Tourists, residents, undocumented immigrants. The constitution treats it as a right, and so does the system.

Beyond emergencies, you pay something called il ticket, a small co-pay for specialist visits, lab tests, and certain medications. Amount varies by region and income. A specialist consultation is capped nationally at around 36 euros.

Children under 6 pay nothing. Low-income earners and retirees over 65 below the income threshold are fully exempt. Pregnant women and people with chronic conditions pay nothing for care related to the pregnancy or condition.

On paper, the Italian system shouldn’t work. It’s significantly cheaper than its neighbors, yet Italians live longer than almost anyone else.

Italy spent 8.4% of GDP on health in 2024, under the OECD average of 9.3%. Per capita, that’s about 5,164 USD in purchasing power, well below the OECD average of 5,967. Life expectancy: 83.5 years, more than two years above OECD average.

That’s a hell of a trade. First-world health outcomes on a tighter budget than France, Germany, or Switzerland. The strain shows up somewhere, of course. It shows up mostly in waiting lists.

How You Actually Get Seen

When you register with your local ASL, you receive the tessera sanitaria, the plastic health card that doubles as your tax code (codice fiscale) and as your European Health Insurance Card on the back. You’ll show it at every pharmacy, every public hospital, every specialist visit.

You also pick a medico di base, a general practitioner who acts as your gatekeeper. Each one is capped at around 1,500 patients, paid by the SSN per name on the list, and most practice in small neighborhood offices.

How you book varies by doctor. Walk-in used to be the default and still exists, especially with older solo practitioners in smaller towns. Post-COVID, most GPs have moved to appointment systems, often via a phone call in a narrow morning window, sometimes via an app. Group practices almost always run on appointments. Unlike Canada, your next available appointment will be today or tomorrow, not three weeks from now.

Many doctors still do house calls if you are too sick to go to the appointment but not sick enough to go to the ER. And if you need help at night, there is guardia medica, a special number (i.e., 116117) you call to see a doctor after office hours and on festivities.

Need a specialist or a diagnostic test? Your medico di base writes you an impegnativa (also known as the ricetta rossa) the red prescription form that lets you book through the regional Centro Unico di Prenotazione (CUP). Waits can be long for certain specialties in certain provinces. This is where the private option comes to the rescue per un pugno di euro.

The pharmacy on duty

In Italy, the law guarantees that you have access to a pharmacy at any hour of the day.

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Where are you from is a complicated question for me to answer.

My family is entirely from the province of Naples. For countless generations. My parents mostly spoke to me in Neapolitan, and the food I ate was typical of Naples.

But I was born and raised in Rome. And when I was nine, we moved to Marche. After high school, I went to study in Milan. Then I left for Ireland, briefly the US, and for two decades and counting, I’ve been in Canada.

South, center, and north, then out. If nothing else, that should make me qualified to speak about the gap between the south and the north of Italy.

Two tales of one city

As the idea for this article started forming, I began thinking of two examples that captured the south at its best and at its worst. Not the weather. Something about the social fabric.

Naples is the city that invented il caffè sospeso, the suspended coffee. In a city where most people struggle, Neapolitans show their generous spirit by paying for two coffees so a stranger who can’t afford one can have it free.

Naples also gave us parcheggiatori abusivi, illegal parking attendants.

Picture this. You drive around the block looking for a spot. You finally find one. Parking is free. And there, standing in front of you, is a rough-looking man in a high-vis vest he got himself. He doesn’t work for the city. He doesn’t work for a private parking company. He’s there to extort a few euros from you so that nothing bad happens to your car. He’s the threat and the solution to the threat.

Parcheggiatori abusivi tell us a lot about the south. They cluster where civic enforcement is weak, where informal economies have absorbed unemployment, and where small acts of low-grade extortion are normalized.

The annoying part isn’t the few euros. It’s what their presence says about the civic fabric around them: police tolerance, business-owner tolerance, the whole ethically flexible contract around public space.

The singer Pino Daniele understood this city: “Napul è mille culure, Napul è mille paure.” Naples is a thousand colors, Naples is a thousand fears. He wrote that in 1977. The line captures how a place can be two things at once, and pretending otherwise is a lie.

Any honest answer to “north or south of Italy?” starts with this dichotomy in mind.

It’s not about the vibes

I keep getting asked the question by people thinking about moving to Italy. The cool, business-like atmosphere of the north or the warm chaos of the south?

On the surface, it almost sounds like a matter of personality. A “What Italian city are you?” BuzzFeed-style quiz. And to some degree, it is a matter of taste and personality. But it’s also a math problem with two variables: where your money comes from and what stage of life you’re in. Most people skip one or both when deciding.

This article walks you through the actual invisible line between north and south: cost, healthcare, daily friction, food, climate, and one tax break that flips the whole conversation for exactly one kind of reader. By the end, you’ll know which side of the boot to look at.

Two key questions

Before you get too excited about the weather and the cost of living, you should answer two questions:

• What is funding your life?

• What stage of life are you in?

Everything else depends on this.

Take a retiree with a foreign pension and a young professional looking for work in Italy. One should optimize for taxes and the cost of living. The other for opportunities and wages.

Same country. Very different needs.

Keep in mind the answer to those two questions. We’ll need them later on.

People tend to start with vibes. What they like about a given location. Milan or Lecce, lakes or seas, small town or city. It makes sense, but it’s also backwards.

Start with the math, then look at the map.

The cost-of-living gap

Yes, the south is cheaper. By a little bit? No. Dramatically cheaper.

“Cheap” can be seen as a feature, but it’s also a signal.

Ask yourself, why is the south cheaper? Lower prices are a reflection of the local economy’s power and demand.

What makes housing affordable is also what keeps wages down and opportunities scattered. That’s the trade-off.

If your income is generated from outside of Italy, a foreign pension, a remote salary, or passive investment income, the south can be your adult playground. Your foreign money stretches further than anywhere else in Italy. Life starts to be dolce.

If your income depends on the local economy, because you work for an Italian employer or open a local business, that advantage shrinks and often disappears altogether. (And a local retail business will likely be targeted for extortion by organized crime.)

Lower rent or real estate prices go hand in hand with much weaker earning power.

People talk about the south’s cost of living as if it were a free lunch. It isn’t.

Healthcare: universal, but not uniform

Objectively, the statement “Italy has great healthcare” is broadly accurate. Italy consistently ranks well in international comparisons. For that, you can thank Milan, Florence, Bologna, Ancona, and so on. All central and northern cities.

Healthcare is organized regionally. That matters a lot for funding, adherence to national standards, availability of qualified personnel, and de facto healthcare experience.

In the north and much of the center, the system does its thing reliably. They get better funding, have shorter waits, more consistent access to specialists, and things go wrong rarely.

In the south, the system is more fragile, underfunded, and inconsistent. You can get good healthcare in the south, too, but it’s not a given. The fact that many southerners travel north for better healthcare is a clear tell.

You can ignore that difference for a while, especially if you are young and healthy.

Friends of mine, a young, fit couple, bought a house in Calabria. They are very happy with their choice. Chances are their next serious encounter with healthcare will happen in 40 years. That’s essentially background noise at this point in their lives. In the meantime, the underperforming local hospital will do in a pinch.

But if you are someone older with genuine medical issues, this shortcoming should be weighed with due gravitas.

This is where central Italy quietly emerges as the right compromise. Not as expensive and cold as the north, not as dysfunctional as most of the south. A Goldilocks zone.

The price of “charming chaos”

Southern Italy is genuinely charming. There is a lot to love, as we’ll see in a moment. But that charm comes along with chaos.

It is often described as chaotic in a way that’s supposed to sound endearing. Often it is. But sometimes it’s just dysfunctional friction with better marketing.

Going back to the parcheggiatore abusivo from earlier. Statistics tell us that he likely has priors, and he’s connected to the local organized crime. It’s a business worth 100 million euros a year.

Nobody dies because you are paying five euros to a thug. But a system that allows small extortions to happen is the same system that handles everything locally.

Informal workarounds, softer enforcement, and outcomes shaped by relationships instead of rules all show up in different ways across parts of the south. Not everywhere. Not all the time. But often enough that it becomes part of daily life.

And daily life is where these things matter. Not during your week-long visit. In a year. In ten.

This is why your scouting visit should be longish and off-season. Book a month or two, not a week. Do it in February. Watch how things actually run.

What the south gives you in return

You might remember the Friends episode where Ross makes a list of pros and cons about the woman he’s dating. He goes on and on about the pros. I could do the same about the north. Then he gets to the cons. “She’s not Rachel.”

That’s the north’s problem. It’s not the south.

If the south were only its problems (higher organized crime, worse healthcare, slower services, lack of jobs), it wouldn’t hold any appeal, and everyone would leave. Some do, by all means, but most stay.

If I were a lawyer for the defense, I’d bring as character witnesses for the south the following:

• Climate. The south has the best weather in Italy. It’s sunnier, has milder winters, and much of life in the south happens outdoors. This isn’t cosmetic. It changes how your days feel and will be spent.

• Clean air. The Po Valley in the north has some of the worst air pollution (specifically PM2.5 particles) in Europe. It’s genuinely a health hazard for sensitive populations, and it’s not great for healthy people either. Not all of the north is affected, but a good portion is. Most of the south, in comparison, has great air.

• Food. Simple local ingredients cooked to perfection, both at home and in restaurants. When people think about amazing Italian food, they are mostly referencing southern food. There are exceptions in the north (Bologna comes to mind), but the south wins this one.

• The sea and landscape. In the south, the sea is mostly reachable, and what a sea it is. Plenty of pristine beaches with crystal clear waters. Plus, dense, historic towns that offer a continuity that’s hard to replicate.

• The people. Italians in the north tend to be polite and friendly. Italians in the south are genuinely warm. Provided you speak Italian, you’ll make local friends in the south. They’ll almost adopt you. The level of warmth (and a bit of intrusiveness) will surprise people from other cultures.

• The price of entry. In the south, you can buy entire homes for the price of a down payment in Milan. It’s genuinely cheaper here, by a significant margin.

The south is not one place, either. Puglia feels different from Sicily. Sicily from Calabria. Sardinia is its own, in many ways, magical thing.

Abruzzo barely feels like the south at all; in fact, its southern classification is disputed in part due to its more central location.

Don’t treat it as a single block. Pick north or south, but then zoom in.

When the math flips: the 7% regime

For one specific group of people, the entire conversation simplifies dramatically.

If you are retiring in Italy or have a significant foreign passive income, Italy will offer a 7% flat tax in southern towns below 30,000 inhabitants for 10 years. That’s not marketing. It’s a genuine saving of, to be precise, a boatload of money.

If this is you, particularly if you are still fairly healthy, it’s not something you should ignore when making a decision.

Eligible regions are Sicily, Calabria, Sardinia, Campania, Basilicata, Abruzzo, Molise, and Puglia. The April 2026 expansion of the population cap to 30,000 inhabitants (Law 34/2026) unlocked places like Ostuni, Sulmona, Noto, and Pompei: small cities with real services, as opposed to tiny towns that will bore you to death.

The pension has to be paid from outside Italy (an Italian INPS pension doesn’t qualify, even if you’ve lived abroad for years). Talk to a commercialista (Italian tax accountant) before signing anything.

If you qualify for the 7% tax rate, the question isn’t “north or south.” It’s “which qualifying town actually fits my lifestyle best?”

One footnote most guides skip: the regime also applies to designated cratere sismico municipalities in Marche, Umbria, and Lazio (the earthquake-affected zones from 2009, 2016, and 2017).

If central Italy is that Goldilocks zone for you, this is how you get its healthcare with the south’s tax rate. Smaller list of qualifying towns, same flat 7%, completely different lived experience.

I personally wouldn’t recommend it, given the risk of another seismic event, but it’s an option.

A decision framework to help you decide

Let’s strip this down so as to have a quick decision framework.

If you are retiring in Italy with a foreign pension or passive income, the south deserves serious consideration. Particularly, the cities and towns that qualify for the 7% tax rate.

If you are a digital nomad with income from foreign clients or a remote job, the south is still worth your attention. It’s cheaper and in many ways nicer.

Younger active workers should also look into the Lavoratori Impatriati regime (a tax-rate discount for qualifying new residents) and the regime forfettario (a 15% flat tax for self-employed earners under €85,000 a year). Both have different rules and different math from the 7%, but are still advantageous by Italian tax standards.

If your life depends on building or advancing a career in Italy, the north still dominates. That’s where most jobs are.

If you are a student, choose the university that best fits your career goals, rather than focusing on north or south. Of course, if your budget is minimal, then opt for southern universities (several of which are excellent).

If you have kids, healthcare and schools matter more. Lean center or north, though plenty of foreign families move to the south and are very happy with their decisions.

If your situation doesn’t fit any of the categories above, the choice becomes more personal. Matters of climate, pace, and lived daily experience become determinants more than the raw economy. This is where central Italy quietly offers a winning compromise.

And whatever you do, test your assumptions in real conditions. Not in peak season. Not in curated moments. In the version of the place you’ll actually live in.

The real answer

“North or south?” sounds like a personality quiz. But it isn’t.

It’s a question about systems: how money flows, how institutions work, how friction shows up in daily life. That’s why two people can look at the same map and arrive at opposite conclusions, both correct.

Italy doesn’t change. Your position within it does.

The north offers structure, opportunity, and reliability at a premium price. The south offers space, climate, and a different kind of richness, along with trade-offs that don’t disappear once you’ve settled in.

Neither side is the answer. The center, with its compromise between the two, is an appealing option, but it’s not the right answer for everyone either.

The answer is the life you’re trying to build, and whether the place you’ve chosen actually supports it.

Pino Daniele had it right: mille culure, mille paure. Both are real. With the south more than anywhere else, you're signing up for both.

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Two truths and one lie about Italy:

1. Italy has amazing food.

2. Italy’s climate is nice and warm.

3. Italians love to be fashionable.

If you’re moving to Italy for the nice weather, you’ll find it. In some places. The lie you’ve been told is that it’s nice and warm across the board. Parts of it are. Large parts of it are not.

This article is really 90% careful collection and verification of data, and 10% words. I’ll show you where each capital region stands. We’re dealing with 20 different climates under the tricolored umbrella term “Italy.”

One note before we get started. The numbers below are from the WMO 1991-2020 normals. Recent data by climate statistics standards, but Italy’s average temperature in 2024 was already 1.33°C warmer than the 1991-2020 baseline, according to ISPRA.

So whatever you see in the table is the floor of what you’ll experience. It will be slightly warmer in practice.

The patterns that will surprise you

Before any city-by-city details, here are three things that surprise almost everyone.

Potenza (Basilicata), in the deep south, gets more annual snow than Milano. Average January temperature in Potenza: 4.9°C. In Milano: 3.5°C. Close, but here’s the deal: Potenza sits at 819 meters in the Lucanian Apennines and gets snow on more than ten days a year! Milano, in the North, increasingly doesn’t.

The wettest large city in Italy is on the Mediterranean coast. Genova (Liguria) gets 1,080 mm of rain a year, more than any other regional capital. This is due to the warm sea air hitting the mountains behind the city. The all-time daily rainfall record for any Italian station was set in a Genova neighborhood (Bolzaneto) with a whopping 948mm in just 24 hours.

Cagliari gets less rain than Marrakech. Sardinia’s capital has genuinely remarkable weather. What’s particularly nice about it is the lack of rain. Just 425 mm a year over the course of 62 rainy days. It’s also the sunniest regional capital in Italy at 2,720 hours of annual sunshine. In terms of sizable cities, only a couple of Sicilian cities (which are not capital of region) beat it. If you wanted to know where to go to reliably find dry warmth in Italy, Cagliari should be at the top of your list.

Even Italians will be surprised by some of these facts. Their idea of Italian weather is often strongly shaped by the particular region they experienced the most. Keep reading and you’ll have a more accurate picture than them.

North vs. south is the wrong question

The stereotype for Italian weather is pretty simple: north cold, south warm. This is largely true, but it’s an oversimplification. Elevation, distance from the sea, and whether cold or warm winds sweep the area all significantly affect the local climate.

Aosta sits in the Alps at 580 meters, surrounded by 4,000-meter peaks, and gets 555 mm of rain a year. That’s less than Bari. The valley is shielded by Mont Blanc and Gran Paradiso. The dominant winter wind is Föhn, which is warm and dry. Aosta hit 40.4°C in June 2019!

