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Apparently, I can’t stay away from Istat data when I can’t sleep at night. Most recently, I mapped happiness in Italy. Today we talk about immigrants. So this is essentially becoming a series. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Many people want to move to Italy, and each year hundreds of thousands succeed. So I got curious about where, exactly, they end up in Italy. This article, which is really a collection of maps I generated, shows you where.

Where the foreign-born live in Italy

When journalists report immigration data about Italy, they mostly throw around the 5.4 million foreign citizens figure. 9.1% of the country. It’s not an incorrect number, but it undersells the real extent of immigration in Italy.

In fact, Istat stops counting foreign citizens the moment they acquire Italian citizenship. So if a 37-year-old Romanian plumber moves to Rome and after a few years becomes Italian, he stops being counted. I’ve been in Canada for 20 years and hold Canadian citizenship, but I’m very much still an immigrant in Canada, as I was born and raised in Italy and moved here at 26.

A better approach to measuring the real number of immigrants is counting how many people living in Italy were born outside of it. It turns out, as of January 1st, 2025, it’s 6,928,045 people. Just shy of 7 million people. 11.8% of the population.

The gap between 6.9 million and 5.4 million comes down to immigrants disappearing from the statistics the moment they naturalize as Italians.

Let’s start with the overall picture. The map below draws a single dot per 250 foreign residents. Gray areas with no dots represent territory with fewer than 126 foreign-born residents.

As you can see, foreign-born residents tend to cluster in Rome and Florence, as well as major cities of the north, including Bologna, Milan, and Turin. The Adriatic coast is also well represented.

Next, let’s divide the map into country-of-origin-specific submaps, using six large communities that are often mentioned when discussing immigration in Italy. The general pattern holds, but you can clearly see differences between nationalities.

Romanians like Rome far more than Moroccans do. Albanians have several foci in Italy, but they love the Adriatic coast (understandably) more than anyone else. The Ukrainians choose Naples surprisingly often.

The Chinese cluster in Tuscany is not Florence, by the way. It’s Prato. The Chinese, for the most part, have moved to Milan and Prato.

So far, we’ve dealt in absolute numbers. A dot gave you 250 foreign-born residents (or 150 for nationality-specific maps). That’s useful, but it falls a bit short because a large city could have a relatively small foreign population percentage-wise, yet the sheer number would still produce a cluster of many dots.

To have the full picture, let’s take a different angle: the percentage of residents born abroad. As I said, the national average is 11.8%. So in the map below, you’ll see anything below that number as a light shade of blue, and anything above in darker shades.

This still shows the huge gap between north and south. Immigrants overwhelmingly favor the north, where the jobs are. But it puts things in perspective, showing a less dramatic split than the headcount map, where the south was mostly empty.

Finally, we have the map of which non-Italian citizenship is most prominent in each comune. Notice again how the Chinese dominate Prato and the Ukrainians dominate Naples. Romania dominates in more than half the Italian comuni.

Where Romanians live in Italy

Speaking of Romanians, let’s take a closer look at where they tend to live in Italy. The national average for Romanians alone is 1.50%.

I think it’s fair to say that Romanians are almost everywhere, with a presence in 7,681 of 7,896 comuni. The largest numbers of Romanians are in Rome (59,401) and Turin (34,353).

The most Romanian comuni are:

1. Pragelato, Turin, 18.44% (130 of 705)

2. Rivarone, Alessandria, 14.39% (57 of 396)

3. Borgoratto Mormorolo, Pavia, 14.07% (56 of 398)

4. San Sebastiano Curone, Alessandria, 13.44% (73 of 543)

5. Rovescala, Pavia, 13.24% (108 of 816)

Pragelato is an Alpine village of 705 people in the Val Chisone that hosted every Nordic skiing event at the 2006 Winter Olympics. More than one in six of its residents were born in Romania.

The most Romanian provinces, percentage-wise, are:

1. Viterbo, 3.39% (10,435 of 307,405)

2. Turin, 3.28% (72,233 of 2,204,276)

3. Arezzo, 3.22% (10,745 of 333,240)

4. Terni, 2.95% (6,358 of 215,285)

5. Rome, 2.90% (122,492 of 4,222,648)

Lowest provinces: Naples 0.258% (7,639), Cagliari 0.330% (1,378), Bari 0.345% (4,213), Sud Sardegna 0.346% (1,141), and Palermo 0.452% (5,413).

Where Albanians live in Italy

Albanians are the Balkan precursors to Romanians. They arrived in Italy in droves in the 90s, ten or so years before Romanians did. The national average for Albanians is 0.98%.

The most Albanian comuni by share are:

1. Lucinasco, Imperia, 16.72% (51 of 305)

2. Castelcovati, Brescia, 15.26% (1,077 of 7,059)

3. Caravonica, Imperia, 12.80% (32 of 250)

4. Tremosine sul Garda, Brescia, 11.65% (244 of 2,094)

5. Santa Maria della Versa, Pavia, 11.45% (261 of 2,279)

And the most Albanian provinces are:

1. Pistoia, 4.11% (11,912 of 289,925)

2. Savona, 2.84% (7,595 of 267,064)

3. Rimini, 2.70% (9,196 of 340,376)

4. Prato, 2.70% (7,003 of 259,657)

5. Asti, 2.66% (5,516 of 207,203)

Lowest provinces: Sud Sardegna 0.022% (72), Oristano 0.027% (40), Nuoro 0.039% (76), Trapani 0.042% (171), Enna 0.044% (67).

Where Moroccans live in Italy

The Moroccan-born represent 0.86% of the national population. The dark spot just south of the center is in the Abruzzo province of L’Aquila, specifically the Piana del Fucino, which is known as l’orto d’Italia (the vegetable garden of Italy). Moroccans have been working those fields for decades. Often exploited.

The most Moroccan comuni by share are:

1. Luco dei Marsi, L’Aquila, 14.77% (869 of 5,884)

2. Gioia dei Marsi, L’Aquila, 12.03% (203 of 1,688)

3. Strevi, Alessandria, 11.82% (229 of 1,937)

4. Sermide e Felonica, Mantua, 11.34% (796 of 7,018)

5. Bastia Mondovì, Cuneo, 11.29% (71 of 629)

In terms of sheer headcount, the top five are Turin 19,741, Milan 9,202, Genoa 6,395, Rome 5,663, and Bologna 4,218. Turin is much smaller than Milan, and yet it has double the number of Moroccans.

The most Moroccan provinces by share are:

1. Modena, 2.54% (17,981 of 708,340)

2. Rovigo, 2.51% (5,693 of 227,134)

3. Vercelli, 2.48% (4,121 of 165,910)

4. Mantua, 2.20% (8,984 of 407,744)

5. Alessandria, 2.11% (8,590 of 407,202)

Lowest provinces: Trieste 0.148% (336), Cagliari 0.160% (666), Catania 0.170% (1,816), Bari 0.190% (2,321), and Palermo 0.197% (2,358).

Where South Americans live in Italy

For South Americans, Germans, Britons, and Americans, I’m using both birthplace data and citizenship. That’s because Italy sent millions of people to those countries. The gap between the two might be instructive.

Here is South America:

If we take the ratio between the two values, split by country of origin within South America, an obvious pattern emerges: Argentina 6.2 born for every citizen, Uruguay 5.6, Venezuela 4.0, Chile 3.8, Brazil 2.7. Yet Ecuador 1.4, Peru 1.3, and Bolivia 1.3.

My reading, remembering that foreign citizens get erased from the stats when they obtain Italian citizenship, is that the countries of the diaspora are all at the top of the ratio. So a lot of the, say, Argentinian-born in Italy are descendants of Italians coming home. People born in Bolivia who now live in Italy are more likely to be new immigrants with no prior ties to Italy.

Most South American comuni, by share (the national average is 1.11%):

1. Longobardi, Cosenza, 28.43% (873 of 3,071)

2. Fiumefreddo Bruzio, Cosenza, 27.84% (1,072 of 3,851)

3. San Lucido, Cosenza, 22.08% (1,636 of 7,411)

4. Castel di Lucio, Messina, 21.46% (302 of 1,407)

5. Nicotera, Vibo Valentia, 20.78% (1,489 of 7,167)

And the most South American provinces are:

1. Genoa, 3.77% (30,870 of 818,812)

2. Milan, 2.78% (90,410 of 3,246,455)

3. Imperia, 2.21% (4,631 of 209,348)

4. Campobasso, 2.15% (4,492 of 209,059)

5. Vibo Valentia, 2.05% (3,093 of 150,516)

Lowest provinces: Barletta-Andria-Trani 0.189% (712), Foggia 0.202% (1,190), Crotone 0.209% (339), Brindisi 0.220% (827), and Taranto 0.223% (1,230). All in Apulia, except Crotone, which is in Calabria.

Where Germans live in Italy

Now that we have discussed immigrants, let’s discuss expats. That’s a joke, of course. If you move to Italy, you’re an immigrant whether you are Peruvian or German. It’s just that the de facto tendency is to call the former immigrants and the latter expats.

In the maps below, the cluster in South Tyrol shouldn’t surprise anyone. That area of the country is culturally very German, and over half the population already speaks the language. It’s a smooth transition for someone coming from Germany.

The national average for German-born is 0.35% (205,965 people).

Top 5 comuni by share

1. Zoppè di Cadore, Belluno, 24.44% (44 of 180)

2. Val di Zoldo, Belluno, 15.65% (428 of 2,735)

3. Terravecchia, Cosenza, 9.57% (54 of 564)

4. Scala Coeli, Cosenza, 7.80% (59 of 756)

5. Igliano, Cuneo, 7.69% (5 of 65)

Top 5 comuni by headcount

1. Rome, 5,595 (0.20%)

2. Milan, 3,493 (0.26%)

3. Corigliano-Rossano, 2,010 (2.70%)

4. Turin, 1,620 (0.19%)

5. Bolzano, 1,257 (1.18%)

Top 5 provinces by share

• Agrigento, 1.91% (7,812 of 408,401)

• Enna, 1.70% (2,591 of 152,544)

• Bolzano, 1.46% (7,864 of 539,679)

• Cosenza, 1.18% (7,896 of 669,535)

• Crotone, 1.10% (1,773 of 161,898)

Lowest provinces: Rovigo 0.10% (223), Padua 0.14% (1,275), Bergamo 0.14% (1,560), and Sondrio 0.14% (256).

Where Britons live in Italy

The national average for UK-born residents is 0.117% (68,938 people).

Top 5 comuni by share

1. Fosciandora, Lucca, 7.04% (39 of 554)

2. Armo, Imperia, 6.72% (8 of 119)

3. Acquaviva Platani, Caltanissetta, 6.68% (56 of 838)

4. Palombaro, Chieti, 6.68% (63 of 943)

5. Molini di Triora, Imperia, 6.53% (40 of 613)

Top 5 comuni by headcount

1. Rome, 5,006 (0.18%)

2. Milan, 3,502 (0.26%)

3. Turin, 925 (0.11%)

4. Florence, 844 (0.23%)

5. Bologna, 560 (0.14%)

Top 5 provinces by share

1. Lucca, 0.432% (1,646 of 381,390)

2. Avellino, 0.359% (1,419 of 395,072)

3. Imperia, 0.320% (670 of 209,348)

4. Agrigento, 0.309% (1,264 of 408,401)

5. Frosinone, 0.306% (1,416 of 462,661)

Lowest provinces: Barletta-Andria-Trani 0.027% (101), Rovigo 0.033% (76), Crotone 0.038% (62), and Taranto 0.041% (227).

Where Americans live in Italy

The national average for US-born residents is 0.094% (55,658 people).