Milano has the least sunshine of any regional capital in Italy at 1,900 hours a year. For comparison, London gets 1,650. That’s the difference between imagining outdoor cafés in winter and actually living through grey weeks. The Po Valley is one of the foggiest, least-windy areas in Europe. It’s also very industrialized, resulting in the most polluted air in the EU.

Firenze has the hottest summer days of any regional capital north of Napoli. Average July high: 32.3°C. The Arno valley traps the heat. The 2017 heat wave hit 42.5°C. Winter can have surprisingly cold snaps. Tuscany is not the gentle climate the brochures suggest.

Campobasso, capital of Molise, is at 700 meters and has the coolest July maximum of any southern capital, 27°C. That’s lower than Aosta. People move here for the cheap real estate and discover it’s not as warm as the latitude would suggest.

Catanzaro, capital of Calabria, has the mildest January night of any continental Italian capital. Average minimum: 7°C, higher than Naples. The geography works the magic: the city sits at 320 meters above sea level on a strip of land between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Ionian Sea. Two seas plus elevation result in a microclimate that doesn’t quite exist anywhere else in Italy.

The actual gentle Mediterranean climate, the one tourists imagine mostly exists in coastal Sicily, coastal Sardinia, the Ligurian Riviera, the Lazio coast, the Naples-Salerno stretch, and the Salento in Apulia.

Outside those areas, Italy gets continental, transitional, or genuinely cold for four months of the year. If you’re picking a region because you read that Italy has a Mediterranean climate, study the table below, or you may be picking a region that’s a lot closer to your own hometown.

The reference table

Below is the one-page image reference I compiled, including a printable PDF version.

All 20 capoluoghi, temperatures in representative months, sun and rain totals, snow frequency, and microclimate notes.

If you’re using this to choose where to live in Italy, remember that climate is only one input.

But it’s an important one. It is the easiest one to research and the hardest to fix once you’ve signed the lease. Use the table.

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Somewhere along the line you came to the realization that the way you’re living isn’t sustainable. Stress kills. As you think of a solution, Italy keeps popping up as the answer.

So you book the flight to scout the country for hidden gems. You rent a car, drive into the hills, and find a charming village forty kilometers from the coast.

The piazza is fairly busy. You see people eating at a trattoria, kids kicking the ball around, a few old people playing cards outside a café. There is even a van selling delicious porchetta.

Could this really be it?

Not so fast. What you don’t see, because you flew back home a week later, is that same village in February. It’s actually fairly cold. The one bar is open but has selective hours. The trattoria is mostly empty. The piazza, silent.

You also don’t see the scuolabus carrying only a handful of kids to school. The ambulance taking forty minutes to get to town. The two cars driving by each hour.

Which version of the town did you bring home with you?

The gap is the real issue. The town didn’t lie to you. You showed up just in time to see the village’s best weeks of the year.

The July mirage

The July version of the village you fell in love with is real. But so is the empty February one. Tourists made it seem alive, but it’s a shot of adrenaline that is missing the rest of the year.

Nortosce, in Umbria became famous for being one of the ghost towns with only two year-round inhabitants. Extreme, for sure, but also the general direction many Apennine comuni are headed to.

Borghi (plural of borgo, small historic villages) are genuinely charming. Their beautiful architecture endures whether they are busy or sleepy. The problem is the thinning community.

My number one tip is to visit any candidate place in Italy in February or November, not just in July. If it feels 80% less alive, believe that 80%.

Many municipalities in Italy are dying

Italy has almost 7,900 comuni. Five thousand or so have been depopulating for years. A thousand are essentially ghost towns. In the remaining rural towns, only a fraction of the residents are under the age of 24.

Most smaller Italian comuni are dying. It’s not a problem that is exclusive to the south either. Northern inland borghi face the same challenges.

The Italian word for this is spopolamento and it’s a subject that has been discussed in Italy for decades now. Young people leave the small towns for the bigger cities. Older people that remain eventually die. The borgo empties. There are literally two million abandoned houses across rural Italy, many of them in the Apennines. Those villages are cheap for a reason: almost no locals want to live there.

The romantic, almost naïve question to ask is, “which tiny village do I want to move to?” The more realistic and prudent one is, “which village will not become a ghost town in five to ten years?”

Pick any comune montano (mountain municipality) without considering its collapse curve and you are choosing a charming place to be lonely in.

The €1 house is usually a trap

Let’s briefly address the one-euro houses deals you see advertised. They too are often located in small, depopulating villages.

The deal still seems sweet enough, though. €1. I mean, even if it’s lonely I don’t have to live there year round. For €1, come on.

Here is the thing: €1 is not the real price.

First and foremost, there is usually a bando (public call) listing the dilapidated homes. People will bid, so the €1 price is virtually never the winning bid. €5,000 to €25,000 is more realistic.

You’ll be asked to put down a €5,000 deposit and commit to renovating the property. You’ll need to start renovations within a year, and finish in 2-3 years. Miss the deadline and you lose your deposit (or in some cases, the property).

And don’t think about North American renovations. You’re working with locals who speak zero English. They are often off a very short list of contractors you can use. Keeping them on task is a challenge in itself.

And the real renovation cost? Best case scenario €30,000. Worst case scenario over six figures.

The €1 price is a marketing entry. Real total cost runs €40,000 to €400,000.

A Chicago buyer won a Sambuca (almost 6K people, in Sicily) one-euro home. It ended up costing her shy of half a million dollars. She ended up with a beautiful home, but half a million dollars buys you a gorgeous home in most of Italy.

For much less, you can buy something liveable from day one in a town with a working hospital, a high school, and a degree of aliveness that survives past the summer.

The practical purpose of the one-euro homes is to transfer the cost of restoring unwanted properties onto foreign buyers, because Italians have no appetite for them.

Universal healthcare is not so universal

In January 2025, the mayor of Belcastro, one such tiny comune in Calabria, decided to draw attention to the healthcare challenges by launching a provocation.

He passed an ordinance making it illegal to get sick, especially during the weekends. Their clinic is mostly closed. The guardia medica (after-hours on-call doctor) often isn’t staffed. The nearest pronto soccorso (ER) is 45 kilometers away in Catanzaro. Roughly half the residents are over 65.

Italy’s national health service is universal on paper. In practice, it’s managed by the regions and there is a huge gap between the south and the north, and between small towns and big cities.

Even in the north, tiny towns struggle to have adequate healthcare if they are not adjacent to larger cities.

The single most important healthcare metric when considering a village is the drive time to the nearest pronto soccorso. 15 minutes is ideal. 25 minutes is acceptable. Over that, and anyone with kids, a medical condition, or over 60, should honestly reconsider their choice.

The earthquake zones are recruiting too

By now you know that the one-euro homes are mostly a trap. Here’s another one: homes in the so called crateri sismici (areas of the country heavily damaged by earthquakes).

If you’re not familiar with it, the short version is that central Italy was hit by major earthquakes in 2009 (L’Aquila), then again in 2016-2017.

A lot of beautiful inland comuni in the Marche, Umbria, Lazio, and Abruzzo region were genuinely affected.

As you might expect, most people have left such towns at an even greater rate than other isolated towns in Italy. So the government is trying to recruit foreign retirees with the same 7% flat tax that applies to south Italy. That means you could get this sweet tax deal on your foreign pension without many of the shortcomings of the south.

The goal of the government, and I’m quoting here, is to make the cratere “the new Portugal.”

It’s not. They are still towns sitting on fault lines. They are still often struggling with reconstruction a decade later.

If you’re going to move to a tiny village in Italy, this is likely the riskiest choice you can possibly make.

“We’ll just drive” is not the answer

The trouble with tiny towns in Italy is that they often lack services in-town. Need a grocery store? The local alimentari (foodstuff shop) will have some basics only. You’ll need to go to the larger town a while away.

Want restaurants? One or two if you’re lucky. Pharmacy? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. School? Again, next town. Hospital? Well, no, the bigger town over does, however.

The bus that does take you to that larger town runs twice a day, except on Sunday. Be sure to not miss it!

“We’ll just drive” sounds like the solution until you start realizing what it actually means. Every errand will now take a 45-90 minute round trip. In an emergency, where you really shouldn’t be driving, the ambulance might take what seems like an eternity.

And about that driving thing. Most non-EU licenses, including American, Australian, and Canadian licenses, stop being valid twelve months after you establish your residency. There is no reciprocity with Italy and you can’t convert yours to theirs.

So you’ll have to enroll into an autoscuola (surprisingly expensive), genuinely study for weeks or months, pass a theoretical exam with very technical Italian that trips us Italians too, and then pass a strict driving test.

“Well, I’ve been driving for 40 years” you’ll tell yourself. That’s the actual problem. You picked up habits they don’t like. You’ll have to unlearn them, at least for the Oscar-worthy performance you need to put on during the exam.

Older village homes are also often without central heating and AC is usually nonexistent. The typical energy classification is G, the worst possible rating, which has two unpleasant implications: 1) Your heating bill in the winter will be hundreds of euros per month; 2) Current EU plans are pushing toward stricter energy-efficiency requirements by the 2030s, potentially requiring costly upgrades for poorly rated homes.

And if you are a remote worker, prepare for very slow internet speeds. Yes, fiber is increasingly common in Italy, but not in isolated mountainous villages.

If your nearest ER, supermarket, fiber address, or high school is more than 25 minutes away, the village isn’t your new home. It’s an isolation exercise for misanthropes or masochists. In Italian. Often in dialect.

Small comuni have slow bureaucracy

You might think that a small comune will have faster bureaucracy. Fewer cases to handle equals less time, after all. Except, tiny towns have limited staff to handle the bureaucracy.

A tiny town of 2000 people might have a couple of clerks open to the public on selected mornings of the week. And yes, they would have processed zero non-EU residency practices before yours. You get to learn the process together. How exciting, slow, and error prone.

Permesso di soggiorno (the document that allows you to stay in Italy) renewals do not happen at the comune. They happen at the Questura (police headquarters) in the capoluogo di provincia (provincial capital).

From a tiny inland village, you can often expect a 60-90 minute trip each way, each time you need to renew it or you missed some document.

The resale wall

“OK, Antonio, I hear you, but I can try, and worst case scenario, I’ll sell.”

I’m gonna stop you right there. In a tiny, depopulating comune there is no resale market. Your house will not move 60 days later because it’s a slow market, as it would in your home country.

The house will stay unsold for many months if you are lucky. More realistically, many years.

The one-euro homes are an extreme case of that, but they exist precisely because no private buyer in Italy is interested in them.

And the foreign demand has mostly to do with clever marketing around a handful of villages (e.g., Mussomeli, Sambuca) where international media ran with the stories and provided million dollars’ worth of marketing for free. It doesn’t generalize to the rest of the tiny villages.

Most depopulated comuni have OMI (Agenzia delle Entrate per-square-meter values) as low as €200 to €500 per square meter. Again, because virtually nobody is willing to buy.

Treat any tiny village purchases as a likely sunk cost. Don’t buy it if you expect to sell it.

Where to actually buy in Italy

The fix isn’t “stay home.” The fix is going up one size.

First, figure out in which region you want to live. Once you know, start searching for towns and small cities in the 15,000 to 50,000 range, ideally within 30 minutes of a capoluogo di provincia.

This is the sweet spot. The one that still gives you a walkable centro storico, daily or weekly markets, a proper piazza, slow pace, and affordability (in most places). You also gain a working secondary school, a hospital with an ER, a Questura nearby, and a rental market that might be slow but does exist if you decide to leave.

This is the must-have checklist I’d recommend:

• Population 15,000 to 50,000

• Hospital with an ER within 25 minutes

• A proper supermarket in town

• High school in town

• Fiber availability

• Not in a Seismic Zone 1 (the worst zone) or on the crateri sismici list

Nice to have:

• Has a train station

• Within 30 minutes from a capoluogo di provincia

This is not an extensive list, but it’s a proxy for many other requirements we don’t need to explicitly state. A 15,000+ town has pharmacies, plural. It’s the threshold where Italian law starts guaranteeing a lot of essential services.

Let’s find a town

Let’s test out the approach to find a target town in Abruzzo.

It’s geographically in the center of Italy but classified by ISTAT as a southern region. So retirees also get the 7% flat tax advantage in towns below 30,000 inhabitants.

Plus, the weather is nice, the air is clean, the people are friendly, the food is amazing, and it’s inexpensive. It’s a very defensible choice.

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I left Italy in 2003 for a job in Ireland. Eventually I met a Canadian woman, we got married, and moved to Canada. I’ve been here ever since.

A few years ago, after my divorce, I had the choice of going back to Italy, or staying. I stayed. And I’m glad I did, because it allowed me to meet my fiancée, Alicia.

But I seriously considered going back.

Almost every Italian abroad runs this calculation at some point in their lives. Usually a few times. It’s a calculation you run in your head. Usually alone. Often in winter. Sometimes after something specific has shifted the ground under you.

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Italians believe a gust of wind can make you sick. We call it colpo d’aria.

We also believe swimming within three hours of eating might kill you. Walking around barefoot on tiles can give you a cold. And don’t get me started on going out with wet hair (a problem for my fiancée Alicia, not for me).

Scientifically, it’s all nonsense. Culturally, it’s non-negotiable.

Here’s one belief I’m keeping anyway, science be damned: when you’re sick, pastina heals you.

Growing up, pastina was the cure for all ailments. Cold? Pastina. Flu? Pastina. Upset stomach? Pastina. Pulmonary embolism? Pasti… well, no, pronto soccorso (ER) for that.

But pastina was always there, like a prescription medicine somehow kept among other pasta shapes. Just in case.

It was your mother’s language when you felt helpless and weak. Her love contracted to one warm bowl until you felt human again.

There was no further discussion, no “cosa vuoi per cena?” You were sick. Of course, pastina was for dinner. It was what the doctor ordered.

Let me start with a clarification that trips up a lot of people: pastina isn’t one shape.

In North American kitchens, the word came to mean stelline (the tiny stars). Especially among Italian-American families.

In Italy, pastina just means “little pasta.” It’s a large category. It contains multitudes.

What Italians actually mean by pastina

Walk into any Italian grocery store, a Coop or a Conad, and you’ll find entire aisles of pasta. Shapes you’ve never seen before, in formats you didn’t know existed. Tucked among them is a whole shelf of pasta cut into tiny pieces. That’s the pastina section.

Stelline (little stars), risoni (which look like fat grains of rice), anellini (little rings), acini di pepe (peppercorns), ditalini (little thimbles), semini (little seeds), filini (thin threads, basically broken-up spaghettini), and more.

Every major brand stocks several formats: Barilla, De Cecco, Divella, La Molisana, Rummo, and Granoro.

There’s no strict cutoff. If it’s tiny, it’s pastina. If you tear a sheet of fresh pasta into rough fragments and toss them in broth, that’s pastina, too.

Italians have a name for the homemade version, grattini, from grattugiare, to grate. It’s one of the oldest types of pastina there is, predating the commercial versions by centuries.

So when an Italian mother makes pastina for a sick kid, the shape depends on what’s in the cupboard and personal preference. The love with which she makes it is the only irreplaceable constant.

My aunt swore by stelline. My mom, accommodating my preferences, favored risoni. Some friends grew up with anellini. There isn’t a correct answer, no matter what your nonna said.

If you grew up in central Italy, your default was probably stars. Italian-American kitchens in New Jersey opted for the same shape, which is why Ronzoni’s stelline (i.e., Pastina Nº 155) became iconic over there.

Italian regional cuisine differs more for big dishes than for sick-day pastina. Brodo and stelline are roughly the same in Marche as they are in Rome or Brooklyn.

Risoni vs orzo: same shape, different word

In North America, the rice-shaped pasta is sold as orzo. In Italy, orzo mostly means barley, the grain.

Order an “orzo” at a Roman bar, and you might get caffè d’orzo, the barley-based coffee substitute that became popular when real coffee was scarce after WWII. (It’s delicious by the way.)

The pasta is risoni, which means “big rice.”

Knowing which is which matters if you ever cook from an Italian cookbook. Orzo on that ingredient list most likely means barley, and not the pastina shape.

The traditional sick-day recipe (Italian penicillin)

Pastina in brodo is the original cure-all. Italian-Americans called it “Italian penicillin,” and the joke captures the reverence sick Italians have for the dish.

It might not cure a virus, but a hot bowl of pastina when you’re shivering does more than any commercial cold remedy.

The recipe doesn’t need creativity.

A good chicken or vegetable broth, salted properly. A handful of pastina (any small shape) boiled in the broth for 4 to 8 minutes, depending on the type. A grating of Parmigiano Reggiano on top.

If you want to get fancy, add a beaten egg stirred in at the end. It’s called pastina all’uovo, and it adds protein while turning the broth silky.

That’s it. An easy remedy you can make even if you’re sick, though nothing beats having your mamma make it for you.

The pasta is small enough to swallow without chewing. The broth keeps you hydrated and your throat warm. The salt replaces the electrolytes you sweated off.

One trick worth stealing from any Italian grandmother is dropping a Parmesan rind into the broth while the pastina cooks. It melts slowly, releases umami into the liquid, and turns a basic stock into something that tastes like it took an afternoon. Save the rinds in your freezer. They’re free added flavor.

In Italy, this is also literally how kids first meet pasta. The baby food brand Plasmon, founded in 1902, makes a whole line of pastine designed for svezzamento (weaning). Boxes labeled Sabbiolina (little sand), Bebiriso (rice-based), Anellini, all formulated for tiny mouths starting at six months.

Amusingly, for many Italians, their first bite of solid food isn’t cereal or mush. It’s pastina.

How I actually eat it

Tradition is a starting point, not a cage. Which brings me to my version.

When I’m not sick, I cook the pastina in salted water, drain it but keep a couple of spoonfuls of cooking liquid, and then add butter and Parmigiano. The result is barely wet.

Alicia thinks it defeats the purpose of having soup, but plenty of Italians eat it this way, too. Drained pastina with butter and cheese is the unsexy weeknight version that a lot of nonne actually serve when nobody’s running a fever.

A separate technique worth knowing is pastina risottata, where you cook the pastina directly in a smaller amount of broth, stirring like risotto, and finish with butter, cheese, and pepper. Same dryness as my drained version, different path to get there.

The brodo version is what I grew up with and what tradition says you eat when you’re sick. The drained version is what I crave when I’m fine and just want comfort. Both are real.

Italian food culture is much weirder and more personal than the foreign idea of it.

Where to buy pastina (and the Ronzoni saga)

In North America, the supply is thinner than it should be. In January 2023, Ronzoni announced it was discontinuing its iconic pastina.

The internet briefly lost its mind. Italian-Americans were grieving on Facebook. Boxes were going for twenty times their original price on eBay.

Two years later, they brought it back. Ronzoni pastina is on the shelves again, with the company confirming it’s a permanent return rather than a limited run.

Plenty of other brands never went anywhere. Barilla pastina is widely stocked, including on Amazon. De Cecco’s Acini di Pepe, though not labeled “pastina,” is another commonly available option. San Giorgio, Granoro, and La Molisana all make solid versions, too.

If you have access to an Italian deli, go there. The selection is wider and the staff will know which shape goes with what.

Italians believe a lot of things that aren’t true. This isn’t one of them. The chicken noodle soup version of this story exists in a hundred cultures. The Italian one happens to come with smaller pasta and stronger opinions about wind.

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Italians are some of the most social people in Europe, along with our Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek cousins.

We’ll talk to you at the bus stop (something that will horrify my Finnish readers), at the bar, at the post office, even at the comune (town hall) while waiting for paperwork that nobody fully understands.

We’ll pet your dog without asking. We’ll stare, then compliment your outfit. We’ll tell you we love your accent and that your Italian is great. We mean it. Yet, none of it implies we’re about to become your friend.

That’s the honest answer. Visit Italy as a tourist, and the country feels open. Move there, and you’ll find that making friends as an expat is harder than your vacation suggested.

The reason isn’t that Italians are cold. It’s the opposite. Italians already have many close friends, often the same ones for decades. There’s no obvious gap a new arrival needs to fill.

I moved around a lot. Nine years in Rome, then ten in Marche, then Milan, then Ireland in my early twenties, then Canada. Add a short stint in the US. Four countries, probably 20 different cities.

So I take an unusual angle on this question. I know what social life in Italy is like from the inside. I also know how it feels to land somewhere new and start to assemble a social life with no instructions in a language you’ve only begun to speak.

They aren’t the same sport.

Warm country, closed circles

This is the contradiction many expats face in their first year. When my fiancée Alicia first visited Italy, she was shocked by how social Italy felt.

People chatting loudly in public. Bars packed for aperitivo. Old men arguing about soccer outside the tabaccheria, the all-purpose tobacco/bus tickets/newsstand shop you find at every corner.

Then we sat down with friends I’ve known since I was a kid. They were warm with Alicia, asked her questions, and never let her feel left out. They loved her. She loved them. And yet, under the surface, you could see the insider connections seep through.

They finished each other’s sentences. They made references that Alicia couldn’t possibly know. Even with me as a bridge, there were whole stretches not worth translating. Not because they couldn’t be translated, but because they were conversations that started 25 years ago.

The funniest moment came when we went for coffee with my old high-school math teacher and a few friends. Alicia thought the guy was hilarious, but she walked out worried. “I usually understand the gist of Italian conversations,” she said. “I got none of what you didn’t explicitly translate.”

Turns out my teacher had spoken at full speed in strict Montegiorgese dialect for a solid hour. I had to reassure her that her Italian was fine. The dialect would have lost most non-local Italians, too.

Italian friendships often start in childhood and develop through the school years. That’s thirteen years with more or less the same people, often in the same town. By the time you’re in your twenties, your closest friends are people you have known since you were six.

That dynamic isn’t hostile to outsiders. It just doesn’t have a documented procedure for “new adult wants in.”

Why making friends in Italy takes longer than expats expect

There’s a second factor, and it’s geographic.

Most Italians don’t move much. They are born somewhere and end up living within an hour of where their family is. Often in the same building where multiple generations of their family live. When they do move, it’s usually Southerners going north for work.

When I moved to Dublin, Toronto, or San Francisco, almost everyone I met was from somewhere else. The shared assumption was that we were all new, trying to figure it out more or less together by comparing notes.

In Italy, there is the inverse assumption. We are all from here. Why do I need new people when I already have the ones I want?

It isn’t snobbery. You are simply joining a card game that has already started. The burden of integrating falls almost entirely on you, the expat.

The Italian friendliness map is not what you think

The north is cold, the south is warm, weather and social temperature-wise. Right? Not so fast. This is directionally correct, but there are exceptions.

The ISTAT provides a rather counterintuitive piece of data. According to their Equitable and Sustainable Well-being report (BES) that tracks a metric called People You Can Count On, there isn’t a huge divide between the south and the north when it comes to perceived social support networks. Valle d’Aosta, Marche, and Sardinia all do well, regardless of their vastly different geography, weather, and infrastructure.

That said, the stereotype does hold for the most part. A 2024 analysis of the data found that southern and island regions have shown growing community support over the past decade, while several northern regions have seen theirs decline.

Here’s what that looks like for key regions.

Campania, Puglia, Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata: warm people who will loudly extend their hospitality to you early on. You will be invited to come over for coffee or for Sunday lunch. Your local bar will know your order within a week. They’ll teach you dialect words. Bring you figs or oranges from their garden.

I mean, Naples is the place that invented caffè sospeso, the widely adopted practice of paying for two coffees, so that someone who can’t pay can have one on you.

The price to pay for incredible friendliness is a little bit of invadenza (intrusiveness) and slow services. Healthcare outside of major cities is suboptimal, bureaucracy is slower than the rest of Italy, youth unemployment in Sicily and Calabria runs over 35%, and organized crime lives here.

With a remote income, you’ll be immune to some of the issues, but you won’t escape other systemic inefficiencies altogether. So, you’ll wait a long time for a specialist visit, but not even a week for a dinner invitation.

Emilia-Romagna is an anomaly in the otherwise socially cold north. People from Emilia-Romagna are genuinely warm. They eat, drink, dance, and host with an enthusiasm closer to Naples than to Milan.

The region was named Lonely Planet’s best place to visit in Europe in 2018, and visitors consistently report being welcomed in a way that doesn’t match the cold-north stereotype.

If you want northern infrastructure (high-speed trains, good hospitals, reliable internet) without sacrificing social warmth, Emilia-Romagna is the pragmatic answer.

The air quality is a bit of a concern for sensitive populations, but it’s otherwise an objectively strong contender as one of the best regions to move to in Italy. Bologna, in particular, is a university city with a genuinely open social culture, in part because students cycle through regularly and locals are used to it.

Lombardy and Piedmont (Milan, Turin) are the transactional north. Everything works, but don’t expect a whole lot of warmth from the local population.

People here are professional, busy, and direct. Your colleague is unlikely to help you move a sofa. In contrast, in Naples, a nonna you spoke to twice will rile up four different people from her balcony to help you out. One is chaotic and warm. The other is measured and cooler.

On the other hand, Milan has the densest expat scene in Italy and the most events, which helps year one and traps you by year three if you let it. It also has a lot of people from the South who came here for work.

Trentino-Alto Adige, Veneto, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia are the cooler north. Don’t confuse spritz culture with social openness. Venetians and Friulani socialize hard within existing groups, but breaking in as a foreigner is harder than in Emilia-Romagna.

They also have a strong preference for dialect over standard Italian in private settings, making it more challenging for expats. Trentino-Alto Adige is closer to Austria culturally than to the rest of Italy.

All beautiful regions to live in. Slower places to make friends.

Marche, Umbria, and the small-town center. The slow-integration zone.

Marchigiani are friendly and welcoming but reserved. Umbria (and to some extent Abruzzo) is not much different. Follow the advice further down, and you'll get there.

Tuscany and Lazio (Rome). Tuscans are charming, funny, and a little smug. They are well aware that they invented Italian and the Renaissance.

Romans will be warm, funny, and often late, especially if stuck in traffic on the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the ring road around Rome.

Both regions have heavy expat populations, which means the same pros and cons as Milan. Easier landing for you, but also a higher risk of the bubble.

Liguria and Sardinia are the wildcards. Both are islands. Well, one metaphorically, as it is trapped between the sea and the mountains, and that geography affects the social culture.

Ligurians have a famous reputation among Italians for being reserved and a bit suspicious of outsiders, which softens once you’re in.

Sardinians are proud, stubborn, deeply hospitable, but slow to extend it. Gorgeous places to live, genuinely good people, but neither of them offers the easiest entry point.

How long does it actually take to make Italian friends?

A rough timeline, based on what expats I know in Italy actually report:

• Months 1 to 3: You’ll feel socially empty but also quite busy setting things up. You’ll have acquaintances. You’ll have the bartender’s name memorized. You won’t have a single person you’d call if your car broke down at 11 pm.

• Months 4 to 9: The invitations start arriving. The first one is out of politeness, the second one is for real. You’ll also start spotting expats who’ve been around a while and have figured out a workable life.

• Months 9 to 18: If you’ve stayed in one place, gone to the same bar, and visibly tried to speak Italian, you’ll have a small circle forming. It will be smaller but also deeper than what you’d build in the same time in Toronto or Dublin.

• Year 2 onward: Played your cards right? You're finally in.

Italians don’t make instant friends the way Americans do. Once you’re in, though, you’re usually in for good.

The novelty factor is a real advantage. Use it.

Conventional advice says go where the expats already are. It’s not wrong. Florence, Rome, and Lake Como are all easier places to land. There’s another option worth considering.

In small Italian towns that haven’t seen a foreigner in years, you are an event. A town of 4,000 in inner Abruzzo, Basilicata, or southern Marche notices when an American, Brit, or Canadian moves in.

The butcher will know who you are by Wednesday. If the town is small enough, the mayor might actually want to meet you. Your foreignness works for you in a way it absolutely does not in Florence, where the locals stopped being curious about foreigners around 1987.

The trade-off is that you have to leverage it while the time window is still open. If you stay quiet and reserved, the novelty wears off, and the curiosity is replaced with a polite, permanent distance.

Show up at the bar, attempt the local dialect badly (they’ll laugh with you more than at you), let yourself be the slightly exotic guest at a few dinners, and the curiosity converts into a real network surprisingly quickly.

I’ve watched this happen in the Marche region. Expats who picked a town with no other foreigners and committed to being visible had a richer social life by year two than those who landed in expat-heavy Tuscany and never left the English-speaking WhatsApp groups.

If you don’t speak Italian and don’t plan to learn, don’t move to a village of 4,000 in Basilicata, though. You’ll get a month of curiosity, a slow fade, and ultimately social isolation.

Learn the language. There’s no way around it.

I keep saying this, and I’ll keep saying it until it registers. Real friendships in Italy happen in Italian.

You can have basic English conversations in pockets of the country. Heck, you can even hold a job in English in a handful of cities, if you luck out.

What you cannot do is have authentic conversations at the dinner table with Italians whose basic English is functional, but flavorless.

Italy ranks among the lowest in the EU on the EF English Proficiency Index. Outside cities and among people over 40, very few speak it at all.

The neighbors who are happy to watch over your house while you are temporarily away, the 70-year-old lady upstairs with the recipes and all the hot gossip (the FBI’s got nothing on her), the 50-year-old guys at the bar who’d take you mushroom hunting. They don’t speak English.

You don’t need advanced fluency to start. You need enough Italian to talk about food, soccer, or weather, without making it the other person’s job to slow down for you.

What actually works and what doesn’t

Here is what works in my experience:

• Join a language school. Just find one in person, not online, for two reasons: 1) You'll make friends with people in the same situation as you. 2) Your Italian proficiency will be a determinant of your ability to make friends with Italians.

• Become a regular somewhere. Same bar, same bakery, same butcher. Italian social life is built on familiarity through repetition. You don’t have to be charming. You just have to keep showing up.

• Join something with a fixed schedule. A trekking group, a wine course, a CAI (Italian Alpine Club) chapter, a dance class, a group sport. Italians make new connections through shared activity, not through “let’s grab coffee sometime.” The coffee invites will arrive as a consequence of the relationships you build.

• Volunteer somewhere. There are countless volunteering opportunities in Italy. If you can’t find one you like, start with the local pro loco (the volunteer-run tourism and culture board most towns have). It’s a fast track into the actual community, not just the expat layer of it.

• Get a dog. I’m only half joking. Italy is very dog-friendly, and a dog gives you a daily reason to be in the same park, at the same time, alongside the same humans, week after week. That kind of repetition is exactly how Italian friendships start. Don’t be surprised if it leads to you being invited to someone’s nephew’s birthday party.

What doesn’t work: waiting to be invited, trying to recreate your existing social life in a different cultural context, and living entirely inside the expat Facebook or WhatsApp groups.

The expat bubble is a bridge, not a destination

Expat groups are useful in your first year. They’ll help you find a plumber, recommend a commercialista (accountant), understand the codice fiscale (Italian tax ID), and complain about bureaucracy with people who went through the same process.

They’re quick relief for the loneliness, especially in places like Florence or Lake Como, where there’s already a substantial English-speaking community. But they are a crutch.

The trap comes later, and it isn’t really about English. It’s about never cutting the umbilical cord. As one American who recently moved to the Azores put it, when his countrymen gather abroad, “Conversations default to politics. To outrage. To cultural grievance.” The same is true in the Anglo expat circles in Italy.

Same arguments you packed up and supposedly left behind, now resurfaced over an Aperol spritz in Chianti or not far from George Clooney’s Italian villa. If most of your dinners go that way, you haven’t really moved. You’ve just relocated.

If your social life is still 90% expats after two years, you’ve effectively built an English-speaking colony with better food. And if you are British or Canadian, with better weather.

That’s a legitimate choice. It’s also not the same as moving to Italy. It’s the reason some expats leave after a few years, saying, “I never really felt at home.” Of course, they didn’t. They were home-adjacent.

If you want to know whether you’re cut out for the deeper version of the move, the question of which Italian region you choose matters less than how willing you are to be the new person, with bad grammar and zero local history, for a year.

That’s the real entrance fee. One I personally paid multiple times, and it always paid off.

So, is it hard to make friends in Italy as an expat?

Yes. And no. It’s hard if you’re measuring against the rate at which friendships form in a mobile, mixing country like Canada or Australia. It’s hard if you don’t speak Italian. It’s hard if you stay only inside the expat bubble.