Top 5 comuni by share

1. Massimeno, Trento, 3.73% (5 of 134)

2. Palermiti, Catanzaro, 3.55% (37 of 1,041)

3. Roccafiorita, Messina, 3.12% (5 of 160)

4. Pizzone, Isernia, 3.00% (9 of 300)

5. Sassinoro, Benevento, 2.60% (16 of 615)

Top 5 comuni by headcount

1. Rome, 5,445 (0.20%)

2. Milan, 3,115 (0.23%)

3. Florence, 1,584 (0.44%)

4. Turin, 753 (0.09%)

5. Bologna, 699 (0.18%)

Top 5 provinces by share

1. Isernia, 0.269% (212 of 78,755)

2. Florence, 0.247% (2,442 of 988,068)

3. Lucca, 0.242% (924 of 381,390)

4. Palermo, 0.231% (2,767 of 1,198,738)

5. Avellino, 0.219% (866 of 395,072)

Lowest provinces: Nuoro 0.017% (34), Mantua 0.021% (86), Sud Sardegna 0.023% (75), and Taranto 0.028% (153).

Where the Dutch live in Italy

The national average for Dutch-born is 0.024% (14,226 people).

Top 5 comuni by share

1. Airole, Imperia, 10.03% (37 of 369)

2. Olmo Gentile, Asti, 4.41% (3 of 68)

3. Mombarcaro, Cuneo, 4.21% (11 of 261)

4. Castelletto d’Erro, Alessandria, 3.15% (4 of 127)

5. Denice, Alessandria, 3.09% (5 of 162)

Top 5 comuni by headcount

1. Rome, 811 (0.03%)

2. Milan, 597 (0.04%)

3. Florence, 210 (0.06%)

4. Turin, 151 (0.02%)

5. Genoa, 121 (0.02%)

Top 5 provinces by share

1. Imperia, 0.131% (275 of 209,348)

2. Sud Sardegna, 0.069% (226 of 329,556)

3. Savona, 0.068% (181 of 267,064)

4. Pesaro e Urbino, 0.062% (216 of 349,558)

5. Varese, 0.058% (515 of 882,592)

Lowest provinces: Barletta-Andria-Trani 0.003% (12), Rovigo 0.004% (9), Potenza 0.004% (15), and Frosinone 0.005% (21).

The provinces with the smallest share of immigrants

If you want to really mingle with the locals and feel like a rare immigrant there, these are the provinces with the smallest share of immigrants:

1. Sud Sardegna, 3.53% (11,631 of 329,556)

2. Barletta-Andria-Trani, 3.85% (14,528 of 377,093)

3. Oristano, 4.19% (6,207 of 148,005)

4. Taranto, 4.46% (24,531 of 550,436)

5. Palermo, 4.56% (54,705 of 1,198,738)

6. Nuoro, 5.05% (9,872 of 195,331)

7. Catania, 5.08% (54,412 of 1,070,169)

8. Naples, 5.10% (151,174 of 2,963,633)

9. Cagliari, 5.24% (21,871 of 417,532)

10. Bari, 5.47% (66,760 of 1,219,545)

All in the south. It’s worth noting that the list would look different if we went by citizenship instead of foreign-born. I chose the latter as it’s a better proxy for the true immigrant count, since citizenship undercounts it once people naturalize, as already discussed.

And there are even five comuni with no foreign-born residents at all. All tiny:

1. Pagnona, Lecco, 310 residents

2. Castelverrino, Isernia, 89

3. Celle di Macra, Cuneo, 88

4. Isasca, Cuneo, 67

5. Morterone, Lecco, 32

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A Substack bestseller, Italy with Antonio offers honest guides for moving to, traveling in, and understanding Italy from a native Italian. Three articles a week, with deeper resources for paid members (including the print-ready PDF and ePub downloads of this article). Join over 2,000 subscribers!

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Earlier this week I published 15 Things I Only Started Loving About Italy After I Left. My audience is made up of people who love Italy, so it emphatically resonated with my readers. It validated their feelings for the country and added some arguments in its favor.

This counterpart article will likely be less popular. It is my job, however, to present a balanced picture of Italy that goes beyond the postcard. Once you know the real Italy, you’re well informed and can make decisions about it.

Doing so requires disclosing not just what Italy does best but also what it gets wrong. And as amazing as Italy is, it does have genuine flaws. These might be deficiencies that don’t affect you personally or compromises you will accept for its upside. But here they are.

The lens through which I view these factors is my lived experience in Ireland (for a couple of years), the US (just a few months), and Canada (for twenty years).

As per my previous, positive version of this article, the order is somewhat arbitrary. They are presented in the order they popped into my head.

1. Bureaucracy. Italy is well known for having Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It’s not something that affects you on a daily basis, but when it does, it can ruin your entire day or week and make you waste a lot of time.

Here is a made-up example that is quite representative. You need to submit a form, but you can’t do so online. You print it and take it with you to city hall. You wait in line for 30 minutes and then proceed to speak with the clerk.

They tell you a marca da bollo (a revenue stamp) is needed for this. You go to a tabaccheria (tobacconist) to get one. You come back, line up some more, and now they tell you that for this type of document, you need to set up an appointment.

They could have told you the first time, but no.

So you set up the appointment. You show up on time, still somehow wait, and when it’s finally your turn, with the right form, filled in, signed, and with a marca da bollo, you’re told they are the wrong sportello (service window). Sorry, they don’t handle this form.

Instead, they send you somewhere else. You go there another day and, you guessed it, they tell you it’s not them who handles that, and they try to send you back to the very first sportello you went to initially.

Eventually you speak about this with Marcello, who is the second cousin of an assessore (councilman at the municipality), and he sends you to Teresa at that first sportello, who you already spoke to. This time, she’s ready to assist you.

Two weeks in, four trips, and a bottle of wine to Marcello later, you got it done. The nightmare will wait patiently for the next time you need something else done.

By the way, this is the experience if you are a native speaker. Now imagine doing it in broken Italian with people who don’t speak a word of English.

2. Wages. Jobs outside of major cities like Rome and Milan are quite spotty in Italy. Unemployment is no longer the headline number it once was: nationally it’s around 5.8%, close to a historic low. The real tell is how few people work at all. Italy’s employment rate for 20- 64-year-olds is 67.6%, the lowest in the EU against an EU average of 76.1%, and in Calabria and Campania fewer than half of working-age adults have a job.

But the real problem is wages. Even if you find a job, expect it to pay very little compared to the cost of living. Milan might give you a generous salary of 1,700 euros, and a two-room apartment in a semi-central neighbourhood will eat most of it. Of course, the maglia nera (last place, literally the black jersey) for wages still goes to the south, where the cost of living is cheaper, but there is a limit to the purchasing power of 1,200 euros per month.

This is one of the key reasons why, at the time, sensing that the Italian economy was headed in the wrong direction, I decided to leave Italy. Somebody had just offered me, under the table, a ridiculous 25 euros a day to teach some Java courses (”you know, you are still a student”). The very first job I got in Ireland paid me 25 euros an hour, with benefits, and that was super early in my career.

Wages in Italy are not just stagnant. Adjusted for inflation, they are lower than they were in 1990, which makes Italy the only country in the EU where real wages have gone backwards over that stretch. Italians are genuinely getting paid less than when the Berlin Wall came down.

With labour so cheap, you might think there are business opportunities there. Not so fast. What they get is little, but as an employer, you’re paying through the nose, with each employee costing you close to double what they take home.

3. The tax wedge. The previous point leads us straight to il cuneo fiscale (the tax wedge). For a single average earner, taxes and social contributions swallow 45.8% of what it costs to employ them, the fifth highest in the OECD. At the margin, it’s far worse: 72.8% of any increase, the highest in the OECD. The state is a silent partner who won’t lift a finger and essentially appropriates half your income.

Which means that many try to evade taxes. For every 100 euros of income tax owed by the self-employed and small businesses, an estimated 61.50 never arrives. This, in turn, requires higher taxes to make up the gap.

As someone ambitious and entrepreneurial, I see this as a serious shortcoming crippling the country’s potential.

Plus, this leads to a whole series of annoyances such as places (or taxi drivers) refusing to accept card payments.

4. Tolerance for graffiti and petty crime. Italy has an institutional tolerance for petty crimes that affect our cities. Graffiti is technically illegal but essentially tolerated. Same story with pickpockets. Same with maranza (aggressive young troublemakers) harassing people in public. Parcheggiatori abusivi (unlicensed parking attendants who charge you to park on a public street)? You guessed it, nothing happens to them. It’s maddening.

Here’s a real conversation I had with a couple of Carabinieri (the military police) patrolling a Milan subway station.

• Me: “Just so you know, those people over there are running a three-card monte scam.”

• Them: “And?”

• Me: “Isn’t that illegal?”

• Them: “Yes, but somebody has to report them.”

• Me: “OK, I’ll report them.”

• Them: “No, you need to be a victim of their crime and report it.”

• Me: “OK, I can waste 20 euros.”

• Them: “Yes, but then we’ll arrest you too for gambling in a non-authorized establishment.”

They were annoyed I even asked.

Of course, Italy has more serious crimes to worry about. The mafia is a cancer, particularly in the south of the country. But this tolerance for petty crime never sat right with me, and as a believer in the broken windows theory, I think this has far more sinister repercussions.

5. Merit vs. connections. In Italy, a lot of the jobs (and other services) are still obtained via raccomandazione (a recommendation, in the sense of a word put in for you by someone with pull). In English, the word sounds a lot more benign than it actually is. What happens in practice is that jobs often go to incompetent people related to important people, rather than those who deserve them the most.

On Transparency International’s 2025 index, Italy scores 53 out of 100 and ranks 19th in the EU. In Italy, cosa sai (what you know) counts for less than chi conosci (who you know).

Raccomandazioni are not a scandal here. They are standard operating procedure.

6. No food diversity. In Italy you’ll find plenty of great food. Mostly Italian, however. Outside of the largest cities, your options will be very limited. As much as I love Italian food, I need alternatives for variety. In most of the country, that variety doesn’t exist.

Even sushi places (a relatively recent phenomenon) are generally buffets run by Chinese people. Authentic Japanese restaurants exist but are few and far between (and of course are much more expensive).

7. Italians are always complaining. I’ve said this before: the national sport is complaining (amusingly, I’m doing so myself in this article). Every time I come to Italy, I’m bemused by how miserable everyone is on the surface. I know it’s their shtick, and deep down, they are not that unhappy. But still, it’s a downer for me to see people constantly voicing their disappointment with everything.

8. Italians are envious of success. Italians are also envious of success in a way that, say, Canadians or Americans are not. A little bit of envy is par for the course and very human. But in Italy, it’s taken to another level.

Two lines are fitting here. In a 1982 interview:

“Italians forgive you anything but success.” — Enzo Ferrari

And:

“When an Italian sees a luxury car go past, his first instinct isn’t to want one himself, it’s to slash its tires.” — Indro Montanelli (attributed)

Which leads us to another aspect. Italians are always suspicious of success. It’s always assumed that some shortcut or unfair advantage has been used (and of course, it’s the only thing standing between them and their ability to have the same success).

This also speaks to Italian dietrologia, which is a very conspiracy-led mindset highlighting their distrust of any official narrative.

9. Italians don’t respect the rules. Italians are stereotypically furbi (cunning). In general, they tend to be flexible when it comes to rules (particularly in the south). They cut in line. Litter when the bin is 20 meters away. Feign not seeing their dog pooing on the marciapiede (sidewalk) to avoid picking it up. They drive like lunatics. And so on. It’s actually a small percentage of the population that does all that, but it adds up fast, and it wears down the rest of us civic-minded folks.

10. Italy is very hot in summer. Not much that Italy can do about this, other than installing more AC units, but I personally find Italy unbearably hot in summer. The temperatures are just too high unless you go somewhere inland at very high altitude. This is a plus for some people, but I genuinely struggle with it, so it’s a dislike for me.

I usually go around May and October rather than August to avoid the issue, and this year, even May hit me with 38-degree days in central Italy.

Despite all this, Italy is a wonderful country. It just happens to be a flawed one. Thankfully, if you are moving there as a retiree or remote worker, only some of these will prove to be genuine grievances.

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“Che figata essere italiani!” How cool it is to be Italian!

I sent it to my friend Claudio on WhatsApp a while ago. It wasn’t in response to the discovery of a long-lost ancient Roman basilica in Fano. It wasn’t because of Italy’s recent athletic success in track and field, swimming, and tennis, either.