It’s not hard in the sense that Italians don’t want you. They mostly do. They’re curious about you, they think you’re brave (and a little nuts) for moving to Italy.

They’ve already mentally cast you as the interesting foreign character in their next dinner party story. You just have to keep turning up long enough for the role to become permanent.

Because in Italy, friendship isn’t about instant chemistry. It’s about loyalty and loyalty compounds over decades.

Have you made the move and tried to break into an Italian friend group? Where did it click, and where did it stall? Tell me in the comments.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are Italians friendly to foreigners?

Yes, Italians are generally friendly and curious toward foreigners, especially in smaller towns where you’ll be a novelty. The friendliness translates quickly into warm interactions, dinner invitations, and recommendations, but more slowly into deep friendships, because most Italians already have tight circles formed in school.

Which Italian region is friendliest to expats?

Emilia-Romagna is the most balanced answer. It combines northern infrastructure (good healthcare, high-speed trains, reliable services) with a southern-style social warmth that’s unusual for the north. The deep south (Campania, Puglia, Sicily) is socially even warmer, but with weaker services.

Do you need to speak Italian to make friends in Italy?

For surface-level connections, no. For real friendships, yes. Italy ranks among the lowest in the EU for English proficiency, and most Italians over 40 outside major cities don’t speak English well enough to bond in. You can start meeting people in English, but you’ll plateau quickly without conversational Italian.

How long does it take to feel socially settled in Italy?

Most expats describe roughly the same arc: three months of loneliness, six months of tentative social life, a real circle by year one, full integration by year two. That’s assuming you’ve stayed in one place and made an effort with the language. Italian friendships build slowly and last forever, which is the trade-off.

Is loneliness in Italy worse than in other expat countries?

It can feel sharper because the public warmth is so visible. You’ll see groups of friends laughing in piazzas while you eat alone, and the contrast stings more than it would in a quieter culture. The loneliness usually lifts once you have a regular schedule and a few familiar faces, but expats consistently describe the first six months as the hardest.

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In Italian, we have a saying that goes, “Tra il dire e il fare c’è di mezzo il mare.” There is a sea between saying and doing. The ethos of the proverb is that the theory and practice differ quite a bit.

The law as written and the law as practiced are sisters, but they haven’t spoken in years. In Italy, perhaps more than in most places.

Nowhere is that gap wider than in real estate law. The civil code is precise. The agreement between countries is well established. The interpretation of the notary who enables your purchase might not be.

So this guide on how to buy property in Italy starts with eligibility: what the law says, what actually happens in the notary’s office, and where to go from there.

Costs and contracts will come later. Skip eligibility, and you can do everything else perfectly and still walk away with no property.

Who can actually buy a house in Italy

Let’s start with the good news. In principle, you don’t have to be Italian to buy a house in Italy. You don’t even need residence in Italy. (On the other hand, buying a property in Italy doesn’t grant you any rights either. You don’t get citizenship or even residency just for buying a house there.)

Where things get trickier is Italy’s reciprocity approach with other countries. The idea is simple: Italy will allow you to buy a house if your country allows Italians to buy a house there.

The notary verifies the international agreements before signing. The practice is where it gets interesting.

Let’s see what this means for citizens of various countries.

EU and EEA citizens

EEA citizens (so EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) have the same rights as Italians, in theory and in practice. This is playing in easy mode. French, Germans, Irish, the lot, can all buy a house in Italy by simply bringing their passport and obtaining a codice fiscale. They’ll be treated as locals.

Swiss citizens enjoy the same practical rights through bilateral EU-Switzerland agreements, with minor limits in both directions tied to Swiss cantonal restrictions on foreign property buyers.

Americans, Brits, and clean-reciprocity countries

Americans and Brits face no reciprocity issue. Long-standing bilateral treaties let you buy without complications. Israel, Japan, China, South Africa, most of South America, and several other countries sit in the same easy category.

Australians

For Australians looking to buy a house in Italy, things look grim on the surface, but are much better in practice.

Australia restricts non-residents from buying most homes. You would expect Italy to respond in kind. However, there is a 1967 Canberra bilateral treaty establishing reciprocity. So Australians can legally buy in Italy (the relevant Italian law is in the Decreto del Presidente della Repubblica 9 dicembre 1970, n. 1430).

Most notaries know about this law. Some may not. So you may run into a notaio who refuses to sign. If you do, tell them to look up DPR 1430/1970. If they are still difficult, opt for a different notaio.

Annoying? Yes, but not a deal breaker.

New Zealanders

New Zealanders are largely restricted from buying properties in Italy. New Zealand banned foreign buyers, including Italians, and Italy responded in kind.

There is a small exception for the genuinely wealthy, however. In December 2025, the New Zealand government passed amendments allowing visa-holder investors to buy properties valued at NZ$5 million or more.

If you are just a regular Kiwi trying to buy a casale in Puglia for 400,000 euros, this does not apply to you. You are still restricted. If you are a wealthy investor buying a luxury villa in Italy, talk to an Italian real estate lawyer. There might be some wiggle room.

Canadians

This one hits close to home. Not for me, as I’m Italian born and raised, but for quite a few friends and students of mine.

Canada has a real estate inflation problem, and in an effort to curb it the government banned foreign buyers from purchasing residential property in most cities. The ban was broad, and Italians got swept up in it. The Italian government took notice and reciprocated. The Canadian ban was recently extended to January 1, 2027, so this restriction is going to stay active for a while.

So the theory is, you cannot buy property in Italy as a Canadian citizen. As we say in Italian, “fatta la legge, trovato l’inganno.” Made the law, found the loophole. In practice, notaries have a fair amount of discretion in the interpretation of the issue.

The escape hatches that consistently work:

• Holding dual citizenship with a country that is on the allowed list

• Holding a valid Italian residence permit (permesso di soggiorno)

• Buying jointly with a spouse who is an EU citizen or an Italian permanent resident

The one that works sometimes:

• Buying in smaller Italian comuni outside the major cities, where some notaries take a more flexible reading. Italians retain the right to buy in genuinely rural Canada (Atlantic Canada has become a quiet workaround for Italian buyers). Some Italian notaries mirror that logic when reading reciprocity for Canadian buyers. Others refuse on sight. My Canadian friends are seeing both.

If you’re Canadian, do not treat this section as a verdict on your specific case. Talk to an Italian real estate avvocato (lawyer) before you fall in love with a listing.

Get your codice fiscale first

Nothing legal happens in Italy without a codice fiscale, the Italian personal tax identifier.

You’ll need it for the house purchase, opening a local bank account, the utility contracts, and registration of the deed.

See my guide on how to obtain a codice fiscale. Follow the steps early. Not the week of the offer.

Finding the place: portals, agencies, and the buyer-agent question

OK, you’re eligible or are willing to take a chance. How do you go about actually finding an Italian house?

In Italy, we don’t have a single MLS the way the US and Canada do. There are a few sites/portals, each with its own set of listings.

Often, if the listing agent or property owner is diligent, the same property will appear on all the major real estate portals. But it pays off to check them all when you are actively house hunting.

Sometimes the listing for a property is only available on one portal, other times the price or the pictures are different.

A good chunk of the inventory actually never makes it online at all, and that’s where local agencies become an important asset. But let’s start with the portals.

The portals

Three sites cover most of what’s listed publicly:

• Idealista is the most-used by both Italians and foreigners and has the cleanest interface. Start here.

• Immobiliare.it has the largest raw inventory and is what most agencies push their listings to first.

• Casa.it overlaps heavily with the other two. Worth a check, not essential.

If you want listings in English, Gate-Away is the only sizeable portal built for foreign buyers. Inventory is smaller (~45K listings) and skewed toward countryside and lifestyle properties, but it is useful for orientation and for finding agents who already work with international clients. Cross-check prices against the Italian portals; foreigner-targeted listings sometimes carry a premium.

For the south, Sicily, and the €1-house territory, also check the town’s own website. A surprising number of municipal auctions and below-market listings are only listed there.

The off-market problem

Unlike North America, a surprising amount of property in Italy is sold without ever hitting a portal. Word of mouth, cousin of a cousin, the agency proposing it to trusted clients, and so on.

Favorite listings online, set alerts for new properties on the portals, but actually walk into the local agencies when you are set on an area, during your scouting trip. They’ll have listings nowhere to be found on Idealista.

Working with an agency

To find an agency, simply search “agenzia immobiliare [town name]” on Google. The first three or four results, plus the office with the most listings on Idealista for that area, are a solid starting point.

Bigger national chains (Tecnocasa, Gabetti, RE/MAX Italia) have wider coverage and English-speaking staff in major cities. Smaller local agencies often have better off-market inventory and stronger local knowledge, but you’ll need at least functional Italian or a translator.

If you plan to speak in Italian, when you walk in, you can say: Sono un acquirente, non sto solo guardando. “I’m a buyer, not just browsing.” Italian agents prioritize serious buyers, and they read tire-kickers like a book.

Be prepared to say what your budget is, where you want to be (region, town, neighborhood), what type of property (apartment, house, with land, in the centro storico), and roughly when you want to close. If you can’t answer those four questions, you’re not ready to be in the agency yet.

The buyer agent surprise

If you are North American, you might expect your real estate agent to be your buyer agent; there to help you get the property as cheaply as possible.

In Italy, it doesn’t work that way. The typical real estate agent represents the deal, not the buyer. They’re paid by both sides, typically 2 to 4 percent plus VAT each.

Dedicated buyer’s agents (agenti di parte or property finders) do exist, mostly in markets with international demand: Tuscany, Lake Como, Rome, Milan, and parts of Puglia. They charge separately, typically 1 to 3 percent of the purchase price, and they actually work for you: they search off-market, they negotiate, they coordinate the geometra (licensed surveyor) and the lawyer.

For a foreign buyer who doesn’t speak Italian and is buying remotely, they can be worth the cost.

The honest middle path most foreign buyers use is a regular Italian agency for the listings, plus your own bilingual avvocato (lawyer) reviewing every document. The lawyer is not a buyer’s agent, but they will protect you, legally speaking.

Don’t trust listing prices

Italian sellers price aspirationally. It’s a wish more than a set-in-stone price.

Outside major urban and high-demand areas (Milan, central Florence, Rome’s prime neighborhoods, Lake Como, prime Tuscan towns), prices are not firm. Even in those markets, there’s room to negotiate on properties that have been sitting.

Houses in most of Italy don’t appreciate the way they do in America and Canada. They also don’t move within 30 days as they do in North America. So sellers are quite motivated to sell and generally willing to negotiate.

10-20% discounts are quite common. For older properties in poor energy class (Class G, especially), with original wiring, 30-year-old windows, or a roof that needs work, you can sometimes push to 25% off the asking price. The potential EU energy upgrade deadlines are giving buyers more leverage on these properties than they had even two years ago.

Bid reasonably low (e.g., 20% off the listing price) and see where it goes. Also, ask your agent what comparable listings have sold for recently. If they refuse to give you that information, it’s a sign that you’re likely being overcharged.

A quick note on paying the deposit (Tracciabilità)

Italian banks and notaries are paranoid about anti-money laundering rules. Every euro of your deposit and purchase price needs a clean paper trail showing where it came from; this is what Italians call tracciabilità.

Foreigners often get caught here trying to pay deposits via Wise, Revolut, or other fintech apps. Some Italian banks won’t accept the funds. Some notaries won’t sign on funds that arrived through routes they consider opaque.

The clean way: a standard international bank wire from a major bank in your name, or a dedicated currency broker (Currencies Direct, OFX, Wise Business), provided you have full documentation.

Keep every document showing the source of the funds, including bank statements and the sale proceeds of any property you sold to fund this one.

Your avvocato will tell you what your specific notary wants to see. Asking before you wire is much cheaper than fixing it after.

The three steps of buying: proposta, compromesso, rogito

Once you have found the property you like and are ready to commit, it’s time to do some paperwork.

This is the part where Italian theory and practice mostly match.

Step 1: Proposta d’acquisto (the irrevocable offer)

In Italy, offers to the seller are a serious matter. Once you sign, provide a small deposit, and the seller signs back, it’s a binding contract.

If problems are discovered, you’re still on the hook. So don’t go around making offers willy-nilly. Insist that the offer has conditions to protect you, such as:

• Subject to mortgage approval

• Subject to a clean cadastral check

• Subject to confirmed reciprocity (if you are Canadian or Kiwi)

Have your bilingual lawyer and geometra review the proposal before you sign.

Step 2: Compromesso (the preliminary contract)

After the proposta d’acquisto is completed and accepted, you enter into the compromesso, also known as the contratto preliminare.

The compromesso is an iron-clad obligation. At this point, you must provide a caparra confirmatoria (a deposit) of 10% to 30% of the purchase price and set a closing date. All terms of the sale are now locked in.

You will lose your caparra confirmatoria if you withdraw from the agreement without a legitimate reason. However, if the vendor withdraws from the agreement, then according to Article 1385 of Italy’s Civil Code, the vendor owes you twice the amount of your original caparra confirmatoria.

This may appear to be a fully protected position to be in. But it is not.

The double-caparra provision does not give you a right to obtain the title to the property but rather provides you with a monetary claim against the vendor.

In other words, if the seller decides to sell to someone else, you can sue them for twice the deposit, but the house can legally be transferred to the new buyer with no recourse. Pursuing claims against vendors in Italian civil courts is a lengthy and rarely enjoyable experience.

If you want the house, not just compensation, transcription is what protects you. To avoid losing your rights to the property once you have signed a preliminary contract, you need to have your compromesso registered in the official public real estate registry under Article 2645-bis. The cost depends on the property value, typically €1,500 to €5,500.

Most foreign buyers skip this step to save money. Most foreign buyers have not lived through the Italian seller who decides to “have a look around” while the closing is pending. In a hot market, transcribe.

Step 3: Rogito (the final deed)

Two to three months later, you and the seller sit in front of the notary (notaio in Italian). The notary reads the deed aloud. If your Italian isn’t fluent, you legally need a sworn interpreter present (budget €500 to €1,000). You wire the balance. The notary registers the property in your name with the catasto (land registry).

The seller is legally required to hand over the APE (Attestato di Prestazione Energetica, the energy performance certificate) at this stage. This document tells you the energy class of the property and is what you’ll be holding when the new EU energy upgrade deadlines start to bite. Don’t sign without knowing the energy classification of the property.

You now own a piece of Italy. Congratulations.

What buying property in Italy actually costs

The sticker price on the listing is not what you’ll pay. Total closing costs typically run 9 to 15 percent above the purchase price. The exact number depends on whether you qualify for prima casa (primary residence) tax relief, whether the property is new or resale, and the specific cadastral value of the unit (which is a value assessment, typically much lower than the purchase price).

The four big fees:

• Registration tax (imposta di registro). 2 percent of cadastral value if the property qualifies as your prima casa, requiring you to move into your residence within 18 months and live there for more than six months a year. 9 percent if it’s a second home. The cadastral value is typically well below market price (often 30 to 60 percent below), so the actual cost is less ugly than the percentage suggests. New builds replace this with VAT (4 percent prima casa, 10 percent second home, 22 percent for luxury categories).

• Notary fees. Roughly 1 to 2.5 percent of the purchase price, with a practical minimum of around €1,500 to €3,000. The notary collects the taxes and remits them to the state, so a chunk of your wire is just a pass-through.

• Agent commission. Each side pays its own. The buyer typically pays 2 to 4 percent of the purchase price plus 22 percent VAT on that, and the seller pays a separate commission of a similar size. Yours is often due upon signing the preliminary contract, regardless of whether the sale completes, which trips up buyers who assume they pay at closing. Negotiate the percentage and the timing in writing.

• Mortgage costs (if applicable). Italian banks have become stricter with non-residents in recent years. Loan-to-value ratios now typically run 50 to 70 percent (so 30 to 50 percent down), depending on the bank and your profile. Talk to them before you start shopping.

Prima casa is the single biggest tax lever foreign buyers can pull. It also locks you into actually moving there. If your plan is a vacation home you’ll visit four weeks a year, it’s going to cost you more.

The notary doesn’t check what you think they check

This is the part that costs unprepared buyers the most money.

The notary verifies legal title and cadastral records. Are you buying from the actual owner? Are there mortgages or liens registered? Are taxes paid? Does the property’s cadastral data match the deed?

The notary does not verify that what’s physically standing matches what was permitted to be built. They check that the seller’s urban planning declarations (dichiarazioni urbanistiche) are present and consistent on paper, but they rely on what the seller declares rather than independently inspecting the building.

Abusivismo edilizio is the Italian term for construction without proper permits, or in violation of approved plans, or in protected zones. Consequences run from fines to demolition orders to the inability to register or resell the place.

A patio that became a sunroom. A garage converted to a bedroom. An entire third floor that doesn’t exist on paper. The problem is most severe in southern coastal regions (Campania, Calabria, Sicily, Lazio, Puglia), where decades of weak enforcement have left whole neighborhoods only loosely connected to their building permits.

There’s a related trap that bites foreigners in particular: the Certificato di Agibilità (the habitability certificate, formerly called Abitabilità). A house can be perfectly legal in the catasto and still lack agibilità because the wiring is dangerous, the plumbing doesn’t meet current code, or the windows don’t allow enough light by modern standards.

Old village houses fail this all the time. Without agibilità, you legally don’t have a habitable home, even if you bought one. Banks balk. Insurance complications follow. Make sure the certificate exists, or that you’ve budgeted for the work needed to obtain it.

Italian property is sold as-is. Once the rogito is signed, the previous owner’s illegal balcony is your illegal balcony. Banks generally refuse to finance properties with unauthorized works. If you ever try to refinance or resell, you’ll be the one paying to demolish or regularize.

The fix is hiring your own geometra before the compromesso. Not the seller’s geometra. Yours.

They compare what’s physically built against what’s registered with the comune (the municipality) and the catasto, they verify that the original permits actually authorize what’s standing, and they check that agibilità is in order.

Budget €500 to €1,500. It’s the cheapest insurance in the entire transaction.

The €1 houses are mostly a marketing scheme

You’ve seen the headlines. Sambuca in Sicily. Mussomeli. Cantiano in Marche. Houses for one euro. Woah! I can buy 4 for the cost of a Starbucks coffee.

Not so fast. Here’s the actual structure. You bid (auctions usually start at €1 and rise quickly), you post a deposit of €1,000 to €5,000, you commit to renovating to municipal standards within three years, and you spend a meaningful sum to make the place habitable. Think 20,000 to 100,000 euros, once you’ve replaced a roof, redone the wiring, and fixed the leaky boiler.

The towns offering these properties tend to be remote. They’ve often lost half their population in fifty years. Internet can be patchy. Skilled labor is scarce. Healthcare is a long drive away. They are not investments in any conventional sense.

They are renovation projects with a steep entry penalty for failure (you lose the deposit if you don’t finish on time).

If you have the cash, the time, and a romantic streak about restoring an abandoned stone house in inland Sicily, go for it.

If you’re looking for value, you’re looking in the wrong place. Calabria and Molise have proper housing for €500-1000 per square meter that comes with running water and an internet connection.

After you have the keys

Owning Italian property generates some ongoing obligations:

• IMU (Imposta Municipale Unica): annual property tax, generally 0.4 to 1.06 percent of cadastral value. Primary residences are usually exempt unless classified as luxury.

• TARI: waste collection tax, based on size and occupants. Typically a few hundred euros per year.

• Condominio fees: if you bought into a building, expect anywhere from €600 to €3,000 per year for shared maintenance. The higher end of the range is for luxury buildings with a doorman on staff.

• Energy class upgrades: the EU’s revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (in force since May 2024) requires member states, including Italy, to reduce average residential energy use by 16% by 2030 and 20–22% by 2035. Class G properties are already being discounted due to likely upgrade costs. Buy a property with a decent energy rating or budget for costly renovations (up to five figures).

And the part foreign buyers often forget: owning property in Italy doesn’t grant you the right to live there.

You still need a visa for stays beyond 90 days in any 180-day window. Owning property strengthens an elective residence application. It doesn’t replace one.

For remote workers, the Digital Nomad Visa (DNV), fully streamlined in 2024 and 2025, has become the practical path for Americans, Brits, and other non-EU buyers to actually live in the house they just bought.

It requires a remote-work contract or self-employment income above a threshold, plus proof of accommodation (which the house solves) and health insurance. For retirees and the financially independent, the elective residence visa remains the standard route.

My article on living in Italy legally covers the details.

What this whole thing actually demands

Most Western nationalities can legally buy properties in Italy. It’s also a slow, paperwork-heavy process that doesn’t reward shortcut taking.

Foreign buyers who treat the process like an American real estate transaction will be frustrated by how much slower it is. If you come with the right expectations, hire a lawyer and a geometra, you’ll do just fine.

The order you follow matters. Confirm your eligibility, get your codice fiscale, find a lawyer and geometra (one can recommend the other), and talk to a local agency.

Look at properties, find one, make your proposta knowing it’s binding, transcribe the compromesso if you are in a hot market and you must have that specific home, then show up for the rogito.

Reciprocity is the hardest limit. Everything else is a matter of money and patience.

The Italian theory and the Italian practice may be sisters who don’t speak, but they both agree on one thing: the buyer who didn’t ask the right questions early pays for them later on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can foreigners buy property in Italy?

Most foreigners can. EU, EEA, and Swiss citizens buy on the same terms as Italians. Americans, Brits, Australians, Israelis, and citizens of most developed economies have full reciprocity. Canadians and New Zealanders currently face restrictions because their home countries restrict Italians from buying residential property. The notary at closing interprets this and makes the final call.

How much are closing costs when buying a house in Italy?

Closing costs in Italy typically run 9 to 15 percent above the purchase price. The biggest variable is whether the property qualifies as your prima casa (primary residence), which drops registration tax from 9 percent to 2 percent of cadastral value. Other line items include notary fees (1 to 2.5 percent), agent commission (2 to 4 percent plus VAT), and a sworn translator at signing if your Italian isn’t fluent. The optional geometra and lawyer you should hire are reasonable, but additional costs.

Do I need to live in Italy to buy a house there?

No. Non-residents can purchase property in Italy without holding any visa or residence permit, provided their nationality has reciprocity. You will need a codice fiscale (Italian tax code). Buying as a non-resident does mean higher closing costs (no prima casa tax break), tighter mortgage terms, and ongoing IMU property tax with no exemption.

What is a compromesso in Italian real estate?

The compromesso, or contratto preliminare, is the binding preliminary contract signed after both parties accept an offer and due diligence is complete. The buyer pays 10 to 30 percent of the purchase price as a deposit (caparra confirmatoria), both sides commit to a closing date, and all terms are locked. If the buyer backs out, the deposit is forfeited. If the seller backs out, they owe the buyer double under Article 1385 of the Civil Code. For full protection against the seller reselling to a higher bidder, the compromesso should be transcribed in the public real estate registry for additional fees.

How long does it take to buy a house in Italy?

Three to six months from accepted offer to keys in hand is typical. The proposta d’acquisto and compromesso usually take a few weeks. The gap between compromesso and rogito (final deed) is normally two to three months, driven by mortgage approval if applicable, the geometra’s structural and cadastral checks, and the notary’s title verification.

Do I need a lawyer to buy property in Italy?

A lawyer is not legally required, but a bilingual avvocato (lawyer) specializing in Italian real estate is strongly advised for foreign buyers. The notary represents the legality of the transaction, not your interests. The agent represents the deal, not the buyer. A lawyer is the only professional in the chain whose duty is to you. Expect to pay around €1,500 to €5,000, depending on the complexity of the purchase.

Can I get a mortgage in Italy as a non-resident?

Yes, but on tighter terms than residents. Italian banks typically lend non-residents 50 to 70 percent of the property value (so 30 to 50 percent down), where residents can sometimes borrow 80 percent. Interest rates are slightly higher, and approval timelines are longer, often six to twelve weeks. Banks will require proof of income, tax returns from your home country, and documentation showing the source of funds.

What does the notary actually do in Italy?

The notaio is a public officer who verifies legal title, confirms there are no liens or unpaid taxes against the property, ensures cadastral records match the deed, collects the registration taxes and remits them to the state, and registers the new ownership in the public registry. The notary does not verify that what’s physically standing matches what was permitted to be built (that’s why you hire your own geometra), and does not represent the buyer’s interests in negotiation (that’s what your lawyer is for). The buyer pays the notary fee and chooses which notary to use.

Are 1 euro houses in Italy a good deal?

Rarely, in the way the headlines suggest. The €1 price is the auction starting bid, not the realistic cost. Buyers commit to a renovation deposit, must restore the property to municipal standards within three years, and typically spend €20,000 to €100,000 minimum to make the place habitable. The houses are usually in remote depopulated towns with patchy services and scarce skilled labor. €1 houses can work for buyers with cash, time, and a romantic streak about restoration. They’re not investments and not value plays.

What taxes do you pay when buying a house in Italy?

For a resale property, the main tax is the registration tax (imposta di registro): 2 percent of cadastral value as prima casa (if you move there), 9 percent as a second home (your Italian vacation home). New builds substitute VAT (4 percent prima casa, 10 percent second home, 22 percent for luxury) for the registration tax. There are also small fixed cadastral and mortgage taxes (€100 to €200 total). After purchase, expect annual IMU property tax (0.4 to 1.06 percent of cadastral value, exempt for non-luxury primary residences), TARI waste tax, and condominio fees if applicable. Nothing too crazy, but it’s an ongoing cost.

Does buying property in Italy give you residency?

No. Property ownership grants no right to live in Italy beyond the standard 90 days in any 180-day period that any tourist gets under the Schengen rules. To stay longer, you need a separate visa: most often the elective residence visa for the financially independent, the digital nomad visa for remote workers, or a work, student, or family visa, depending on your situation. Owning property strengthens an elective residence or digital nomad application by showing accommodation, but it doesn’t replace the visa itself.

Disclaimer

I’m not a lawyer or notary, and this article isn’t legal, tax, or financial advice. What I am is someone who’s researched the topic exhaustively and spoken with friends and former students who have actually closed on properties across Italy. Their experiences and the data behind this guide shape what’s here, but they don’t substitute for someone qualified looking at your specific case.

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Florence is stunning. One of the most beautiful cities in the world.

If you are visiting Italy for the first time or you’ve never been to Florence, you must go and spend a couple of days there.

What you’ll find is an overwhelming amount of beauty and Renaissance art. You’ll also find everybody else.

In fact, millions of people visit Florence each year and it recently ranked as one of Europe’s most overcrowded tourist cities.

Going to Tuscany and limiting yourself to Florence is choosing to fly to Italy to stand in line in a sea of selfie sticks.

I’m not going to lie, the Uffizi gallery makes your whole trip to Italy worthwhile. My fiancée, Alicia, thinks that even the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella alone warrants the trip.

Florence is worth two days. The mistake is making it your base or your only stop in Tuscany.

Tuscany is much more than just Florence.

There is a lifetime of Tuscan cities and towns to fall for, most of them with a fraction of the crowds and the cost.

Here are ten I would send anyone to. Some are easy day trips by train. Some need a rental car and a willingness to drive scenic, winding roads. All of them give you something Florence no longer can: room to breathe.

What about Pisa?

Before we start, Pisa is an afternoon. Drive to it, take a photo of you virtually high-fiving the tower, eat a sandwich, and leave. Do not book three days to “experience Pisa.” There aren’t three days of Pisa. The airport is genuinely useful for landing in Tuscany, but the city as a base is a planning error.

The Tuscan provinces on the map

Before we review my recommendation list, I prepared a map to show you Tuscany’s 10 provinces to give you better context.

Alright, let’s dive in.

1. Lucca: A walled city

Lucca is one of the most overlooked cities in Tuscany. It is a walled, flat Renaissance city that favors people on foot and cyclists over car drivers.

The historic center of the city is surrounded by 16th-century walls. This gives you a four-kilometer (roughly 2.5 miles) tree-lined loop that you can walk or cycle. Renting a bike while visiting is a great idea here.

The population (of the city, as opposed to the province) is around 89,000, though the beautiful historic center accommodates way fewer people and feels relatively small.

It’s a city of culture. Puccini was born here. The Lucca Summer Festival brings major international acts to town every July. The Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, built on the footprint of a Roman amphitheater, is a beautiful square that is actively used by locals even though it looks stuck in time.

Two or three days is plenty for a visit. Climb Torre Guinigi, the medieval tower with oak trees growing out of the top (depicted in the photo above). Eat tordelli lucchesi, the local meat-stuffed pasta in beef ragù. Walk the walls at sunset.

If the hills of many Tuscan towns wear you out, Lucca is flat, which makes exploring the center easy on the legs.

If you are thinking about actually moving to Tuscany, Lucca is a serious option if you have some budget. It is not cheap. But unlike many Tuscan towns it has a working non-tourism economy. It is essentially the Paper Valley of Europe (plus mechanical and pharmaceutical employers in the surrounding comuni).

Its streets are genuinely livable inside the walls, and it has an established expat community (mostly retirees and remote workers from English speaking countries).

Getting there: Direct train from Florence Santa Maria Novella, about 1 hour 20 minutes, around €9 for a regional ticket. Pisa airport is 30 minutes by train. Don’t drive into the historic center, it's a ZTL (Zona a Traffico Limitato, the restricted traffic zone that'll get you an expensive ticket if you drive in).

2. Siena: One of the best cities in Italy

When we visited, Alicia fell in love with Siena. Chances are, you will as well.

Piazza del Campo is a shell-shaped square that slopes toward the Palazzo Pubblico. It’s the place where, twice a year, in July and August, the local contrade (neighborhoods) race horses in the Palio di Siena.

Siena takes its contrade seriously. The Palio is not an event put up for the tourists. It is a local event with tourists watching.

It is a working city of roughly 53,000 people, highly ranked for quality of life, with one of Italy’s oldest universities and a banking history that includes Monte dei Paschi, the world’s oldest continuously operating bank.

The food is phenomenal even by Tuscan standards, with its own twists. Pici, the thick hand-rolled pasta, is the local specialty. Order it cacio e pepe or all’aglione if you like garlic. Their sweets are also remarkable, including Panforte, the dense spiced fruitcake Siena has been exporting since the 13th century. And while you’re there, order gelato from Il Masgalano.

Stay at least two nights. Wake up early to see Piazza del Campo empty. Then see it again at sunset. Day-trippers from Florence arrive at noon and leave at five. The city changes once they go.

Getting there: The bus is faster than the train. Autolinee Toscane runs frequent direct services from Florence’s Villa Costanza station in about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Flixbus is also an option. The train involves a change and might not be worth it. An endless network of escalators will take you from the bus station to the upper level of the city.

3. Arezzo: The smart move most tourists skip

Arezzo is where Roberto Benigni filmed Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful. An overlooked city by most visitors, well-loved by us Italians.

You’ll find great art (particularly by Piero della Francesca) and 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.

Arezzo is also the cheapest province in Tuscany for property, at around €1,403 per square meter. If you have been priced out of Lucca but still want a real Tuscan city with services, art, and good train connections, this is the one to look at. Whether you’re reading Italian property listings for a rental or a buy, Arezzo offers a lot for the money.

A day covers the visitor highlights. Two, if you want to settle into the rhythm of the locals.

Getting there: Direct train from Florence in 30 to 90 minutes, depending on whether you catch a Frecciarossa or a Regionale. Fast trains cost €15, regional ones around €9.

4. Pistoia: 35 minutes from Florence, half the price

Italy’s Capital of Culture in 2017, a title that came and went without most foreign visitors noticing. Pistoia sits 35 minutes by train from Florence, has one of the most beautiful main squares in Tuscany (Piazza del Duomo, with a striped cathedral, an octagonal baptistery, and a Romanesque bell tower), and you can usually have the churches mostly to yourself.

Pistoia is also Europe’s biggest plant nursery hub. The countryside around the city is chock full of vivai (nurseries) producing trees and ornamental plants for half the continent.

Half-day or a full day for a visit, easily combined with Lucca or Florence. As a place to live, Pistoia province has the lowest rents in the region at about €9.1 per square meter, a serious gap compared to Florence. Cheap, well-connected, and quietly cultured.

Getting there: Regional train from Florence Santa Maria Novella, 32 to 50 minutes, departing a few times per hour, for literally €5.

5. Cortona (Arezzo): Under the Tuscan sun

Yes, this is where Frances Mayes set her book and the film. Yes, that has made Cortona the most visited small town in the Val di Chiana. But Cortona was a hill town with serious Etruscan history a long time before any of that.