It was in response to a meme he sent me. Somebody had used AI to animate an anthropomorphic capybara to the sound of a Neapolitan guy flirting with a girl and, amid all the cheesiness and tackiness, destroying the Italian language in the process.

Layers of Italian culture, stereotypes, and localized lived experience, all captured in an untranslatable 15-second clip.

And how fortunate indeed it is to immediately and instinctively get it by virtue of being raised in Italy.

No matter where I am, I’ll always be grateful to be Italian. When I think about it, a smile forms on my face. A bittersweet one, as I left after all.

There was a time when I took Italy too much for granted. I saw the problems clearly. Problems are easy to see. It’s everything else that hides in plain sight. I was unaware of the blessing because it was ambience.

In one of my favorite songs, Both Sides, Now by Joni Mitchell, she moves from illusion to disillusionment, from enchantment to clouds just getting in the way.

She concludes that seeing something from both sides doesn’t amount to certainty.

In my case, the song gets it half right. I don’t have certainties either. But having seen Italy from both sides now, I can observe things that were actually there the whole time, invisible because ordinary, and so easy to take for granted. There is an element of nostalgia, sure, but it’s mostly calibration.

So here are fifteen things I only fully started appreciating once I left. They are not in order of importance. Rather, they’re sorted by the order they popped up in my head.

1. Healthcare. Italian healthcare actually works well. Public healthcare is “free,” if slow, and a much faster private option exists for not much money (think 100 euros for a specialist visit).

There is always a pharmacy not too far away, even at night (the so-called farmacia di turno), and the people behind the counter are actually medically qualified to dispense advice and do so with a palpable sense of care.

I was experiencing some constipation due to dehydration while visiting in May, and a pharmacist spent 30 minutes discussing my medical history and coming up with a plan.

There is a service to talk to a doctor and even receive a visit at home if necessary in the middle of the night (what we used to call Guardia Medica), so that you don’t have to wait for hours at an ER if it isn’t necessary.

Far fewer people are without a GP, though Italy has its own worsening shortage. In parts of Canada, the waitlists run into years. And doctors still do house calls. Perhaps less so than in the past, especially in larger cities. But for large swaths of the country, the old-fashioned house call while you’re sick is still an option.

My late father had a nurse coming to his house to take care of him during his cancer treatments. For free. One time, she came during a storm.

Italian healthcare is not perfect, and there is a north-south gap, but overall it’s much better than in many other countries, including Canada.

2. Art and history everywhere. Italy is chock full of art and history. It’s everywhere. It’s the wallpaper. The background you get so used to seeing that it becomes invisible.

Of course the building you walk past on your way to work was built in 1408. Of course a town of 35,000 people has a magnificent cathedral with important medieval and neoclassical frescoes.

On the whole, Italy is an open-air museum, and you can spend your entire life trying to see all of its art and history. All of its 61 UNESCO World Heritage Sites (more than any other country in the world). And you’ll fail, because 100 years is not enough for that.

3. Socialization over food. Italy really loves food. But it’s not mindless snacking around the clock in isolation. There is a culture of socializing over meals for hours. The meal is the epicenter of social connections and the resulting conversations.

Friends socialize over meals abroad as well, but in Canada at least, dinners are fairly short and often a prequel to an actual event. In Italy, more often than not, that’s the event. Slow is the keyword. Even at restaurants, you won’t be pressured to get out quickly as soon as you’re done eating, the way most North American restaurants tend to.

4. Fruit and vegetables that taste incredible. Speaking of food, it’s remarkable how much better fruit and vegetables taste in Italy, and it’s something I really miss.

The first time I tried strawberries in Canada, I noticed they had a white center instead of red. And they were almost tasteless in comparison. I immediately understood why people put whipped cream on them.

I have a sweet tooth. I readily admit it, but at some point I had to use a packet of Splenda on them because they were not sweet enough. Even tomatoes straight off the vine are sweet enough to be eaten on their own in Italy.

5. Eating out is not a gamble. Italy doesn’t have much variety when it comes to eating out. Few other cuisines are generally available outside of large cities. But the narrow range also applies to quality. It lives in a band that goes from good to exceptional.

Good food is the default mode, so eating out is not a gamble the way it is in Ireland, Canada, or the US (the other three countries I’ve lived in). In general, worst case, the food is still good.

Here in Canada, I have many more options, but the variance in quality is off the charts. You have to be very careful in reading the reviews, because the average restaurant is actually fairly bad (and you’re charged much more for it, but that’s another issue altogether).

6. Coffee as infrastructure. For the most part, in North America we don’t have a coffee culture. We have a coffee-flavored dessert-in-a-cup culture. Bars (i.e., cafes) are everywhere in Italy, and I love the fact that you can walk into any of them for the same ritual, fully understood by every resident.

You approach the barista, have your espresso standing right at the counter, pay your €1.29 (OK, €1.51 in Bolzano), and a minute later you’re out. Make it a $6, 20 fl. oz. iced latte and the twice-a-day ritual no longer survives.

Even at home, coffee is a means to socialize and to see friends. Having someone over for coffee is normal and doesn’t need Outlook calendar invites. It’s a spontaneous tool in the arsenal of making and keeping friends.

7. Pastries everywhere. Every country does pastries. Few make them as well, or make them as available at 7 a.m., as Italy does. Any bar, even an Autogrill service station on the highway, has a selection that in most of the world would take a specialty bakery to match. Pasticcini, little pastries sometimes bought by the tray as a gift when visiting someone, are something UNESCO should take a closer look at.

8. The sagre and feste di paese. This will be my last point about food, I promise, but I really miss Italy’s 20,000+ yearly sagre and feste di paese (town celebrations).

The whole town gets together to party with music, games, and delicious thematic food like porchetta, specific pasta shapes, and other typical dishes.

It’s an event that satisfies your need for company as much as your hunger. If you’re visiting Italy in the summer, don’t deny yourself the experience. Chances are you’ll love it.

9. Walking everywhere. Italy really does have a culture of walking wherever possible. I’ve spoken about this before in my post about Italy being inconvenient. The consequences of being sedentary and no longer walking everywhere have been devastating for my health.

Culturally, here in North America we are much more car-dependent, and in many places it’s genuinely not safe to walk. Of course, you can use a treadmill, go to the gym, or drive to the one spot where people go jogging. But it’s not the same as living in a place where walking is the default assumption.

10. The evening passeggiata. Speaking of walking, I really miss the spontaneous ritual of the evening passeggiata.

Walking in the evening and seeing familiar faces in the piazza (town square). It’s not about exercise, and it’s not about going anywhere in particular. It’s a stroll to get some fresh air, people-watch, window-shop, and feel part of the community.

I have not quite found that feeling outside of Italy.

11. Cheap, fast trains. Italian trains are cheap, fast, and for the most part reliable. It’s an amazing method of transportation to explore most of the country on a budget, and it’s essentially absent in North America.

Coach services like FlixBus and regional buses further extend that range for just a few euros. I wish it were available in Canada, as I miss seeing the landscape fly by or escaping to a nearby city when bored.

12. Cheap flights to Europe. Along the same lines, it’s amazing how accessible Europe is from Italy thanks to cheap airlines à la Ryanair. I pay more in gas to drive to Vancouver, a city in my own province, than someone living in Italy pays to fly to Copenhagen.

I wish I had visited far more European capitals while I had the chance to do it on the cheap. Nothing genuinely comparable exists in Canada. Flights within the same province are often several times the cost of a flight between Milan and London.

13. Openness to chat with strangers. Italians are friendly and chatty people (provided you speak Italian). It can come across as intrusive and too inquisitive, shocking even. Yet in Italy it’s normal, and I wish it were part of my daily experience in Canada as well. I even made friends that way. Those little spontaneous encounters generally enrich your day, and I never thought much of them growing up in Italy.

14. Dialects and micro-cultures within a country. Italy is one country, but it’s really a fusion of local micro-cultures with their own dialects and traditions. This creates a deeply rooted diversity that gives you endless opportunities to explore different peoples, languages, music, foods, and cultural practices.

15. Working to live, not living to work. La dolce vita is a myth. What is true, however, is the stereotype that Italians tend to embrace a lifestyle with a much better work-life balance. Italians genuinely work to live, not live to work. Milan excluded. There, it’s much closer to the workaholic culture we have in North America. Amusingly, I’ve acquired that workaholic ethos myself, but I wish I were much more stereotypically Italian in this respect. The slow life has many health benefits.

I realize six out of 15 are about food. In Italy, it is that important. Also, there is a small chance it’s just me being a fat ass. But then again, no; it’s definitely Italy.

Perhaps I should write the counterpart to this and tell you the things Italy gets wrong and I don’t really miss at all. Even an extraordinary place like Italy isn’t without its many flaws.

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“You say Italians complain a lot. Is there a place where they are happy?” I jokingly replied to my inquiring fiancée: “Yeah, outside of Italy. On vacation.” But it got me thinking about the real answer. I spend my evenings knee-deep in Istat data, and I’ve seen some indicators that could give us conclusive answers.

So I started investigating, focusing on specific indexes that either flat-out address happiness or give us adjacent information such as perceived safety, which could be useful for someone considering a move to Italy.

I generated eight “heat maps” (technically, choropleths) to visualize my findings. All data is based on Istat 2024 census figures.

And yes, I struggled not to title this “Fear and Loathing in Italy.” It was not easy, but I managed.

The happiness maps of Italy

Let’s start with the most direct one: the map of happiness in Italy. The map expresses what percentage of the local population feels that their life is an 8-10 out of 10. In other words, what percentage is genuinely satisfied with their lives. Darker is better.

Overall, the national satisfaction rate is at 53.8%, up from 52.0% back in 2022.

What’s remarkable is that, as you can see, it’s not a clean north-south split. The top provinces in terms of life satisfaction are: Bolzano, Enna, Trento, Sondrio, Crotone. Three alpine northern provinces and two extreme southern ones. And the lowest life satisfaction goes to Naples, also in the south.

Istat split the data by gender, so I poked at it and came up with the same map split by gender. Here’s the men’s satisfaction rate:

And here is the women’s:

Before I pull any numbers, it’s pretty obvious from the maps that men have higher life satisfaction than women in Italy. The men’s map has far more dark areas.

Specifically, 55.0% of men reported a high life satisfaction versus 52.8% of women. A small gap, but a gap nevertheless. In only 2 of 107 provinces, women are happier than men: Ragusa (in Sicily) by a margin of 1.4 points and Barletta-Andria-Trani (in Apulia) by a statistically insignificant margin (i.e., 0.03). Matera is effectively a draw. All other 104 provinces go to the men.

The provinces where the gap is most in favor of men are Genoa in Liguria (+4.1), Ascoli Piceno in Marche (+3.9), Lucca in Tuscany, La Spezia in Liguria, and Siena in Tuscany (all at +3.8). Rich, center-north provinces, not the poor south, as we might have conjectured.

The family, friends, and neighbors maps

Next, let’s take a look at social network support (you know, the offline kind). Respondents on the census were asked if they have relatives to rely on in case of need.

Aside from Caserta in Campania and Messina in Sicily, the south absolutely dominates on this metric, validating the stereotypes.

The national record (93.6%) belongs to Crotone (in Calabria), one of the poorest provinces in the country.

After family, let’s look at friends.

The split north-south doesn’t materially change. At the top of the chart, we have Nuoro in Sardinia (84.3%), and at the bottom we find Rovigo in Veneto (67.2%).

Finally, let’s look at the percentage of people who can rely on neighbors.

Crotone is at the top again (84.1%), and Rovigo is once again dead last (62.3%). The south continues to have a strong performance on social connections, but it’s clearly not exclusive to them, as shown by the Alpine provinces.

Crime and safety perception

It’s hard to be happy or at peace if you’re scared for your life. So the next two maps are about crime in Italy. Not objective crime, which I already mapped before, but rather the perception of crime and safety.

This is the map of the percentage of people who feel safe walking alone at night.

Again, the south (Sardinia very much included) and the Alpine provinces are standouts.

In fact:

• Best: Enna 85.0%. Then Sondrio 80.2%, Crotone 79.6%, Valle d’Aosta 79.4%, Nuoro 79.4%.