The MAEC archaeological museum has an Etruscan collection that would be the centerpiece even in large cities. The view from Piazza Garibaldi at sunset is the kind of view that has been earning love letters for centuries.

The town sits at around 600 meters above the Val di Chiana plain. The old centro is small and walkable. The light is, even by Tuscan standards, quite remarkable.

One or two nights as a visitor. Use it as a base for Pienza, Montepulciano, and Lake Trasimeno (technically Umbria, but twenty minutes away). For movers, the expat presence is real, and so is the seasonality. In February, Cortona is quiet to the point of melancholy. Decide if that sounds restful or boring before you commit.

Getting there: Train to Camucia-Cortona station, then a bus or taxi up the hill (the historic center is a steep two-kilometer climb). About 1 hour and 20 minutes from Florence.

6. Pienza (Siena): A Renaissance Pope’s idea of the perfect town

A 15th-century pope decided his hometown should be the architectural ideal of a Renaissance city, and he had the money to make it happen.

Pope Pius II hired Bernardo Rossellino, redesigned the village from scratch, and renamed it after himself. The result is the most coherent piece of Renaissance urban planning you can walk through. UNESCO listed the entire town in 1996.

Pienza is also where pecorino di Pienza is made. Sheep’s milk cheese, aged in caves, sometimes wrapped in walnut leaves or rolled in ash. Buy a wedge from any of the cheese shops on Corso il Rossellino and eat it with a glass of Vino Nobile from nearby Montepulciano.

This is a stop, not a base. A few hours, half a day at most. Fewer than 2,000 people live in the historic center, and it gets seriously crowded with day-trippers between 11 am and 4 pm. Come early or come late.

Getting there: Rental car, basically. There is a bus from Siena that takes about 75 minutes, but if you want to actually visit the wider Val d’Orcia, you need a car.

7. Montepulciano (Siena): Vino Nobile and a ridge in the sky

Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is one of Italy’s oldest documented wines, with records of winemaking in the area going back to the 8th century. The town that produces it sits on a long ridge at 600 meters, with cellars carved into the tufa rock beneath noble palazzi. Many of those cellars are open for tasting.

Unlike the Brunello tastings up the road in Montalcino, they often don’t require an appointment booked weeks in advance.

The Piazza Grande at the top of the town is the kind of place you want to sit and let the afternoon happen to you. The 16th-century church of San Biagio, just outside the walls, is one of the great Renaissance buildings nobody talks about.

One night is fine. Two if you want to drink properly without driving.

Getting there: Rental car. A train to Chiusi-Chianciano Terme followed by a regional bus exists, but it’s a three-hour ordeal from Florence, and the bus connections are unforgiving. Drive.

8. Volterra (Pisa): Older and moodier

A walled hill town, but a darker one. Volterra was a major Etruscan center (the Museo Etrusco Guarnacci has one of the great collections of funerary urns anywhere), then a Roman city with a well-preserved theater, then a medieval town built around the alabaster trade that still operates today.

Local artisans carve alabaster by hand in workshops you can wander into. Twilight fans know it as the home of the Volturi vampires, which has produced a small subgenre of disappointed teenagers wandering the streets.

Volterra feels older than other Tuscan hill towns. It is grayer, windier, harder. That is a feature, not a bug, for some.

One night for visitors, two if you want time at the alabaster workshops and the Etruscan museum. As a place to live, Volterra is on the affordable end of Tuscany and has a small but committed expat community. It is also fairly isolated. A pro or a con, depending on how you see it.

Getting there: Driving is easiest. By bus from Pisa or Florence with a change at Colle Val d’Elsa, expect 2 to 2.5 hours. Volterra has no train station.

9. Pitigliano (Grosseto): Carved into the cliff

Pitigliano is built directly into a cliff of volcanic tufa rock, in the wild southern Maremma near the Lazio border.

From a distance, Pitigliano looks like the village grew out of the cliff itself. Architecturally, it kind of did. The Jewish community here was substantial enough from the 1500s onward that the town was nicknamed “La Piccola Gerusalemme,” Little Jerusalem.

You can still visit the synagogue (built in 1598), the kosher bakery, and the ritual bath cut into the rock. The synagogue is preserved largely thanks to the Associazione La Piccola Gerusalemme, a mixed Jewish and non-Jewish cultural association founded in 1996 by Elena Servi, one of the last Jewish residents of Pitigliano, together with her son Enrico Spizzichino.

This is the part of Tuscany most travelers never see. The food is Maremman: cinghiale (wild boar), pici, sfratto (a Jewish-origin pastry filled with honey, walnuts, orange peel, and pepper). The local white wine, Bianco di Pitigliano, was one of the first Italian whites to receive DOC status.

One or two nights, with day trips to Sovana and Sorano (the other two villages in the Città del Tufo trio) and the Etruscan vie cave, sunken paths cut up to twenty meters deep into the rock.

Getting there: Rental car. Public transport to Pitigliano is theoretical at best. The nearest useful train hub is Orvieto in Umbria, then a bus or car.

10. Viareggio (Lucca): The beach, the Carnival, the Liberty promenade

Viareggio is the largest beach town in Tuscany. Three kilometers of sandy beach, a Liberty-style promenade lined with elegant cafés where Puccini used to sit, and Italy’s most famous Carnevale.

The Viareggio Carnival has been running since 1873 and features enormous papier-mâché floats, often satirizing politicians, paraded along the Passeggiata for four Sundays leading up to Lent.

Outside Carnevale, Viareggio in summer is what most Italians mean when they say “andare al mare.” Beach clubs (bagni or stabilimenti balneari) where you rent a sun lounger and umbrella for the day, lunches of fritto misto, and evenings on the seafront. You will not find many famous monuments. That is not why you come here.

A day or two combined with Lucca for a visit. If you are coming for Carnevale itself, book your lodging six months in advance. The town fills quickly.

For movers, Viareggio and Marina di Pietrasanta, to the north, have some of the highest residential property values in the province of Lucca. Here, beachfront stays beachfront even in winter.

Getting there: Direct train from Florence in about 1 hour 30 minutes, hourly, around €10. From Lucca, 20 minutes. From Pisa airport, 25 minutes.

So here is the question. If you have seven days in Tuscany, how many of them are you really going to spend with 44,000 other tourists in five square kilometers of Florence?

Pick your three from the list above. Build a route between them. Rent a car for the southern stretch. You’ll come home with stories that don’t start with “we waited two hours for the Uffizi.”

Which of these have you been to? And which one are you considering for your next trip?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best Tuscan city to base yourself in besides Florence?

Lucca and Siena are the two strongest bases for travelers without a car. Lucca works well for the western side of the region, including Pisa, Viareggio, and the Garfagnana. Siena is the natural base for the south, including the Val d’Orcia, Chianti, and Montepulciano. For the eastern flank toward Umbria and the Marche, Arezzo is the answer.

Can you visit Tuscany without renting a car?

Yes, but with limits. Florence, Lucca, Siena, Pisa, Arezzo, Pistoia, and Viareggio are all on the train network. The hill towns of the Val d’Orcia and most of the Maremma, including Pitigliano, are not. If your itinerary is all city-based, skip the rental. If you want Pienza, Montepulciano, or Pitigliano, rent.

Which Tuscan town is the cheapest to live in?

The Arezzo and Pistoia provinces are the most affordable. Arezzo province sits at around €1,403 per square meter for property, the lowest in the region. Pistoia province has the lowest rents at about €9.1 per square meter. Within those provinces, look at Sansepolcro, Anghiari, and the smaller towns of the Casentino valley for real value.

Is San Gimignano worth visiting?

It is worth a few hours. The medieval towers are striking, and the Vernaccia di San Gimignano is a fine white wine. But the town is overrun by day-trippers from Florence and Siena, and it doesn’t reward an overnight stay. Stop for lunch on a route between Florence and Siena. Don’t book three nights.

How many days do you actually need in Florence?

Two full days cover the must-sees: Uffizi, Accademia, Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, and a long walk through Oltrarno. Add a third day if you want to slow down. After that, the city becomes a place to eat in but not really inhabit, because the historic center is mostly tourists, restaurants for tourists, and shops for tourists. Better to use those extra days on one of the ten cities above.

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I moved to Montegiorgio when I was nine years old. At the time, it belonged to Ascoli Piceno.

In 2004, Fermo was legislated as a new province (operational from 2009) and Montegiorgio moved with it. Well, the town didn’t move, but the borders on the map did.

So, technically speaking, Ascoli Piceno is the province that raised me. The “big” place nearby. The city you’d go during local school trips. The starting point, if you wanted to take a corriera (a long distance bus) to Rome.

And if you wanted a coastal counterpart, San Benedetto del Tronto with its endless palm trees was only 30 minutes away.

Most people who ask about moving to Ascoli Piceno are asking two questions at once, without realizing it.

The inland, medieval version of the province is Ascoli Piceno city. The palm-lined, beach, working fishing port is San Benedetto del Tronto. They are located thirty kilometers apart and yet, they may as well belong to different centuries.

This is the third and final city-level deep dive in the Marche series I promised paid subscribers in the Moving to Le Marche article. Pesaro came first. Macerata and Civitanova Marche came second. Now, it’s time for the southern end of the region.

What follows is a very chunky guide covering both cities: neighborhoods, rent prices, property costs, taxes, healthcare, schools, jobs, bureaucracy, climate, internet, social integration, transport, and a 60-day setup checklist. Identical structure to the previous two guides. Quite different facts. Different earthquake history, too.

Paid subscribers get the guide as a downloadable PDF and ePub, so you can take it with you on your phone/tablet/e-reader, or simply print it.

So here it is. Everything you need to know about moving to Ascoli Piceno (or San Benedetto del Tronto), including the stuff that doesn’t make the tourism brochures.

By way of preview, here is the table of contents:

• Introduction

• What Ascoli Piceno Is

• What San Benedetto del Tronto Is

• The Climate

• Where to Live in Ascoli

• Where to Live in San Benedetto

• What It Costs Buying Property

• Internet and Connectivity

• Jobs

• Taxes

• Your First 60 Days

• Healthcare

• Schools and Families

• Speaking English and The Expat Community

• Safety

• Getting Around

• Cultural Life

• Outdoor Life

• Food

• What These Places Lack

• Day Trips

• Seven Mistakes People Make

• Conclusion

(This post’s cover image credit: Imamerrante it, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

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We’ve all seen the video. An American wife breaks the spaghetti before dropping it in a pot of boiling water. The husband watches in disbelief, then erupts. “Mamma mia, you no break-a da spaghetti.” Reposts. Tens of millions of views. Brand deals.

The format is well established. She does something culturally normative in North America but not in Italy. The husband performs his indignation in broken English. Dramatic hand gestures. She laughs. The algorithm watches approvingly and rewards the clip with millions of viewers.

Pineapple on pizza. Ketchup on pasta. Cappuccino after lunch. Ice in the wine. Rinse and repeat until the follower count has seven digits.

I have nothing personal against the people running the format. Many seem lovely. The genre is the problem. It’s tired, it’s misleading, and more problematic than it looks on the surface.

The Italian husband on TikTok isn’t a husband. He’s a costume. The American wife isn’t a wife. She’s a laugh track.

What the format does to the Italian guy

The husband gets reduced to one trait. He’s the guy who gets mad at food. He doesn’t read, doesn’t have political opinions, doesn’t grieve, doesn’t have an existence outside the kitchen.

Actually, make that two traits. He polices Italian food rules and can’t quite say it in English.

Stereotypes usually have a kernel of truth, and this one does too. Italians do care about food. They will mock you for ketchup on pasta. They will judge your cappuccino timing. The kernel is real. The problem is when the kernel becomes the whole person. The Italians I know argue about politics, read history obsessively, and yes, also care about food.

What the format hides is that most of these couples don’t live in Italy. They’re in New Jersey, Toronto, Tennessee, or Massachusetts. Which means the Italian guy is an immigrant. Not the 1905 kind, with a beaten suitcase held together by cord and hope. But an immigrant nonetheless.

He left Italy, learned English as an adult, navigated the immigration system, and built a life in a radically different cultural and geographic context.

That story is interesting and three-dimensional. The format throws it away to film him overact to cream in carbonara.

In my early twenties, Microsoft invited me to a private meeting in the Netherlands for tech “influencers.” I was one of maybe four people from Italy. My English at the time was, charitably, shaky.

I remember walking into a shop and asking the Dutch woman behind the counter a question. She openly laughed in my face. “You Italians.” I think I used “when” instead of “where.”

Eventually, I too left Italy as an adult. Anyone who treated my linguistic fluency as my main characteristic would have been an idiot. The accent isn’t the man. (And 25 years later, I’d be happy to have an English rematch.)

What it does to the American wife

The wife doesn’t get off scot-free either. She’s the person who doesn’t get it. The one who messes up Italian food rules so he can react. She’s the director and the surrogate for the audience.

What she thinks about the actual food, or the husband standing in front of her, doesn’t make the cut. There’s no room in the format for her knowledge of Italian cultural norms or her respect for them. She has to be uninformed, surprised, forever unaware.

The sweet husband pivot

Some couples have realized the format is overdone, so they’ve reinvented themselves by flattening the husband in a different direction.

The Italian guy is now only occasionally mad about food. Mostly, he’s the sweet guy. With the child-like sweetness reserved for Italian men with broken English. He’ll make sad faces if she pretends to have cheated on him. He’ll go out of his way to make some grand romantic gesture, while pretending not to know just how romantic it is by any standards, Italian or North American.

This is arguably an improvement over the guy raging about afternoon cappuccini. It’s still not great. He’s a caricature. He’s still mono-dimensional. It still suggests Italian men are all alike: romantic, impulsive, mad at food prepared incorrectly.

And the comments are often a problem of their own. “Aww, how do I get one of those?” He’s not a giant plushy. You don’t get one. You form a relationship with one.

What an actual intercultural marriage looks like

I was married to a Canadian woman for almost two decades. I’m now engaged to another Canadian. Both relationships have had real cultural differences. None have looked anything like a TikTok skit.

Cultural differences are mostly fun to navigate. Some amuse. Some frustrate. Most just become part of how you live together.

There’s no belittling each other for growing up with different customs. Curiosity does most of the work. “Oh, I wish we did that” gets said from both sides, plenty of times, over the years.

You’ll argue. There will be misunderstandings. Like the time my fiancée thought a fight was about to start at dinner in Italy. It was just relatives having antipasti before dinner.

That’s the kind of moment a 30-second skit can’t capture. It’s too small. Too easy to scroll past. It’s also the actual texture of the experience.

The data behind the laughs

By watching TikTok, you’d be forgiven for expecting a lot of American-Italian couples in the numbers. There aren’t.

In 2024, ISTAT registered roughly 21,000 mixed marriages where an Italian man married a foreign woman. Most of those wives were Romanian, Ukrainian, Russian, or Brazilian. North Americans don’t make the top tier. Italians marrying immigrants in Italy, rather than the American tourist with the camera.

ISTAT also found that interethnic marriages in Italy are about 15% more likely to end in separation than marriages between two Italians. We have a rather anachronistic proverb about this. Mogli e buoi dei paesi tuoi. (Wife and oxen from your own town.)

These marriages tend to require more conscious work on language, culture, and key life decisions about where to actually live. The stuff the skits entirely bypass.

Plenty of mixed marriages work. Mine, God willing, will too. But “let’s communicate and find workable solutions” isn’t a TikTok hook. “Amore, you cut the pasta” is.

The format also flattens Italy

The damage extends past the marriage. The “Italian husband freaks out” trope teaches the audience to think of Italians as hand-gesturing creatures with one personality trait.

Italy has 20 regions. A guy from Bologna and a guy from Catania share a passport and not much else. The TikTok Italian husband is from nowhere in particular. He’s from “Italy.” Whatever that means.

What I’d watch instead

I’m not against comedy or making fun of each other’s differences. Show me her mispronouncing gnocchi as “gnoch-cce” or him butchering “squirrel.”

Run me through the literal song and dance of which country wins on which dimension. Italy has better food. America has better salaries. Italy has better style. America has bigger houses.

But make it part of a wider menu. One that includes more than a stereotypical character standing in for a whole country. “You Italians.” Past a certain point, even thick-skinned people start to feel the xenophobic edge.