• Worst: Prato 47.9%. Then Milan 49.6%, Verona 51.4%, Monza e Brianza 52.7%, Rome 52.7%.

Sadly, the gender gap is massive here. At the national level, 72.4% of men feel safe walking alone after dark. Only 51.5% of women do. A 20.8-point gap, which is widest in the Monza e Brianza province at 28.1 points.

Next, the overall perceived crime risk. Note that in the case of this chart, lighter is better.

Again, Alpine areas and the south are positive standouts. However, Campania and most of Apulia are largely excluded.

Specifically:

• Best, meaning least fear: Oristano 3.7%. Then Nuoro 4.8%, Sondrio 5.6%, Enna 5.7%, Valle d’Aosta 5.8%.

• Worst: Naples 46.3%. Then Rome 37.1%, Milan 36.3%, Prato 36.2%, Barletta-Andria-Trani 31.5%.

Prato is an interesting anomaly. A small province in Tuscany that happens to have the worst perception of safety at night and the fourth-worst perception of crime overall.

More interesting facts

In the process of collecting and analyzing this data, I came across some interesting insights and outliers. I’m presenting them here in more or less random order.

Correlation shows how two variables move together. For example, how ice cream sales grow in relation to rising temperatures. We can use it here to measure the relationship between each of the five variables and the overall life satisfaction reported by each province. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but we can still use it as an imperfect proxy of how much each of these factors affects happiness in Italy. 1 means total correlation. -1 means inverse correlation.

The correlations with life satisfaction, from best to worst, are friends (0.71), relatives (0.65), neighbors (0.62), perceived safety after dark (0.59), and fear of crime (-0.54). The inversion for the last indicator is normal since we are not measuring a positive, but rather a negative. The more crime you fear, the less happy you are.

Interestingly, friends beat family when it comes to affecting happiness, something intuitive in my experience, but still contrary to the Italian stereotype. (I realize, taken out of context, “friends beat family” sounds like a local newspaper headline.)

Looking at the extremes of the overall life satisfaction data, we find that the places with the most 10-out-of-10 responders are: Enna (24.2%), Vibo Valentia (21.2%), Nuoro (20.6%), and Agrigento (19.5%). The worst provinces for this are Bologna and Ravenna at 9.3%. People in Emilia Romagna are surprisingly unenthusiastic.

In terms of people scoring their happiness 5 or below, Cagliari (14.7%), Genoa (14.3%) and Ferrara (14.1%) take the podium for having the most negative Nancys.

On average, people living in a province tend to be happier than those living in the capoluogo (the capital city) of that province. For example, Turin’s city is at 49.1% on the life satisfaction indicator compared with 52.5% for its own province.

All grandi comuni (big municipalities) are charted below. As you can see, 23 out of 27 have the province outperforming the city.

Interestingly, women report more support than men on two of the three social maps. Yet, despite being better connected, they are less satisfied. Perhaps because of their much worse view of crime. Or because they are slightly behind on the friends one, which strongly correlates with overall happiness.

Finally, I noticed some outliers in terms of shifts from the 2022 data. The biggest improvers in terms of happiness are Isernia (+7.3), Salerno (+6.3), Avellino (+6.1), Trapani (+5.7), and Catanzaro (+5.5). All in the south!

The provinces with the biggest drop were Grosseto (−3.1), Ragusa (−2.9), and Caserta (−1.8).

Only 13 of 107 provinces went down at all. Italy is getting happier almost across the board. Grosseto and Ragusa fell the furthest, but both started above the national average, so they regressed to the mean rather than sinking further.

Caserta is the real exception. It was already the second-worst province for life satisfaction, and it dropped further.

So, what does this mean for you?

If you plan to visit Italy, this has essentially no impact on you. But if you plan to move there, you should at least consider these maps.

You know yourself best and what you value the most, but moving to a province where people are generally happier than average has its benefits.

Or maybe you had a traumatic experience in the past, and moving to a place where people feel safe at night is a better indicator than overall reported happiness.

I give you the data and the fun facts; you do what you will with it. Ambasciator non porta pena (don’t shoot the messenger).

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When people ask me where to move to Italy, I start with probing questions to understand who they are.

Because Italy has everything. You want the sea? Check. Mountains? Check. Isolation? Check. Bustling metropolis? Check. Cold weather? No problem. Hot weather? As much as you want.

So it’s highly individualized work to match the places in Italy with a client’s lifestyle and personality.

Still, for most people, the solution ends up fitting the profile of città di provincia. Places that are neither too big nor too small. Too big and your experience becomes too impersonal. You lose much of the Italian lifestyle appeal, including the person behind the bar counter who knows your order and casually flirts with you. Not to mention traffic and parking challenges. Too small and you start missing key services and entire afternoons, as you’ll need to day-trip to an actual city an hour away to get them.

The framework I devised to find said places is not overly strict. In fact, in some regions it finds too many eligible towns, and we have to apply more ad-hoc filters to make it manageable.

Not so with Calabria. It has 404 comuni, and even being a bit lax on the rules (more on this soon), only four make the cut. Welcome to the south.

Calabria is a stunning region, but its problems, including spotty services, are very real. So I won’t lie to you and present you with a list of 15 postcard-perfect places, which Calabria has in spades. Instead, I’ll be (mostly) loyal to the approach we’ve taken across regions and surface the four towns that are actually workable for a resident who wants to live in Calabria without too many compromises.

Gun to my head telling me to live in Calabria, I would choose one of these four. And yes, we’ll address the elephant in the room, though it won’t be a filter.

What Calabria is actually like to live in

As mentioned, Calabria has 404 comuni (municipalities). They are spread across five provinces: Cosenza (150 comuni), Catanzaro (80), Vibo Valentia (50), Crotone (27), and the metropolitan city of Reggio Calabria (97).

Per Istat, the population is 1,834,646 as of the end of 2024. What’s remarkable is that its population has fallen every single year for over a decade.

The Il Sole 24 Ore quality of life index for 2025 puts all five Calabrian provinces in the bottom sixteen.

Catanzaro is the least bad at 92nd. Reggio Calabria is 107th of 107, dead last, for the second year in a row.

If you drill down and look at the economic indicators, the situation is even more critical than the rankings would suggest. The record for lowest average employee pay in Italy belongs to Vibo Valentia, at a staggering €13,300 a year. Almost one third of Milan’s average.

The same province also holds the record for the slowest civil courts. The national average has proceedings conclude in over 345 days (already a very lengthy process). In the province of Vibo Valentia, they take about three times as long. That’s a preview of Calabria’s efficiency problem when dealing with public institutions.

Calabria has great Mediterranean weather. Its capital, Catanzaro, has remarkably mild winters, thanks to its latitude and location between two seas. In summer, the region gets properly hot as you’d expect from an area bordering Sicily. (That said, pick a place at altitude and your winters will be cold even in Calabria.)

My personal read of Calabria is that there is a large gap between visiting on vacation and actually living there. Perhaps more than anywhere else in the country.

Calabria is also home of the ’Ndrangheta, the most powerful mafia in the world. They run the show here. This has surprisingly little direct crime impact for most expats, and a huge impact for businesses and at the administration level, with the results we’ve already partially highlighted. Not a reason to skip Calabria, but be aware.

More bad news, I’m afraid, but Calabria also has the worst seismic risk profile of any region in the country. The entirety of the Reggio Calabria province is under Zone 1, the highest risk classification possible.

This is not a theoretical risk. In 1908, a massive earthquake (7.1-7.5 on the Richter scale) hit the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria in the south of Italy (where the mainland almost touches Sicily). It remains, to date, the biggest natural disaster in Europe, killing an estimated 80,000 people.

If you do buy here, the region publishes seismic microzonation studies by comune. Read the one for the comune you’re considering and potentially budget for a structural engineer.

Regarding the language, assume you’ll need Italian. You’re not going to understand the local dialect for a long time, and that’s okay. As long as you know Italian, you’ll be able to communicate. Just don’t expect English, not even the basics.

And yes, Calabria is also beautiful: Blue Flag beaches, incredible food (a dream, if you love spicy food), friendly locals, Catholic traditions, art, history, and so on. I’m not dissing Calabria. It’s a mix of extreme pros and cons.

Two of my Italian-language students from Ontario bought a cheap house here on a whim. It isn't even on the coast, but somewhat inland, and yet they're extremely happy with their choice, their neighbors, and the limoncello they get to make from all the lemon trees on their land.

The 7% tax and shaky healthcare

Speaking of pros, as a region of the south, Calabria qualifies for the flat 7% tax regime for ten years. So any comune of 30,000 people or fewer qualifies for a pretty sweet deal for retirees.

Here is the catch. On Il Sole 24 Ore’s 2025 index, Calabria is the worst region for quality of life for senior citizens (65+). Reggio Calabria is the weakest of them at 105th out of 107. Vibo Valentia is 104th, Crotone 102nd, Cosenza 98th. Only Catanzaro places a bit better at 69th, and that is still the bottom half of the table.

Part of that story is the healthcare performance of the region. Every year the Ministry of Health scores each region from zero to 100 on prevention, hospital care, and district care. Calabria scored 77 on hospital care, 66 on prevention, and 52 on district care. The passing score is 60 across the board, and Calabria is the only region in Italy to fail.

Note that the hospital care score is actually remarkably decent for the south. Still, healthcare challenges obviously exist, as evidenced by the low district care score and the percentage of people seeking hospital care elsewhere.

District care means GPs, home care, chronic disease management, and community services. The staff that truly matters to a senior citizen daily.

The regional trauma network is built on eleven points, which leaves Piana di Gioia Tauro without a hospital capable of serving the 170K people in the area, and improvements there have been announced, redesigned, and ultimately delayed for years. So even access to a nearby ER is not a given.

The good news is that the towns that survive our framework all have an ER nearby, and that should particularly matter for those of you who are interested in the 7% tax deal. But the ER is for the day something goes wrong. District care is for the other 364 days, and it is the single thing Calabria is measurably worst in the country at.

Applying the filter to Calabria

The population filter does a lot of the heavy lifting for us. The 15,000 to 100,000 band leaves only 17 comuni out of 404.

The seismic filter halves the current pool. Eight comuni remain after removing those in Zone 1. The filter removed some major candidates, including Lamezia Terme, Cosenza, and Vibo Valentia.

All eight survivors shortlisted so far are in Zone 2. There are no Zone 3 or 4 comuni in Calabria.

The stability filter, in a region depopulating fast, leaves us down to only two comuni. I don’t want you to have to choose among two towns, so I’m relaxing one filter. I’m setting the depopulation to 7%, which is roughly the region’s rate, instead of the standard 5% we’ve been using. So for Calabria, the filter ensures depopulation at a rate lower than the region’s average.

That leaves us with the four towns below that don’t introduce any major compromises.

The candidates

1. Corigliano-Rossano

Corigliano-Rossano is the third-largest comune in Calabria, yet it’s virtually unknown outside the region. It was formed in 2018 when the comuni of Corigliano and Rossano merged.

It meets all the requirements of our filters with ease: a hospital with an ER, high schools, several grocery stores, Zone 2, and a depopulation rate that is essentially stable by Calabrian standards.

Plus, it’s well positioned geographically. You have a train station in town and 30 km of Ionian coast.

The real estate is €633 per square meter against a national average above €2,000. That’s €82K for a 1,400 sq ft / 130 sq m house. It’s one of the cheapest places where you can buy and still have access to services.

Opt for Rossano’s centro storico if you care about beauty and can live with stairs, humidity, and the need for a car. Buy on the flat for walkable access to amenities like the supermarket or the train station.

The coast empties outside the summer months, so rent there for a winter before you commit to buying.

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If you are a tourist visiting Italy, airports are not really something you need to worry about. You’ll fly into a major airport like Rome or Milan and handle the rest via public transportation or rental car.

However, if you plan to move to Italy, the availability of nearby airports matters a great deal when picking a town. Airports are no longer interchangeable to you.

They determine whether “exploring Europe” is a spontaneous weekend activity or a long journey that requires time and preparation. They determine whether your family can easily come to visit you or if it takes a flight, a taxi, four hours of train, and a regional bus that doesn’t run on Sundays. They even determine if winter feels isolated or well connected to the rest of the world.

You can certainly renovate the farmhouse. Even add a much-needed AC unit. But you can’t move the runway. Location, location, location is a business mantra, but it applies here as well.

To help you assess all that, I generated the map below, which includes the main airports in Italy. 32 of them, across three tiers, from intercontinental gateways to the tiny regional ones that are mostly seasonal.

I left out a few very minor or cargo-only airports as they wouldn’t affect your relocation decision one way or another. (If you’re curious: Bolzano, Foggia, Parma, Cuneo, Brescia, Taranto, Grosseto, and the tiny island ones in Elba, Lampedusa and Pantelleria.)

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In Italy, soccer is religion. It’s hard to understand how much it shapes the country and public discourse if you didn’t grow up there.

When asked what they aspire to be, most Italian boys respond that they want to become soccer players.

Boys, regardless of inclination, will play soccer with their friends. I contracted osteomyelitis at the hospital as a newborn. I wasn’t supposed to live. I lived. Doctors didn’t think I would ever walk. I walked. But my knee and leg have hurt all my life, and even I played soccer. I wasn’t particularly good at it because of physical limitations, but, chubby and limping, I still played.

The old men at the bar reading the newspaper are often reading a pink one. Don’t mistake it for a sign of progressiveness. What they are reading is La Gazzetta dello Sport, a sports daily newspaper which has a heavy focus on soccer.

Italians adopt various forms of national gambling that are more or less socially acceptable and mainstream. For most of the last century, none was as popular as betting on soccer games with la schedina del Totocalcio, a card for guessing the outcomes of 13 Serie A and B games, Italy’s top two leagues. Fare 13 (literally: doing 13) meant winning a small fortune. It became shorthand for a jackpot, and it’s part of why the number 13 is actually considered lucky in Italy.

Today Italians are still overwhelmingly betting on soccer more than any other sport, but they do so through digital means such as apps on their phone, chasing the modern version of the 13, the multipla (guessing several matches but not necessarily 13).

Soccer is genuinely a big deal in Italy. You can’t go a day without someone mentioning it. Soccer players are worshiped.

A 30-year-old local soccer player started dating and married an 18-year-old girl in my high school. It didn’t cause a scandal in part because an age gap is less frowned upon in Italy, and in part because he was (I believe) a Serie C player. And in a small town, that’s a big deal, and it’s akin to celebrity status.

Baggio, Del Piero, Maldini, Totti, Maradona. They haven’t played in decades, and everybody in Italy still knows who they are.

Maradona is essentially a lay saint in Naples, including murals and shrines that put those of actual saints to shame.

In Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God,” one of the kids asks his brother if he’d rather choose Maradona being acquired by Naples’ soccer team or having sex with his attractive, exhibitionist aunt Patrizia. The teenager, hormones be damned, answers without hesitation that he’d rather have Maradona play for Naples. (Spoiler: in real life he did and won a Scudetto for Naples, the yearly championship in Serie A.)

Italy became bad at soccer

With so much love, attention, and frankly money thrown at soccer in Italy, it’s hard to explain how we became so bad at it.

On March 31, 2026, Italy failed to qualify for the FIFA World Cup by losing to Bosnia and Herzegovina on penalties. The third straight World Cup miss for Italy. No former champion has ever missed three in a row.

We didn’t lose to Brazil. We lost to Bosnia and Herzegovina. For context, Bosnia and Herzegovina was devastated by war just a few decades ago and has a smaller population than Tuscany.

It’s the equivalent of the United States failing to qualify for the Olympic basketball tournament. Or New Zealand’s All Blacks missing the Rugby World Cup. Or India missing the cricket one. Now imagine them doing it three times in a row. It’s genuinely shocking.

Essentially everybody in Italy is complaining about the national team and how badly we are doing in soccer. Get the priest, bad.

Yet, in the sports we underfund and more or less ignore, Italy is absolutely dominating.

Over the past two weeks or so, two European championships took place: the European Aquatics Championships in Paris and the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham.

Across 17 days, Italy won 23 continental titles. As we say in Italy, scusate se è poco (our apologies if it’s too little).

Italy dominates in the pool

In Paris, Sara Curtis, a 19-year-old girl, broke the world record in the 50-meter backstroke. She did it twice, the second time winning the final in an astonishing 26.56 seconds.

Simona Quadarella won the distance freestyle in the 400, 800, and 1,500 meters. Her 400-meter swim broke a European Championship record Federica Pellegrini had held since 2008.

Chiara Pellacani won five diving golds, the first diver ever, male or female, to take five in a single European Championship.

Ginevra Taddeucci won open-water gold in the Seine.

Italy dominates on the track

On the track, in Birmingham, Nadia Battocletti won the 5,000 and the 10,000 meters, the first runner ever to complete that doppietta (double) at two consecutive European Championships. You can watch her 5,000-meter run, in which she is in third place and, at some point, decides to say goodbye to the rest of the field by leaving them all behind.

Larissa Iapichino won the long jump with her opening attempt. 7.00 meters exactly, which made her the first Italian woman to take the outdoor European title in the event. By the way, buon sangue non mente (literally: good blood doesn’t lie), as she is the daughter of two-time world champion Fiona May. She’s trained by her father, a former national-level pole vaulter and long jumper.

And the men won too, in the pool and on the track. Nicolò Martinenghi took the 50 and 100 meters breaststroke. Leonardo Fabbri won the shot put, Gianmarco Tamberi won the high jump, Andy Diaz won the triple jump, and Massimo Stano won the race-walk marathon. Then Scotti, Sito, Soudassi, and Benati stole the 4x400 meters from Britain by 0.03 seconds during the final.

Italy took 43 medals in Paris, more than any other country in the world. It also finished at the top in athletics for the second championship in a row. In total, 23 European golds in 17 days. Most of them by women. Again, scusate se è poco.

Why Italy got bad at soccer

I posted some of these stats in a Substack note, and somebody asked me why Italy, who used to be so good at soccer, is struggling.

Jokingly, I said that we should blame the immigrants (enter the old man yelling at immigrants stereotype). But my theory genuinely has to do with importing foreign talent.

My gut feeling was that Italy has so much money for its league that it just buys the best available talent in the world instead of cultivating the one it has at home.

I’m a data guy, however, and I don’t like to have theories that are not backed by data (even if correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course). So I looked it up, crunched the numbers, and my theory appears to have supporting data.

The irony is that a country that keeps throwing money at a sport is unable to produce a decent team, specifically because of the money.

Foreign players now hold about 63% of all team spots in Serie A. It’s the biggest share out of the big five leagues in Europe.

Back in the 1990s, the Serie A was actually the most closed league in Europe. Close to 90% of players were native Italian.

Regulations changed, and that opened the floodgates. Italian teams sought the best talent they could find around the world, and money ensured they could acquire it.

So a 19-year-old Italian kid in Serie A will now play very little, no matter how talented. Italian under-21s get around 2% of total Serie A minutes, and many will not play at all for the entire season.

Demographically, the Italian league is one of the oldest in Europe. The average age is near 27. Managers are risk-averse and would rather deploy a proven 30-year-old foreign player than a promising teenager who might cost them the match.

In terms of local talent trained in Italy, we rank last among the major nations for money earned selling players. Remember Baggio, Del Piero, Maldini, Totti? We stopped making them.

In the chart above, I placed the foreign share of Serie A players against the World Cup results. The pipeline of young Italian talents simply ran dry, and the results, or lack thereof, eventually showed up.

Of course, money is not the only culprit. There are other technical aspects that are specific to tactics, manager choices, and other factors.

But I contend that Serie A teams have a choice to make each summer: they can spend their money on a finished player dominating the field in some corner of the world, or they can bet on one grown at home. They take the former option most of the time.

The sports with no money

Go back to Paris and Birmingham and notice what those athletes share. Nobody bought them. Little money to invest. No foreign long jumper to import. Italians competing in these sports are all we’ve got, and we must make them as good as possible if we want to win medals.

And constraint tends to agree with Italy. I argued before that our country is usually better for what it lacks than for what it has in excess.

Give a swimming or athletics federation no money and a roster it can fill only with local athletes, and you get Sara Curtis. Give a club a global transfer market and millions to spend, and you get a bench full of foreigners and a native team that loses to Bosnia.

One last thing

If you are moving to Italy, or loving it from a distance, know that soccer is the national nervous system. Maybe one day we’ll learn to fully appreciate all these sports in which Italians shine despite the lack of resources and national support.

For the time being, though, know that when Italy does badly at soccer, the whole country reports that pain.

Right now some of us are celebrating Curtis or getting emotional at watching Battocletti take off.

Just know that at the bar, the old men are still arguing about soccer.

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Every day, busloads of tourists arrive in select towns in Italy to photograph what they see as beautiful and unique.

Cave dwellings in Matera, cone-roofed houses in Alberobello, and spider-like fishing platforms on stilts in the Adriatic Sea are all examples of unintended, must-see attractions.

The people who built them would be completely puzzled by the attention their utilitarian creations draw today.

None of the three were built for aesthetics. They were built to get around a limitation.

So the restriction came first, and the form adapted to it, incidentally creating something beautiful. When the restriction dissolved, what was left was the beauty that attracts tourists today.

Somehow this involves dodging taxes, but we’ll get to that.

The Sassi di Matera: from shame to fame

The houses carved in the rock in Matera are quite picturesque. Their origins, however, are as humble as it gets.

For most of Matera’s 9,000-year history, people lived in the Sassi (the stones) because carving a home in tufo rock was easy and inexpensive.

The result was dwellings with no water and, in more modern times, no proper bathrooms or electricity. Back in the day, they often were shared with the family mule, which didn’t help hygiene.

By 1950, the population living in the caves was dealing with extreme poverty. Malaria even. The infant mortality rate reached peaks of 44%. When politician Palmiro Togliatti visited, he called them la vergogna nazionale (the national shame). And the then Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi remarked that people living there could not go on living as animals.

Two years later, a special law was passed that forced the evacuation of roughly 15,000 people to accommodation on the nearby plain. The doors were sealed, and the Sassi sat quietly for thirty years.

Eventually the revival, including modern amenities, arrived. UNESCO listed them in 1993, Matera was named a European Capital of Culture for 2019, and the disgrace became the reason most people bother visiting Basilicata.

Today you can book a cave in the Sasso Barisano district and pay €200-€400 per night for the experience and the mule’s old spot.

Matera’s history is one of struggle and the incredible beauty that emerged from it.

The next town’s beauty came out of deception.

Alberobello and the trulli tax dodge

Alberobello’s origins don’t share the same poverty story as Matera. It is instead a tale about a feudal family and the farmers who worked their land.

Under the Kingdom of Naples, creating a new settlement required the crown’s permission, and it incurred taxation (a rule called the Prammatica De Baronibus).

The Acquaviva counts of Conversano didn’t like the idea of paying a tax. So they ordered their peasants to build dry stone houses that could be easily dismantled. The convenient side effect was that the counts could also kick out unwelcome tenants. There are no tenant rights or squatting attempts when the whole house can be collapsed in two hours without heavy machinery.

When a royal inspector approached, all of the houses in Alberobello would come down, leaving a clearly nontaxable field of rubble. After the inspector left, or (if it went to court) after the court case was settled, the peasants would return and rebuild.

In 1797, Ferdinand IV freed the town and made mortar legal. The first house that used it is Casa d’Amore, which still stands. UNESCO listed the trulli in 1996.

The cone you line up to photograph is essentially an ancient tax scam with a pretty roof.

Trabocchi, built by people afraid of the sea

The trabocchi of the Abruzzo coast are big wooden platforms on stilts, with spider-like arms holding nets. You can find them concentrated around the province of Chieti, from Ortona to San Salvo.

The point was fishing without a boat. In fact, the men who built them were mostly farmers rather than fishermen. Men who often couldn’t swim or were downright scared of being at sea (in fairness, for good reason, since people died at sea all the time back then). So they engineered fishing machines instead of becoming sailors.