Those couples exist. Some of them post often. The algorithm doesn’t reward them, because dignity doesn’t trend.

If one partner is the punchline and the other is the setup, it isn’t a marriage. It’s a bit. And it’s been the same bit since 2021.

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Having a codice fiscale is a prerequisite for buying a property in Italy and for virtually everything else you’ll do when moving to Italy. Even newborns automatically get one, often before they leave the hospital.

Without it, you’ll be delayed or outright blocked from signing a lease, opening a bank account, getting an Italian phone number, closing on a property, starting a job, or signing up with the public healthcare system. I’m not exaggerating: you’ll struggle to get anything done.

The good news is that the codice fiscale itself is free. Getting it as an American or Canadian citizen in 2026 is where things become interesting, because consular practices changed in 2024, and most guides on Google haven’t caught up.

Don’t worry, though, I’m giving you the up-to-date playbook to get a codice fiscale. No lawyer required.

What the Codice Fiscale Actually Is

The codice fiscale is a 16-character alphanumeric identifier issued by the Agenzia delle Entrate, Italy’s revenue agency (yes, just as cuddly and friendly as the IRS in America and the CRA in Canada).

It’s generated from your first and last name, date and place of birth, and sex, using a public algorithm. If two people would receive the same codice fiscale, the agency steps in to disambiguate.

The canonical example of a codice fiscale for Mario Rossi (Italy’s John Doe) born in Rome on January 1, 1980, is RSSMRA80A01H501U.

Think of it as a Social Security Number in America or a Social Insurance Number in Canada, but normally handled by Italians with less secrecy, in part because anyone can calculate it with a few details about you.

Your landlord will want it. Your bank will want it. Your mobile carrier will want it. The notary handling your property purchase will want it.

It’s valid for a lifetime. It doesn’t expire, doesn’t need renewal, and doesn’t depend on where you live. You get one, and it’s yours forever.

Don’t confuse it with the partita IVA. The codice fiscale is personal. The partita IVA is commercial and required to invoice clients as a freelancer or run a company in Italy. Anyone who tells you a partita IVA is needed to buy a vacation home is confused.

What Changed in Mid-2024

Until mid-2024, the standard advice was: apply through your nearest Italian consulate, walk in or send an email, wait a few weeks, get your PDF certificate.

It mostly still works that way, but the priorities have shifted. What happened is that several Italian consulates, particularly in the United States, updated their internal guidance and started prioritizing Italian citizens and active visa applicants over foreign nationals who simply wanted a codice fiscale to buy a house or open a bank account.

The Embassy of Italy in Washington D.C. published the most explicit version: foreigners engaging in long-term activities in Italy are encouraged to first apply via a delegated representative in Italy, and Washington has gone as far as asking, in some cases, for written proof of a failed delegate attempt before processing such requests. Other consulates adopted the general idea without the same paperwork demand.

In practice, the response times vary widely now, from a few weeks at smaller consulates to several months of silence at the busiest US ones. Canadian consulates have generally stayed more responsive, particularly in Vancouver and Montreal.

This isn’t a scandal. It’s resource triage: a handful of consular staff, millions of dual citizens in North America, and a system that would rather the Agenzia delle Entrate handle this inside Italy.

Four Paths to Get Your Codice Fiscale

I’ll rank them by ease of process for a non-EU citizen this year.

1. Apply in person in Italy (easiest if you’re already going)

This is the easiest path, but only if you already have a trip scheduled.

Walk into any ufficio territoriale of the Agenzia delle Entrate. Bring your passport and the AA4/8 form. Some offices take walk-ins; others expect you to book an appointment through the Agenzia’s online portal. Either way, it’s quick.

The Ufficio Territoriale di Roma 2 Aurelio in Trastevere moves reasonably fast by Roman standards. Milan offices are efficient. Smaller provincial offices can be even quicker because the line is shorter. Naples, bless it, requires patience, a book, and possibly a prayer to San Gennaro.

The certificate is issued on the spot. That is the document you walk out with, and it’s all you need.

This option doesn’t work if you need the codice fiscale before you travel, for instance, to apply for a long-stay visa. And of course, if you aren’t travelling to Italy already, don’t make a trip just for that.

2. Your Italian consulate at home (still viable, inconsistently)

Still worth trying, especially from Canada and the UK, where consulates remain more responsive. Worth attempting elsewhere if you have time, since the service is free when it works.

Italy maintains consulates in dozens of cities across the major English-speaking countries. Apply only to the one that covers where you legally live: applications from outside a consulate’s jurisdiction usually get rejected without comment.

Google “Italian consulate [your nearest major city]” and find the one with jurisdiction over your address. What you want is the page on a .esteri.it domain. Anything else is a third-party guide, not the consulate itself.

To save you the first click, here are helpful links for some of the larger consulates and embassies serving English-speaking countries:

United States:

• New York: https://consnewyork.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale/

• Los Angeles: https://conslosangeles.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale/

• Chicago: https://conschicago.esteri.it/en/

• Boston: https://consboston.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale/

• Miami: https://consmiami.esteri.it/en/

• Houston: https://conshouston.esteri.it/en/

• Detroit: https://consdetroit.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale-italian-tax-code/

• Philadelphia: https://consfiladelfia.esteri.it/en/

• San Francisco: https://conssanfrancisco.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/altri-servizi/codice-fiscale/

• Washington D.C.: https://ambwashingtondc.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale/

Canada:

• Toronto: https://constoronto.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale/

• Montreal: https://consmontreal.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale/

• Vancouver: https://consvancouver.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale/

• Ottawa: https://ambottawa.esteri.it/en/

Vancouver’s CF page has the clearest documentation of any Italian consulate I’ve read, which is a low bar but still cleared with impressive ease.

United Kingdom:

• London: https://conslondra.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino/codice-fiscale/

• Edinburgh (covers Scotland and Northern Ireland): https://consedimburgo.esteri.it/en/

Australia:

• Sydney (NSW only): https://conssydney.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/codice-fiscale/

• Melbourne (Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, ACT): https://consmelbourne.esteri.it/en/servizi-consolari-e-visti/servizi-per-il-cittadino-italiano/italian-tax-file-number/

• Perth (WA and NT): https://consperth.esteri.it/en/

• Canberra: https://ambcanberra.esteri.it/en/

New Zealand:

• Wellington (for all of New Zealand): https://ambwellington.esteri.it/en/

Tax code applications to the Wellington embassy go in by email per the embassy’s instructions.

Documentation requirements are roughly consistent across consulates: (usually) signed AA4/8, a clean PDF scan of your passport, proof of residence in the consular district (driver’s license, utility bill, lease), sometimes a birth certificate, sometimes a short signed statement explaining why you need the codice fiscale. Read your consulate’s page before submitting. They do not chase incomplete applications.

3. Delegate someone in Italy (annoying but most reliable in 2026)

If you know anyone in Italy, a friend, your commercialista, a real estate agent handling your purchase, this is the fastest route short of you showing up in person.

You prepare a procura speciale (a special power of attorney) naming them as your delegate to submit Form AA4/8 on your behalf.

The process:

1. Sign the procura in front of a notary public in your home state or province.

2. Get it apostilled. In the US, by the Secretary of State in the state where the document was notarized. California, Ohio, New York each have their own office. A California POA cannot be apostilled in Florida.

3. In Canada, apostilles became available on January 11, 2024 when Canada joined the Hague Convention. Global Affairs Canada issues them, and so do several designated provincial authorities, including Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Quebec. Where you got the document notarized determines which office processes the apostille.

4. Send the apostilled POA, a clean color scan of your passport, and the signed AA4/8 to your delegate in Italy.

5. They walk into any Agenzia delle Entrate office and submit it. You get your codice fiscale, often the same day.

Surprisingly, the process is fast once it hits Italy. Apostille turnaround in your home state is often the real bottleneck, not the Italian side.

4. Pay a delegate service (€100 to €200)

If you have no contacts in Italy, no trip planned, and your consulate has gone quiet, a paid delegate service does what your cousin would do: prepares the proxy, files it at the Agenzia, and sends you the PDF.

Studio Legale Metta and Smart Move Italy are two of the better-known options. Prices generally run from €100 to €200 per individual, plus whatever your local apostille costs.

The codice fiscale itself remains free. You’re paying for someone else’s time and the apostille logistics.

Worth it? If you’re trying to close on a house in Le Marche in thirty days and your consulate hasn’t replied in six weeks, yes. If you’re six months out from moving and have time to try other paths, no.

Bonus path for students: the Universitaly portal

Non-EU students pre-enrolling at an Italian university through universitaly.it automatically get a codice fiscale generated during the application. It appears on your student file and shows up in your visa documentation. If you’re coming to study, you almost certainly already have one. Check your pre-enrollment page before you email anyone.

The One Thing That Ruins Most Applications

Name spelling.

Your codice fiscale is generated algorithmically from your legal name as it appears on whatever document you present. If your passport reads “MARIA LUISA GARCÍA-LÓPEZ” and the form goes in as “Maria Garcia Lopez” you’ll get an incorrect code and run into issues down the line.

The Agenzia can fix it, but only after you’ve discovered the mismatch with another round of paperwork and delays.

Make sure you spell your name exactly as it appears on your passport. Accents and middle names included.

If you are a married woman, Italy will honor the name on your passport, whether it’s your maiden or married name (Italian women historically keep their maiden name on identity documents).

Dual citizens must apply as Italian citizens. If you’ve been recognized and have an Italian passport, use that one. The consulates require it, and the process is simpler.

What You’ll Actually Need

• Form AA4/8, downloaded from the Agenzia delle Entrate in English. Fill in the fields digitally rather than handwriting them, since handwritten foreign names cause a high rate of data-entry mistakes. Then sign the form (either print and sign by hand, or digitally) and submit as a PDF. Note: a few consulates, notably Vancouver, use their own form (ASSI05) for foreign-citizen applications instead of AA4/8. Always check your specific consulate’s page before submitting.

• A valid passport with at least six months of remaining validity, scanned as a single clean PDF. No phone photos of the data page with glare across your face.

• For the consulate route: proof of address in the consular area, ideally a driver’s license or utility bill in your name.

• A short written statement explaining why you need the codice fiscale. Buying property, opening a bank account in advance of relocation, applying for a visa. One paragraph is sufficient.

• If you go the delegate route: the notarized and apostilled procura speciale plus the signed AA4/8 with the “third party request” box ticked.

What You Actually Receive

A PDF certificate of attribution. The same one I showed you in the “What the Codice Fiscale Actually Is” section. Not a card. The old plastic codice fiscale tesserino, the green-and-white card many older guides still photograph, is almost entirely extinct.

Today the codice fiscale lives on the Tessera Sanitaria, the credit-card-sized Italian health card. That card only comes after you register with the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale (SSN), the Italian National Health Service, which requires legal residency and a permesso di soggiorno or equivalent.

A non-resident applying through a delegate, a consulate, or a quick visit to the Agenzia in Italy gets the PDF version and nothing else.

Print it. Save it on your phone. Email it to yourself. The PDF has full legal validity for every transaction the card would cover. Notaries, banks, real estate agents, and the Agenzia itself all accept it without question.

The barcode on it is the same Code 39 barcode that’s on the plastic Tessera Sanitaria, so a pharmacist or any reader can scan it directly off your printout if needed.

Once you actually move to Italy and enroll in the SSN, they’ll issue you the Tessera Sanitaria, which arrives by mail to your registered address. It’s valid for six years (or matched to your permesso di soggiorno if shorter), and renewed automatically. Until then, the PDF is your document.

The Other Documents and Why You Don’t Need Them Yet

A note on the carta d'identità and the CIE (Carta d'Identità Elettronica). These come up because foreigners often confuse them with the codice fiscale or the Tessera Sanitaria.

They're separate documents and they're not for non-residents. The carta d'identità is the Italian national ID card, traditionally a paper booklet, now issued in electronic form (the CIE) since 2016, with a chip, biometric data, and the holder's codice fiscale printed on the back.

It's available only to Italian citizens and to foreign residents legally registered with an Italian comune, and it's issued by the comune itself, not by a consulate or the Agenzia delle Entrate.

A non-resident American or Canadian can't get one, and won't need one: your passport functions as your ID for every purpose during a visit or pre-arrival. Once you actually move to Italy and establish residency, you’ll become eligible to get a carta d’identità as well.

One Last Thing

Italy doesn’t particularly want you to need a codice fiscale unless you’re committed. The system rewards people who show up, physically or through someone they trust, with quick turnarounds. It “punishes” people trying to do everything remotely from a consulate inbox.

If you’re serious about a move or buying property, the codice fiscale is step one. It’s also the step you should do early, before you have a lease to sign or a notary deadline to hit. Do it now, while nothing depends on it. The whole thing becomes easier when it’s not on fire.

Are you considering getting a codice fiscale? Or have you been through the process already? Let me know in the comments.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a codice fiscale before I travel to Italy?

Only if you’re signing contracts, opening bank or phone accounts, or closing on property.

If you’re going as a tourist and not in a rush to sign anything, you can get the codice fiscale at any Agenzia delle Entrate office once you land.

Non-EU citizens applying for a long-stay visa often, but not always, receive the codice fiscale during the visa or permesso di soggiorno process.

How long does it take to get a codice fiscale?

Immediate at an Agenzia delle Entrate office in Italy, generally under a week through a delegate in Italy once the apostilled POA has arrived, and anywhere from a few weeks to several months through a consulate, depending on the location and time of year.

Canadian consulates currently move relatively fast. Apostille turnaround in your state or province of residence is often the real bottleneck.

Can I use one of those online codice fiscale generators?

For casual purposes where someone just needs to type sixteen characters into a form, maybe. For anything official, no.

Those generators calculate the code based on the public algorithm, but the Agenzia delle Entrate maintains the actual register and handles collisions. Only an officially issued certificate is valid for notaries, banks, contracts, or the tax office. A generator-produced code will fail the first real check.

Also, many of those generators assume your place of birth is in Italy and won’t work if you are born elsewhere.

Does the codice fiscale expire or need updating?

Never expires. Valid for life. If you legally change your name, you can apply for a new code aligned with the new name. Otherwise, you get one, and you keep it for life. Address (or even citizenship) changes don’t affect the code.

Do I need a codice fiscale if I’m just thinking about moving to Italy?

No. A codice fiscale matters only when you’re about to do something concrete that requires one, like signing a lease, opening a bank account, closing on a property, or registering with the public healthcare system. Wait until you have a real reason or one upcoming reasonably soon.

And if you’re applying for a long-stay visa or pre-enrolling at an Italian university, the code is part of that process anyway.

Do I have to file taxes in Italy if I get a codice fiscale?

No. Having a codice fiscale doesn’t make you an Italian tax resident, doesn’t trigger any filing obligation, and doesn’t put you on any list. Tax residency in Italy is determined separately, based on where you actually live.

The standard rule under Italian law is that you become tax resident if you spend more than 183 days a year in Italy, register your residence at a comune, or have your “centro degli interessi vitali” (center of vital interests) there.

None of those are triggered by holding a CF. Americans in particular hear “tax code” and start worrying. The codice fiscale is closer to a Social Security Number than to a tax filing. Many foreign nationals hold one for years without ever owing Italy a euro.

What are the downsides of getting a codice fiscale?

Almost none. The code is free, lifelong, doesn’t expire, and creates no obligation by itself. The realistic downsides are practical: time and money spent on the apostille, possibly a fee to a delegate service. There’s no scenario where having a CF actively hurts a non-resident. The risks come from what you do with it (signing contracts, declaring residency, taking on a job), not from the code itself.

What if I’m an EU citizen, like a Dutch or German national?

The process is simpler. EU and Schengen citizens can apply with just a valid passport or national ID card, and no power of attorney apostille complications.

You have three options: walk into any Agenzia delle Entrate office in Italy with your ID and the AA4/8 form, apply through your nearest Italian consulate at home (the consulates serving major Dutch, German, French, Belgian, and other EU cities all process EU citizen requests routinely), or delegate someone in Italy with a simple power of attorney that doesn’t need an apostille between EU member states.

The “try a delegate first” pressure that some consulates apply to non-EU applicants doesn’t really apply to you. EU citizens are processed as a matter of course.

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Through the eyes of someone simply visiting the country, Italy is almost a utopian ideal. The weather, the food, the beaches, the beautiful people, the style.