Trabocchi look quite sketchy in photos, but they are actually well-built and solid. They definitely stood the test of time as well, since they date back to the 1700s. (With some sources indicating their possible existence as early as the 1200s.)

At any rate, that fear led to engineering, which ultimately produced beautiful architecture. These days, they are often turned into seafood restaurants.

The pattern is clear: a constraint leads to a workaround, which is then abandoned or seen as problematic, only to be reevaluated later on and promoted to a tourist attraction.

The price of fame

Now that the Sassi, trulli, and trabocchi are world famous, their price tags have skyrocketed. And since they are so unique and rare, the state heavily regulates them, making changes difficult.

A large share of Matera’s Sassi are not even private property. People get them on long concessions rather than buying them outright. The real cost then becomes the full restoration using heritage rules.

You can spend a small fortune to live in a cave that you don’t even own, restored to standards you did not choose.

Listings for privately owned ones will use fancy terms like hypogeum, but make no mistake, you’re buying a cave you cannot change for the most part, at the price of a real house in nearby comuni (municipalities).

When it comes to trulli, you can buy a finished and renovated one for €250,000 or more. Or you can get one da ristrutturare (to be renovated) for as little as €30,000.

Tempting right? I get it. It’s such a unique setting. Well, that is until you realize the caveats.

Many trulli are protected under heritage law (Legislative Decree 42/2004). In Alberobello, you cannot demolish one, add a floor, or reshape the conical roof however you like.

Restoring a roof requires one of the few experts who know how, by hand, stone by stone, to the tune of €1,500-2,000 per square meter.

Adding a window means getting through three feet of wall containing two layers of dry stone and rubble in the middle. That is, if you get approval.

The irony of it all is that the trullo was engineered so that a man could pull a stone and drop the roof before a tax collector arrived. Now it takes a permit and a heritage architect to move that same stone.

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In 2025, Italy received eight billion visitors. Well, not quite. The real number is hard to calculate, so I’ll give you one I’m confident about instead: over half a billion overnight stays.

Rome leads the pack, of course, with 50 million. Milan: 18 million. Venice: 13 million. Florence: 11.5 million.

I’m known for finding interesting data about Italy, but these are not hard finds. Everyone writing about the country quotes these numbers as evidence that Italy is full. That overtourism is its cross to bear. Let’s call it the curse of being beautiful.

Italy is not full, though. Italy’s rim is. In the middle, it’s largely ignored by foreign visitors, and the gap between the two Italys is much larger than most assume.

The map I generated shows all the Italian comuni (municipalities) according to the number of tourist beds available per hundred residents. The darkest areas are the ones with more beds for tourists than residents. I would argue that this is a defensible threshold for overtourism.

The pattern makes sense, but it is also somewhat counterintuitive. You would expect major cities like Rome, Venice, Milan, and Florence, despite their large resident populations, to dominate. They are certainly visible on the map, but they don’t stand out that much.

What stands out is the entire Alpine range, Tuscany as a whole, and the Ligurian and Romagna coastlines. In the south, the Amalfi Coast, the Gargano (at the top of Apulia), and the Salento (the “heel” of the country), as well as the perimeters of Sicily and Sardinia.

Still, it makes sense when you consider that the map shows a ratio whose denominator is the population. A village of 1,000 people in the Dolomites receiving 150,000 visitors a year needs far more beds per resident than a city of 2.75 million that receives tens of millions of overnight stays.

The rest of the country is, for the most part, pale. Not many people live there, and not many people visit, so the tourism infrastructure is thin, including the number of beds available.

In the whole country, there are 7.7 million tourist beds. Yet 2,249 comuni have fewer than two beds per hundred residents, and 450 have zero registered tourist accommodations.

Where tourism in Italy actually is

Istat counts accommodation capacity in every one of the 7,896 comuni. For 450 of them, the count is zero. But it publishes visitor figures for only 4,531. So 2,915 comuni (i.e., 7,896 - 4,531 - 450) have registered accommodations and do not appear in the published visitor statistics.

That is 37% of the country. Almost 3,000 comuni hold 151,026 tourist beds between them. The median one has 32 beds and 1,445 residents. Despite the available lodging, there is no measurable tourism. These places are not underrated or undiscovered by the masses. They are statistically invisible.

Volume is only one part of the equation

The volume of tourism is a valuable metric, but equally interesting is when tourists arrive.

At the national level, July and August alone account for 34% of all overnight stays. The median comune gets roughly 32% of its overnight stays during those two months. However, Sellia Marina in Calabria gets 83% of its overnight stays in that period. Taviano, Maruggio, and Salve in the Salento, and Vico del Gargano all exceed 72%.

So some towns can genuinely be quiet for 10 months and then receive an overwhelming number of visitors in eight weeks. Annual numbers mask all that.

And the data shows that some places have volumes of tourism that leave room for little else. For example, the resort town of Lignano Sabbiadoro has 1,407 tourist beds for every 100 residents. And the picturesque Limone sul Garda records 1,044 overnight stays per resident each year.

So Italy doesn’t have a tourism problem. It has a concentrated tourism problem. Tourism that overwhelms certain places, certain regions, and certain months of the year.

What these numbers cannot see

Full disclosure, there are two limitations to the data Istat offers us.

1. Overnight stays only count people who sleep in the given place. Day-trippers don’t count. Cruise passengers storming seaside cities don’t count either.

2. Consider the tourist beds as a floor, not an exact count. There are definitely unregistered short-term rentals, especially in the south, which are missing from the official data.

Neither of these two limitations changes the overall picture. The map still gives a good picture of the general level and location of tourism pressure in Italy.

The point

Overtourism appears in every conversation about Italy. Rightly so. But it’s important to understand that it’s also highly concentrated and seasonal.

Beyond the hot spots lies another Italy made of thousands of comuni with little tourism infrastructure, few visitors, and in many cases serious population decline.

Some are pleasantly overlooked. Hidden gems, really. Others are isolated, shrinking, and economically stagnant. In many cases, truly not worth the visit.

From a visitor’s perspective, the question you should be asking when considering a town off the beaten path is: why don’t tourists go there?

Sometimes the answer doesn’t invalidate the effort to get there. Hidden gems do exist. Sometimes the other tourists are right.

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Some areas of Italy require a car to get around. So you decide to rent one and explore the countryside without the limitations of public transportation or the prohibitive expense of long taxi rides.

Solid choice, with one tiny problem: driving in Italy is easier said than done.

Driving in Italy is a pain in the axle

Let’s start with the paperwork. To drive in Italy as a non-resident, you may need both your home country’s driving license and an International Driving Permit (IDP), which is essentially a translation of your driving license. May, because it’s country-dependent.

It’s easy enough to get and doesn’t cost much (less than $50 in most countries). It’s also easy enough to forget at home. I kept reminding a student of mine. He got it done and promptly forgot to take it with him.

You’ll need to rent a car and ensure you don’t pick a large SUV because many charming places have narrow streets and it’s easy to get stuck. This is a common, if rookie, mistake. North American cars are huge by Italian standards. Remember, most streets were built for carts pulled by donkeys.

I hope you have lots of room on your credit card and multiple credit cards, because car rental places are notorious for ruining trips when they put a hold on your only credit card for a portion of the value of the car.

You’re likely used to automatics, so you’ll also have fewer choices and pay more for it, given that most cars in Italy are still manual. You might even book an automatic, show up, and realize they only have manual cars left on the lot.

Perhaps worst of all, you’ll need to navigate the roads with Italians who drive in a more... aggressive fashion than you’re likely used to. Some areas are worse than others. Marche? Manageable. Naples? Expect to be honked at for stopping at a red light.

Expect winding, narrow, poorly maintained rural roads. And expect potentially thousands of dollars’ worth of fines if you’re not familiar with Zone a Traffico Limitato (ZTL, the areas limited to local traffic) and you keep entering and exiting said zones in a futile attempt to find parking.

If you move there, as opposed to just visiting, you’ll need to convert your licence after a year or, if your country has no reciprocity deal, pass the Italian exams. Spoiler: many countries, including the USA and Australia, do not have one.

The theory exam is full of bureaucratic Italian that trips even native speakers. You’ll most likely want to pay an autoscuola (a driving school) to practice with an instructor and try hard to forget 30 years of bad driving habits. Expect to pay often €1,000 or more.

Plus, you’ll also need to do the dog-and-pony show that is the practical exam. A test of driving proficiency in which you obsessively and theatrically check the rear-view mirror as if the local mafia were chasing you.

So skip the car

I’m being a bit overdramatic here, but this is to say that trying to avoid driving in Italy is a sensible choice.

You certainly don’t need a car in major or touristy cities. In fact, you are better off not driving in cities. Anything reachable directly by train will not make you miss opting out of a rental.

The trouble starts with smaller places not directly reachable by train or by coach services like FlixBus and Itabus.

For those, a car is indeed much more convenient. But you can, with some planning and patience, make it there nevertheless. The trick is to find the nearby hub, get there by train or FlixBus/Itabus, and then take a short regional bus for the last stretch in. Master that second leg of the trip and you’ll be able to go almost anywhere.

Take the now-famous Civita di Bagnoregio. The first leg of the trip is reaching the local hub, Orvieto. You can easily get there by train as it sits on the Rome-to-Florence line.

The second leg is the Cotral (Lazio’s regional company) bus from Orvieto to Bagnoregio in less than an hour. That regional bus is fairly typical: it runs Monday to Saturday only, so Sundays are out, and you must buy tickets at the tabaccheria (tobacconist/newsstand) by the stop.

You’ll also need to tell the driver where you want to get off, as you can’t count on him calling your stop by default. It is for locals who know the area, after all.

Unlike trains, there is no single national network of regional buses. Lazio has Cotral, Tuscany has Autolinee Toscane, Umbria has Busitalia, the Amalfi Coast has SITA Sud, and so on.

To find the local bus you need, I recommend the app Moovit, which does a better job than Google Maps for Italian buses. To be sure, always confirm the times with the operator’s own website.

Some useful words to read the Italian timetables by the bus stop (or online):

• Feriale: Monday to Saturday

• Festivo: Sundays and holidays. When the service thins or dies.

• Scolastico: School days only. Read: it doesn’t run in summer or on Sundays, and often not on Saturdays either.

• Estivo: Summer schedule, often stripped to the bare bones. The one most likely to leave you stranded, especially in August.

The key rule you don’t get to break is this: any trip needs to establish what time the last bus back leaves.

Rural buses often run only a few times a day. If you miss the last bus that returns you to the hub, you end up being stuck in a village of 800 people with no set accommodations and broken Italian to explain your predicament.

Plan your day on the basis of the last bus back. You won’t see as many places as you would by car, but maybe that slower pace is part of what you seek in Italy.

Or maybe compromise

Visiting rural places without a car in Italy is possible, but it takes careful planning, use of the two-leg method, and acceptance of some inconveniences.

Some towns get two buses a day or are served only by a line that runs on school days for kids, and might not accept the general public.

Perhaps then the best approach is to compromise. For those, opt for a taxi or an NCC (noleggio con conducente, a licensed chauffeur/private-hire service) from the nearest station. It can be far cheaper than renting a car for a whole week. Or rent the car, but do so for a single day, to visit a cluster of small places that would take days to visit by bus.

Rent a car when buses truly fail you, but don’t preemptively assume that a place can’t be reached via public transportation.

Il gioco vale la candela (literally: the game is worth the candle). The reward is worth the faff, as the British would put it. The harder it is to get to a town, the fewer tourists you’ll find there.

You’ll have earned the place for yourself.

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This article is part of a series in which I investigate Italian towns to relocate to. So far we’ve covered:

• Piedmont

• Veneto

• Tuscany

• Umbria

• Marche

• Abruzzo

• Campania

• Sardinia

Today we’re applying our framework to Liguria.

The screening includes several filters. Comuni (municipalities) must:

• Have a population between 15,000 and 100,000. Not too big, not too small.

• Not be in a Zone 1 seismic area or a recent cratere (the reconstruction zone after an earthquake).

• Have a full supermarket in town for groceries.

• Have a high school in town.

• Have a full ER within a 25-minute drive.

• Have fast internet (fiber optic).

• Have a depopulation rate below 5% over the past 10 years.

In most regions, it takes a few of these criteria to knock the list down to a manageable size. Not in Liguria. The very first filter, population, takes out 224 out of 234 comuni. One is too big (Genova); the rest are all too small.

Liguria is simply full of small villages and towns. Almost a third of all comuni there have fewer than a thousand people.

Of the 10 remaining comuni, nine pass the rest of the filters as well. We’re going to cover each of them.

What Liguria is actually like to live in

Liguria is the third smallest region in Italy size-wise, after Valle d’Aosta and Molise. It’s a 350 km strip of land compressed between the sea and the Piemonte mountains. It has four provinces, though Genova is technically a città metropolitana, the authority that replaced the old province. It’s also the region's capital.

Namely, its four “provinces” are:

• Genova (67 comuni)

• Savona (69 comuni)

• Imperia (66 comuni)

• La Spezia (32 comuni)

Genova, the city, holds on its own 37.4% of the region’s 1.5 million residents. The metropolitan city (so Genova proper plus surrounding areas) accounts for more than 50% of Liguria’s population.

In terms of demographics, Liguria is the oldest region in Italy. The average age is 49.6, and the old-age index is a staggering 283.3. What that means is that for every 100 children under 15, 283 people are over 65.

In 2024, the region recorded 21,072 deaths against 8,380 births. Despite this negative delta, the population rose by 1,003. All because of immigration.

For what it’s worth, medium-sized cities like the ones we are looking at tend to have the youngest people and lowest death rates within Liguria. I’m sending you to the healthiest slice of the strip.

Cristoforo Colombo was from here, which might tip you off to the real engine of the region: ports, ships, tourism, and turkey dinners. The last one is a joke, but the naval industry is serious business: Genova’s port, Costa Crociere’s head office in Genova and its cruise terminal at Savona, and Fincantieri at La Spezia, if we are name-dropping. The GDP per capita is near €30,000, average for the North, but far from Milan levels.

The quality of life is generally okay, but nothing to write home about. La Spezia 42nd, Genova 43rd, Savona 65th, and Imperia 80th out of 107. Imperia’s ranking is actually remarkably low, as it’s dead last among northern provinces.

Language-wise, outside of central Genova, assume you’ll need Italian. Since Liguria borders France, as you move west, knowledge of French will actually help you out more than English will. Though this isn’t Aosta, don’t expect bilingualism.

Earthquakes are not a critical issue in Liguria. There are no Zone 1 comuni or crateri, even though 30 Zone 2 comuni in the Imperia province do exist.

So our seismic filter does nothing in Liguria. What you need to worry about are landslides. ISPRA estimates 54.9% of the population in Liguria is at risk of landslides. That’s 823K people, an unpleasant record unmatched by any other Italian region. Genova, in particular, holds the city record, and it has flooded repeatedly, most notoriously in 1970, 2011, and 2014.

Check the ISPRA’s IdroGeo map for your specific address before you make an offer on a house.

Depopulation is an issue in Liguria. It mostly affects smaller comuni, however. In fact, of the ten comuni that survive the population filter, only one gets excluded due to its depopulation level (Sestri Levante with a 7.38% drop).

From a services perspective, Liguria does well, as all northern regions do. The only service you need to watch out for is fiber internet access. It’s one of the last regions with less than 70% coverage. A quick check for the specific house address you’re considering will ensure you are not making Elon Musk richer by buying his Starlink satellite internet service.

Finally, Liguria is in the north, and there are no comuni on the crateri list, so the 7% tax regime for retirees doesn’t apply here.

Here are the nine comuni worth considering for relocation in Liguria.

1. Savona

Savona, the city, is an important port on the Ligurian Sea with a medieval historic center. It’s also the cheapest place on this list.

An average of €1,983 per square meter gets you a decent-sized city with real infrastructure, a solid hospital in town, many supermarkets, and direct trains to both Genova and Torino.

Il Sole 24 Ore’s latest rankings placed it 11th for culture and leisure, punching well above its weight for a city this size.

The good news sort of stops here: said rankings also placed it 65th out of 107 provinces overall, and 91st for justice and security. So it’s a city of culture and crime. (Mind you, Italy has relatively low levels of serious crime.)

The port gets quite busy as well, which is good for business, but it does mean that many cruise passengers can disembark en masse and temporarily fill the old city with tourists. Costa Crociere uses this port, and over 750K cruise passengers stop by each year.

Think of the waterfront as a working port with cranes and cruise terminals, rather than a peaceful boardwalk.

Still, a genuinely reasonable choice for the right person.

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For those who don’t follow Canadian news, Summerland, the town next to mine, is burning and its 12,000 residents were evacuated overnight.

Where I live, just 20 minutes south, we’ve had PM2.5 readings (fine-particle pollution) over 300 µg/m³ today. For reference, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends an annual mean PM2.5 of no more than 5 µg/m³.

My eyes are burning, my throat stings, and I have headaches. With two air purifiers running 24/7, the house still only manages to keep PM2.5 to a miserable 50 to 70 µg/m³.

This is a case of acute, absurdly high levels of PM2.5, in a place that has low levels when wildfires aren’t around.

Sporadic surges might not give you lung cancer, but they still greatly increase the chance of cardiovascular events, especially for cardiac patients like me.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in a hotel room by the ocean in Nanaimo, breathing fresh air for the first time in 5 days. Acute exposure can at least be escaped.

Italy has a few places where wildfires are a concern (inland Sardinia in particular), but the air quality problem takes a different shape. It’s chronic.

That’s the kind of air quality problem that shaves off years even if you’re healthy. Berkeley Earth equates roughly 22 µg/m³ of PM2.5 over a day to smoking a cigarette. In Milano, non-smokers essentially smoke a cigarette a day.

You can’t temporarily escape it if the baseline is constantly unhealthy.

Like the climate piece before it, this one is essentially a careful collection of region-by-region data. This time, I’ll show you the air quality of the regions’ capitals.

The table

92 Italian cities are on the EEA list. The map below immediately paints a clear picture.

What follows are specific details for the regional capitals, ranked cleanest to worst. Rank 1 of 761 is the best air in Europe (Finland and Sweden dominate the top positions).

Aosta is missing from the list because, at roughly 34,000 people, it is too small to be part of the EEA database, which targets cities of 50,000+ residents.

A few thoughts

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from this, but I’d like to point out a few of my thoughts about it.

Every regional capital in the table sits above the WHO health guideline of 5. The same is true of the other two pollutants: 10 µg/m³ for nitrogen dioxide and 60 µg/m³ for peak-season ozone. The cleanest capitals in Italy manage 11 and 79, respectively. All 19 fail all three targets.

The current EU limit for PM2.5, 25 µg/m³, five times the health guideline, is not breached by any Italian city on the list. That changes in December 2026, when the PM2.5 limit drops from 25 to 10, and the nitrogen dioxide one goes from 40 to 20.

13 of the 19 capitals don’t clear both bars. Only Cagliari, Catanzaro, Potenza, L’Aquila, Genova, and Trieste do.

Many journalists treat the EU limit as a health standard, but it was never one. But at least, in December, it becomes a serious one.

Nine out of 12 cities at the bottom of the list are Italian. Every one of them is in the north, specifically the Po basin.

In fact, Milano is the second-worst of all 761 cities in Europe tracked by EEA. The only city with worse air is Slavonski Brod in Croatia.

The highest ozone readings in Italy are Saronno at 114, Bergamo at 111, and Milano at 110, all in the north, all in Lombardia. The north-south gap is striking.

Cagliari, at 4 meters above sea level, ranks 125th. Potenza, at 819 meters, ranks 287th. So altitude is no guarantee either.

What really matters is whether a city sits inside a basin that traps air. Trento is on the floor of an Alpine valley and still manages to have bad air, placing 696th out of 761 (worse than Roma and even Bologna).

Mountain air is clean. The towns where most people live are in the valley at the bottom of it, which doesn’t help them.

Finally, treat these capoluoghi (region capitals) as a ceiling. They generally have the worst air in the area. Comuni (municipalities) nearby will go down from this ceiling the higher up you go in altitude, and the farther you go from the plain, the motorways, and industry.

The short version

If you are moving to Italy, you should consider air quality as a relatively important factor. The data votes for the south, the islands, and the coasts. It argues against the entire Po basin, and even the Alpine valley floors.

Even Sassari, at 6 µg/m³ (30th in Europe, with the cleanest air of any Italian city), is slightly above the WHO guideline.

No Italian city big enough to be on the list is under it.

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Only two things are certain in life: death and taxes. In Italy, the certainty of paying taxes gets replaced by the certainty of complaining.

You were sold the dream of la dolce vita (the sweet life) in Italy and the afternoon siesta, but every Italian you meet seems to be complaining about life.

What’s actually going on and how does this affect your potential move to Italy?

What Italians complain about

Let’s start by pinning down what Italians complain about.

Each Italian is different, but there are broad categories of complaints that apply to most.

Italians complain about taxes being too high. Objectively, they are. A few exceptions ease fiscal pressure for some, but overall, taxes are some of the highest in Europe.

This is in part because so many evade taxes. The taxi driver with a constantly “malfunctioning” card reader, the bar not issuing a scontrino (fiscal receipt), and the host offering to cancel your Expedia booking for a discount if you pay cash are all examples of furbi (cunning people) trying to dodge taxes.

This, in turn, becomes a vicious cycle in which tax rates must be high enough to offset the shortfall in revenue. You might think that going after tax evaders is the right strategy, but it’s often political suicide.

I’ll give you one example before we move on to other reasons for complaining. In Italy, people who own a TV (virtually every household) have to pay “il canone RAI,” a tax of 90 euros a year. Millions of Italians did not pay it, and enforcing it wasn’t easy.

So then Prime Minister Matteo Renzi rolled the canone into the electricity bill every Italian has to pay (10 installments of 9 euros each, per year). Suddenly, over 5.5 million Italian households started paying the canone. Also, suddenly 5.5 million households stopped voting for Renzi, and he went from being a popular moderate leftist politician to sitting on the sidelines. (There were other factors, but this didn’t make him any friends.)

On that note, and not unique to Italians, we do love to complain about politicians regardless of who is in charge. “È tutto un magna magna” (it’s all one big feeding frenzy) is a common expression to vent about politicians being greedy and only looking out for themselves.

Another common complaint, perhaps even more popular than taxes, is the lack of jobs and low wages for the jobs that do exist. Only 67.6% of working-age Italians have jobs, compared with 81.1% in Germany. Italy and Romania are the only two countries in the EU below 70%. A third of the working-age population isn’t even looking for work, the highest inactivity rate in Europe. The south is worse still: Calabria and Campania are the only regions in the entire EU where fewer than half of working-age people have a job.

And the average country-wide salary, bumped by the prosperous north, is about 1,700 euros a month, net. On average annual wages, Italy sits second to last in the G7, ahead of only Japan. Above all, it’s the only country in the EU to have had its wages go down over the past 30 years, instead of going up or at least keeping up with inflation.

Healthcare, and services in general, are another source of frustration. The truth, at least as far as healthcare goes, is that Italians are a bit spoiled and don’t fully realize how good they have it.

Virtually everybody has a GP without being on a years-long wait list as we do in Canada. In many places, doctors will come visit you at home. There is even a medical night service at home, and 24/7 access to at least one pharmacy in the area. Finally, the standard of care is genuinely high.

All of it is virtually “free,” even most medicines. The catch is slow access to specialists, but private access is fast (days or a couple of weeks) and relatively inexpensive. Still, if you do go the public route, you might have to wait for months for specialists.

Italians then complain about the heat. Rightfully so in summer, even though modern technology such as air conditioning exists to make everyone more comfortable. That comes at a cost, however, and we already discussed that finances are tight for most.

Finally, a major complaint by almost half the population is immigration. A significant percentage of the country sees immigrants as problematic and wants them gone, which puts Prime Minister Meloni in the awkward position of being Schrödinger’s fascist; some critics see her as a fascist while others see her as not fascist enough to enact ICE-style remigrations.