It’s hard to understand why anyone would choose to leave this place. Yet, I did more than 22 years ago, and roughly 200,000 young Italians do the same each year.

What’s more bizarre are the reactions you get when you mention your intention to move to Italy. “Ma sei matto?” (Are you crazy?) “Ma perché vuoi venire qui? Io me ne andrei domani se potessi.” (Why do you want to come here? I’d leave tomorrow, if I could.)

This is the reaction most foreigners considering a move to Italy will get when talking to locals. It probably has spooked you.

This is not a matter of “tourists go home.” They are not lying to protect their open-air museum cities and pristine beaches. They say the same things to other Italians considering a come back.

Their reaction is universal. Raised eyebrows. A pause. “Sei sicuro?” (Are you sure?)

They mean well. They’re telling the truth. But it’s their truth, not yours.

Italian Salaries Are Actually That Bad

Two things you need to know about Italians. First, the national sport is not soccer. It’s complaining about the country. Second, they do have good reasons to complain.

Let’s start there:

• Between 1990 and 2020, Italy was the only EU country to see wages go down.

• The average salary in Italy is roughly €33K per year, about €1,650 a month take home.

• For every euro an employer spends on you, almost two-thirds goes to taxes and social contributions (Italy consistently ranks among the highest tax wedge countries in the OECD).

So when an Italian tells you “here you work and you don’t see the money,” they mean it almost literally. From their perspective, la vita in Italy is not so dolce.

Why Italians Are Leaving Italy

Stipendi fermi da 30 anni (salaries stuck for thirty years) is one factor. Lack of jobs in much of the country is another.

Youth unemployment is still extremely high by European standards. In southern regions like Campania, Sicily, and Calabria, it can exceed 35–40%.

Nearly half of young Italian workers are in a contratto a tempo determinato (a fixed-term contract with no guarantees of stability).

Add bureaucracy and slow career progression, and it becomes clear why many leave.

It is the reason why I left. I wanted better career opportunities, and Ireland (first) and Canada (then) delivered.

Why This Doesn’t Apply to You

Here’s the part they’re missing: you’re not entering their job market.

If you arrive in Italy with income generated outside of Italy, you invert the entire equation.

You pay roughly the same cost of living as an Italian, 25 to 30% lower than the US overall, and up to 70% lower in smaller towns or the south. (If you’re not sure where to base yourself, here’s a guide on which region of Italy you should move to.)

When you move to Italy, you and your Italian friend are not living in the same country, however. You eat the same food, walk the same streets, shop at the same stores. But you do not live the same lives.

I have a friend in the Marche who earns about €1,400 a month working locally. Rent, bills, groceries; there isn’t much left. Nights out are calculated. Vacations are rare.

A remote worker I know, living ten minutes away, earns a US salary. Same supermarket. Same cafés. Completely different life. Much nicer rental. Dinner out without thinking 2-3 times a week. Frequent travel to European capitals and Croatia. Savings at the end of the month.

In some ways he’s playing the game in hard mode (language barriers, bureaucracy, no local contacts), but in economic terms, he has found the cheat code.

Your Italian friend is telling you the truth about their life. What they can’t see is that yours will look very different.

Who Should Actually Move to Italy

This works for:

• Remote employees earning US, Canadian, British, Swiss, or Northern European salaries

• Consultants and freelancers with clients outside Italy

• Retirees with foreign pensions

• People with meaningful savings

• Founders running businesses registered elsewhere

It becomes a lot more challenging for:

• Someone planning to find a job on the Italian market

• Someone without remote income who hopes to figure it out after arriving

• Someone who wants an Italian career ladder to climb

• Anyone expecting an American-style standard of living in a major city

If you’re in the first group, the country your cousin in Bari is warning you about is not the country you’ll be living in.

The legalities of actually moving to Italy are not as difficult as you’d expect, either. As I explain in my guide on how to move to Italy legally, there are both Digital Nomad and retiree visa options with no caps. Both are relatively easy to get.

“But Isn’t This Just Gentrification?”

It’s a fair question and one I want to address directly.

Gentrification describes wealthier outsiders pricing locals out of neighborhoods that were already vibrant and lived-in. Lisbon, Mexico City, parts of Barcelona. The critique is valid in those places.

Most of the Italy I’m describing faces the opposite situation. The towns where foreign income has a meaningful impact are the ones that have been quietly losing population for decades.

Italy’s interior has lost millions of residents since the 1970s. Schools close. Churches deconsecrate. Business shut down. Houses sit empty until they collapse. The famous “€1 house” schemes exist precisely because no Italian wants to buy them and live there.

Foreign families moving into a Marche hill town aren’t displacing anyone. They’re often the reason the local alimentari (grocery store) stays open another five years, the reason the elementary school stays above the minimum enrollment to keep its doors open, the reason a 400-year-old building gets restored instead of demolished. In some rural towns, the mayor will personally help you with paperwork because each new resident matters. The movie Un mondo a parte more or less directly addresses this.

The places where foreign demand actually does push prices beyond local reach are a small subset: central Florence, parts of the Amalfi Coast, the most photogenic Tuscan villages, central Rome. I’m not recommending those. The whole argument of this newsletter is that the better Italy for new arrivals is also the Italy that genuinely benefits from them.

There’s a real critique buried in here, which is whether tourism-economy towns serve residents or visitors. That’s worth taking seriously. But moving to a depopulating town and actually living there year-round (paying taxes, sending kids to local schools, becoming part of the parrocchia) is the opposite of the tourist economy. It’s what these places need to keep existing.

Is Moving to Italy Right for You?

Before you book your move, run through this checklist:

• Can you earn without relying on the Italian job market?

• Are you okay with Italian-style housing (smaller apartments, “good enough”) outside the most desirable city centers?

• Do you speak some Italian or plan to reach B1? (BTW, my site, Linguetto, can help.)

• Can you handle bureaucracy and a slower pace of life?

• Are you looking to embrace the Italian life, not escape your current one?

If you answered yes to most of these, Italians are underestimating the quality of life you’ll experience. Smile, thank them, and order another espresso.

They’re not wrong about Italy. They’re wrong about your Italy.

(For a fuller picture of daily life beyond the economics, see my guide on what living in Italy is actually like.)

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do Italians discourage people from moving to Italy?

Because their lived experience is shaped by low wages, precariato (job insecurity), and bureaucracy. From their perspective, they are giving honest advice. What they don’t factor in is that foreigners often arrive with external income, which completely changes the equation.

Is Italy a good place for remote workers?

Yes. If your income is earned outside Italy, remote workers benefit from a lower cost of living relative to the US, UK, or Canada, while maintaining foreign-level salaries. Your quality of live will receive an upgrade. The same is true if you have a half-decent foreign pension or passive income.

How much do you need to live comfortably in Italy?

A single person can live comfortably on €2,500/month post-tax, depending on location. In Canada, I pay that for my mortgage alone, for a townhome in a small city.

If you’re frugal and pick a cheap place, in many small Italian towns you can live on as little as €1,000/month post-tax, though that’s a bare-bones lifestyle.

€2,500 assumes a comfortable margin (eating out, weekend trips, occasional indulgences), the kind of life someone moving from the US, Canada, or the UK would likely want.

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Across the road from the bus stop where I used to get dropped off in Montegiorgio, there is a monument to Salvo D’Acquisto. It was placed there in 1993, when I was in middle school.

At the time, I had no idea who he was. You will be forgiven for still not knowing. Stick around, we are going to change that today.

Italy is full of Via Salvo D’Acquisto, Piazza Salvo D’Acquisto, monuments, plaques, and so on. It sounds like a big deal, and it is.

Who Salvo D'Acquisto was

Salvo D’Acquisto was a twenty-two-year-old carabiniere, an officer of Italy’s military police, posted to a station north of Rome, in what is now the comune of Fiumicino.

On September 23, 1943, about two weeks after Italy had signed its armistice with the Allies and the Germans had moved in to occupy the country, a German unit near Palidoro arrested twenty-two local civilians.

The day before, two German soldiers had died when some old abandoned munitions exploded. The commander assumed sabotage. When nobody among the local civilians confessed, he forced them to dig a common grave and line up along it.

D’Acquisto stepped forward and said he had committed the sabotage. He had not. The civilians were released. He was executed by a firing squad. According to the one witness who survived, his last words were “Viva l’Italia.”

He was from Naples. He was also a devout Catholic. Pope John Paul II gave him the title of Servant of God. Pope Francis recognized his offering of life in the canonization process, an important step toward sainthood. Italy gave him the Gold Medal of Military Valour posthumously.

Yet he is not what April 25th commemorates. What it commemorates is part of why the holiday remains controversial eighty-one years later.

What the day is actually for

April 25 is Festa della Liberazione, Italy’s Liberation Day. It marks the date in 1945 when the National Liberation Committee called the insurrection in Milan that would put an end to the German occupation of northern Italy and what was left of the Republic of Salò (Mussolini’s puppet state).

Around 200,000 Italians had joined the Resistenza (the armed resistance). Roughly 35,000 to 45,000 of them died in the process. They were called partigiani, partisans, and unlike D’Acquisto, their contribution came from actively fighting.

That’s what the holiday was built to honor. Freedom from fascism and Nazi occupying forces, but also honoring those who valiantly fought for it. Not every brave Italian of the war years. The armed, organized ones who picked up rifles and attacked.

Martyrdom feels universal in a way armed resistance does not.

Everybody can agree that D’Acquisto was a brave and selfless young man. He sacrificed himself. He saved twenty-two civilians. He died saying “Viva l’Italia.” There is nothing to argue about. You can put him on a postage stamp, eventually a Catholic feast day, name a hundred streets after him, and nobody rightfully flinches regardless of their political inclinations.

The partisans are different. They shot people. They blew up trains. They executed collaborators. They were frequently Communists, Socialists, or members of the Action Party. (Though, there were also many Catholics, monarchists, and liberals in the resistance.) They won a war that left Italy on the losing side of its own alliance choices.

That is a more complicated thing to memorialize, and Italy has spent eighty years wrestling with its mixed feelings about it.

The contested part

Italy has never fully made peace with its own twentieth century. The partisans won the war. They also wrote, in large part, the 1948 Constitution that still governs this country. But the postwar amnesty of 1946 left most of the fascist apparatus intact. The prefects stayed. The magistrates stayed. A neo-fascist party, the Italian Social Movement, was founded in 1946 and sat in parliament for the next half century.

That party dissolved into National Alliance in 1995, and a few of its members ended up eventually founding Fratelli d’Italia, Brothers of Italy. It currently runs the country.

The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, does not use the word “antifascist” to describe herself and has been careful to mark April 25 in generic terms about freedom and democracy rather than in the specific terms the day was built to honor.

Small examples matter here. In 2024, the president of the Italian Senate, Ignazio La Russa, spent April 25 laying a wreath in Prague for Jan Palach. A perfectly defensible gesture on any of the other 364 days of the year.

The same week, the state broadcaster pulled a Liberation Day monologue by the novelist Antonio Scurati. The official reason, eventually, was a contract dispute over 1,800 euros. Scurati read the monologue anyway, from Piazza del Duomo in Milan, holding a red carnation.

The Italian right has been working, patiently and with considerable skill, to reframe April 25 as a broad celebration of freedom that does not require anyone to condemn fascism by name or honor the partisans by name. That is not a neutral position. No matter how you see it, it is a presa di posizione (taking a stand) that has consequences for the way Italian kids learn history in school.

About Bella ciao

You probably know the song.

If you are under forty and not Italian, you most likely know it from La Casa de Papel, Money Heist, the Netflix series where it plays as a kind of heist anthem for charismatic thieves in red jumpsuits.

Or from TikTok where it spread without any knowledge of its heavily politicized past.

Bella ciao is complicated even inside Italy. Historians argue about how much it was actually sung during the resistenza itself. The honest answer is: less than you would think. It became canonical mostly in the 1950s and after, partly through folk revivals and partly through a famous Spoleto Festival concert in 1964. The lyrics are a partisan’s goodbye. “If I die a partisan, you must bury me, up in the mountain, under the shade of a beautiful flower.”

Italians sing this at the funerals of partisan veterans, at Liberazione ceremonies, at protests against governments, and yes, occasionally at soccer-adjacent events for no defensible reason. It is not a pop song.

A few Italian artists have, at different times, publicly declined or pushed back on performing Bella ciao, usually to avoid its political history. For example, Laura Pausini has at times said she prefers not to associate her work with explicitly political songs. Apriti cielo (All hell broke loose).

The globalization of Bella ciao through Netflix and TikTok has been good for the song’s reach while dulling a little its meaning for international audiences.

Why this matters if you are moving to Italy

You cannot understand modern Italian politics without understanding why April 25 is still contested eighty-one years later. If you arrive picturing a settled postcard country, you will be confused by the first real political argument you witness while eating an incredible dessert at dinner.

This country is not settled. It is still arguing with itself about whether the men who lined civilians up beside ditches deserve to be condemned by name, or whether it is kinder to fold that whole period into a comfortable “excesses of both sides.”

That fight is alive. It shows up in school curricula, in court cases, in which streets get renamed and which ones do not, in who gets invited to speak on April 25 and who flies to Prague.

To live in Italy is to live inside that argument, whether you brought opinions with you or not. Most long-term foreigners I know arrive neutral. They have an opinion within a year.

One last thing

Every Italian town has a Via Salvo D’Acquisto. Many of them also have a Via dei Partigiani, or a square named for a specific local partigiano who was tortured, or shot, or never came back from the hills. One of those signs gets nods from everybody. The other one, not always.

April 25 is the day the second sign gets its red carnations.

If you’re new here: I write about Italian culture and what it’s actually like to visit or move to Italy, from a native Italian’s perspective. If you want a place to start, Which Region of Italy Should You Move To? is probably a good introduction to how I think about this country.

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My uncle and I used to go fishing together in Civitanova Marche. He still does. I’m the jerk who left for other ports.

So these two cities sit in my head as a slightly awkward pair. Macerata is a hill I associate with someone I loved and lost, and with a summer when I was twenty-two and didn’t know anything yet. Civitanova is the smell of the port in the late evening and the rod in my uncle’s hand. Who, by the way, is an absolute legend on the pier.

Pesaro made it easy to write that first guide. Macerata makes me slow down. Which is probably fine. You should slow down before this decision, too.

Most people who ask me about moving to Macerata are asking two questions at once, and they don’t always know it.

The inland, university-town, opera-in-summer, lunch-at-the-agriturismo version of the province is Macerata city. The shoe-factory, beach-umbrella, volleyball-arena, eat-the-fish-you-just-watched-get-unloaded version is Civitanova Marche. They sit twenty-two kilometers apart, share a hospital network, and belong to the same administrative province. But they aren’t the same place, and they aren’t even a similar place.

This guide is the second city-level deep dive I promised paid subscribers in the Moving to Le Marche article. Pesaro was first. Macerata is next, with Civitanova Marche appended as the coastal alternative for anyone who wants the Adriatic at their doorstep rather than twenty minutes away.

What follows is over 8,000 words covering both cities: neighborhoods, rent prices, property costs, taxes, healthcare, schools, jobs, bureaucracy, climate, internet, social integration, transport, and a 60-day setup checklist. Same structure as the Pesaro guide. Different facts.

If you’re only going to move once and you’re serious about doing it right, read both cities’ sections even if you think you already know which one you want. I’ve watched more than one person arrive convinced they wanted the beach and then discover they actually wanted bookshops.

Paid subscribers get the guide as a downloadable PDF and ePub below, so you can take it with you on your phone/tablet/e-reader, or simply print it.

By way of preview, here is the table of contents:

• Introduction

• What Macerata Is

• What Civitanova Marche Is

• The Climate

• Where to Live in Macerata

• Where to Live in Civitanova Marche

• How Much It Costs to Live Here

• Buying Property Here

• Internet and Connectivity

• Jobs and the Local Economy

• Taxes

• Your First 60 Days

• Healthcare

• Schools, Families, and Special Needs

• Speaking English

• The Expat Community

• Safety and Integration

• Getting Around

• Cultural Life

• Fitness and Outdoor Life

• Food

• What These Places Lack

• Day Trips and Nearby Towns

• Seven Mistakes People Make

• Which city is right for you?

(Cover image credit: Silena1968, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.)

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