This is helping Futuro Nazionale, Roberto Vannacci’s very right-wing party, to advance quickly in the polls off the frustration of Italians who see immigrants, particularly North African ones, as a source of crime rather than a resource for the country. Founded six months ago, it is polling around 7% in the summer of 2026, fifth (soon fourth) nationally and ahead of Salvini’s Lega.

Italians’ complaints easily explain why their default stance when you tell them that you’re considering moving is “ma sei matto?” (Are you crazy?) Even though your circumstances would be wildly different than theirs and moving might be the best thing you’ll ever do.

Complaining is the national language

Here’s something you need to understand about Italians: complaining is the national language. The default mode. It’s akin to small talk. Canadians complain about the weather. Italians about their country.

The expression “piangersi addosso,” literally to cry on yourself, and the noun “la lamentela” (the complaint) are practically national genres.

Neapolitans have an even more colorful expression for the attitude many Italians have: “chiagni e fotti” (you cry and you f**k), meaning that things are actually going pretty well but you still complain about it.

Because the grievances above, for the most part, are legitimate. But life for many Italians is still very good.

What Italians do besides complaining

Italians complain, but do they do anything about their condition? Many do not, in part because they drown in learned helplessness. They don’t think that things are going to get better, regardless of what they do. Walk into the self-help section of an Italian bookstore, and most of what you’ll find is translated from English.

Others do something, but it takes the shape of what I did 23 years ago: they leave the country to seek better opportunities. Italy is in fact bleeding young, highly educated people. Between 2011 and 2024, roughly 630,000 Italians aged 18 to 34 moved abroad. Counting all ages, 156,000 citizens left in 2024 alone, a record (though part of that spike is people abroad finally registering after new penalties kicked in).

Make no mistake, the people who complain the loudest are the ones more likely to stay. Their complaining is the valvola di sfogo (release valve) to vent their frustration so that the moka pot that is their nervous system doesn’t blow up.

It’s like dogs: you don’t have to worry about the yapping Chihuahua. You have to worry about the silent Cane Corso.

So are Italians miserable?

Back in 2008, Pew ran a piece under the title “Italy’s Malaise: La Vita Non É Cosí Dolce.” (By the way, they got both accents wrong.) Only about one Italian in ten believed the next generation would have a better life than the current one, the lowest percentage among the Western countries surveyed.

Plenty of Europeans are gloomy about money. When Il Sole 24 Ore commissioned a survey of young adults across Europe, Italians shared the same economic anxieties as the French, Germans, Spanish, and British but stood out for being the only ones to conclude that there’s no way out. Others see a tough situation. Young Italians see a hopeless one.

The World Happiness Report asks people: “Where does your life stand today, zero to ten?” Italians answer 6.57. That’s well above the global average, and 38th out of 147 countries. It’s the self-report of a country that is, day to day, doing pretty well.

Take this at face value, and Italians are not miserable. They didn’t say 4.

But that question only asks how life feels right now. It never asks the question Italians would respond to most harshly: whether there is a future in Italy.

So here is the interesting paradox: Italians complain a lot and are not hopeful about the future. Yet, they are not miserable.

My theory is that, as much as they take Italy for granted, they do realize that Italy still offers a life worth living. They eat well, they live long, the afternoon still slows down the way the tourist guides suggest. It’s not full-on dolce vita, that’s a myth, but it’s not so bad either.

So a bit defeatist? Yes. Doth the lady protest too much? Absolutely. Miserable? Not really.

What this means if you’re moving to Italy

The decision that will shape your Italian life the most is not which region, though that’s important. It’s whether your income depends on the Italian economy or is insulated from it.

Live off a remote salary, a foreign pension, or savings, and the stagnant wages and lack of hope are, put bluntly, not your problem. You get the amazing food, the light, the cheaper cost of living, the slower afternoon, and the passeggiata: pretty much the postcard Italy you were promised.

In fact, the engine of the lamentela in Italy is stagnant wages. Remove that variable, as an expat, and your own assessment will be much higher than the already respectable 6.57.

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Many of my readers dream of retiring in Italy. In fact, some already have.

In my region-by-region series on where to move, the topic of the 7% flat tax for retirees comes up often.

So let’s take the bull by the horns and address how it works, the areas where it applies, and what it means in practice.

The 7% tax regime in Italy is amazing

The short, if imprecise, definition is that the 7% tax regime is an extremely generous fiscal program for foreign people retiring in Italy. If you qualify, you’ll genuinely pay very little tax.

The point of the program is to attract foreign retirees and their money to small comuni (municipalities) in the south and selected towns affected by recent earthquakes in the center of Italy.

In other words, Italy wants to revive areas that are somewhat underdeveloped and would otherwise bleed people, and do so with an influx of money from the outside. It’s an odd choice to aim for retirees rather than young workers, but hey, we are not here to judge. We are here to maximize our resources.

It hasn’t been marketed properly outside of Italy, so the success of the program has been modest at best. A report shows that in 2025, covering the 2024 tax year, only 933 people took advantage of the program.

If you’re curious, Abruzzo has consistently led the program, followed by Puglia and Sicilia. The last breakdown from the ministry was published in 2021, but it shows that Ceglie Messapica in Puglia and Penne in Abruzzo were popular hits (with 7 retirees each, in that year).

The program has mostly attracted British and German pensioners, with the Americans being in a distant third position.

Make no mistake, though: this is an incredible deal in areas where the cost of living is low in the first place. You can legitimately stretch your retirement dollars without the North American (or Oceanic) worries of a skyrocketing cost of living. And doing so in beautiful places, while enjoying nice (if hot) weather and fantastic food.

If it still exists by the time I retire twenty years from now, I’m 100% going for it myself.

Before you get too excited, however, let’s get very specific about everything so that you get the full picture of how the tax regime actually works.

Who qualifies for the 7% tax regime

To qualify for the 7% tax regime, you need to:

• Receive a pension from your home country

• Not have lived in Italy in the past 5 years

Regarding the pension, you don’t have to be 65. Article 24-ter of the Italian tax code, regulating this program, doesn’t say anything about your age. But it does care that you are receiving a legitimate retirement pension from your country.

For example, if you are Canadian and you saved a bunch of money in an RRSP retirement account that allows you to withdraw funds at will, you’re not a retiree as far as Italy is concerned.

If you’re drawing CPP, or an employer pension that pays on a schedule somebody else controls, you qualify. The test is not public vs private; it comes down to whether you or somebody else controls when the money is withdrawn.

Qualifying for the 7% tax regime also doesn’t automatically give you Italian citizenship or even a permesso di soggiorno (a permit to stay in Italy). The visa is a separate application with its own process.

Thankfully, if you’re planning to retire in Italy off your pension, the elective residency visa requirements are not too onerous. Still, plan for 31-35K euro worth of yearly income to meet the financial expectations imposed somewhat arbitrarily by your local consulate.

What the 7% tax regime covers

If you qualify, Italy will tax your pension and other categories of foreign income at 7% for the first 10 years of your residence in Italy.

So the 7% tax regime covers:

• Your foreign pension

• Withdrawals from your foreign retirement accounts (from Italy)

• Your foreign rental income

• Your foreign dividends, interest and capital gains

Again, the foreign pension is the must-have to qualify. Once you have that, everything else is cargo.

You’re also exempt from IVIE and IVAFE, which are Italy’s wealth taxes on foreign properties and financial assets, and won’t have to file a quadro RW to declare said foreign assets.

After 10 years, these revert to ordinary Italian taxation. Think something like 32% on a 60,000 euro pension and 36% on an 80,000 one, less on smaller pensions.

Ten years at 7% is still strikingly generous.

What does it not cover? Anything produced in Italy. If you buy investment properties in Italy and rent them out, that’s allowed, but the rent is Italian-source and taxed at ordinary Italian rates, either 21% under cedolare secca or your full IRPEF bracket. Much higher than 7% either way.

Where the 7% tax regime applies

The following towns are eligible for the program:

1. Towns with no more than 30,000 people in the following 8 regions: Abruzzo, Molise, Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, Sicilia, and Sardegna.

2. Towns with no more than 30,000 people affected by the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, defined by Commissario delegato decree n. 3 of 16 April 2009 (49 comuni) and extended by decree n. 11 of 17 July 2009 (8 more). Since these are all in Abruzzo, I won’t include the list, since it’s redundant and already covered by the previous point.

3. Towns with no more than 30,000 people listed in annexes 1, 2 and 2-bis, which were affected by the 2016 earthquakes that devastated central Italy. The regions with comuni on these lists are Lazio, Umbria, Marche, and Abruzzo. Again, this doesn’t help anything in Abruzzo since the whole region is already eligible for the program (provided the town is at or below 30,000 residents).

So the non-south additions provided by the annexes are the following:

Lazio (14 eligible)

Accumoli (Rieti, 493), Amatrice (Rieti, 2,146), Antrodoco (Rieti, 2,238), Borbona (Rieti, 573), Borgo Velino (Rieti, 901), Cantalice (Rieti, 2,386), Castel Sant’Angelo (Rieti, 1,156), Cittaducale (Rieti, 6,400), Cittareale (Rieti, 374), Leonessa (Rieti, 2,019), Micigliano (Rieti, 119), Poggio Bustone (Rieti, 1,957), Posta (Rieti, 518), Rivodutri (Rieti, 1,121).

Too big: Rieti (44,866).

Umbria (14 eligible)

Arrone (Terni, 2,504), Cascia (Perugia, 2,930), Cerreto di Spoleto (Perugia, 961), Ferentillo (Terni, 1,767), Montefranco (Terni, 1,243), Monteleone di Spoleto (Perugia, 535), Norcia (Perugia, 4,399), Poggiodomo (Perugia, 81), Polino (Terni, 233), Preci (Perugia, 678), Sant’Anatolia di Narco (Perugia, 490), Scheggino (Perugia, 422), Sellano (Perugia, 918), Vallo di Nera (Perugia, 317).

Too big: Spoleto (Perugia, 35,875).

Marche (83 eligible)

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Every year on the second of November, people in Italy head to the cemetery to pay their homage to the dead.

My father used to take me to visit my nonno. November 2nd is a memento mori for the whole country, but it was especially true for me. ANTONIO CANGIANO was staring right at me on a tombstone. (I was named after my grandpa, as it’s tradition in Italy.)

The large Roman cemetery where he was buried was surrounded by endless cypress trees. Further, fellow Romans around me would often use the expression, “andare agli alberi pizzuti,” referring to the cypresses as a euphemism for dying.

So I came to associate that particular tree with death very early in life.

Around six or so, I saw a picture of Val d’Orcia in Tuscany and asked my dad why it had so many cypress trees around regular houses, not cemeteries.

My dad never completed third grade but was a man of great culture. He opened a successful bookstore in Ostia and would essentially read nonstop. So the answer I got was, in hindsight, detailed and historically accurate.

In this article, I’ll tell you the short, grown-up version.

Cypresses as markers

When you see those tidy rows climbing a ridge, all the way to a house, those trees act as fences.

As you drive up to the area, it’s all picturesque, and you might mistakenly assume they are there for decoration. Narrow, tall, and easy to grow, cypresses were more of a marker of territory, as they could easily be seen from two hills away. A tool that has kept neighboring farmers on friendly terms for centuries.

Two of them a few feet apart? Good chance that’s a gate. A double file running up a road, that’s the driveway to a property somebody owns. If you interpret the land this way, you’ll quickly see that they are not placed randomly. They are a surveying instrument with the added benefit of breaking the wind along the edges of grain fields.

The tree, by the way, is not native to the area, but Cupressus sempervirens has likely been growing in Tuscany since Etruscan times, seven centuries before Jesus was born. Today they feel intrinsically Tuscan, but they actually came by boat from Greece and Phoenicia.

The death came before the cemeteries

The Greeks and the Romans called the cypress the mourning tree long before modern cemeteries existed.

Ovid gave the association its most famous telling in the Metamorphoses, where Cyparissus felt grief for killing a tame stag, and turned into the tree. Roman funerals used the branches and made wreaths for Pluto.

Symbolically, it made sense that an evergreen tree was a stand-in for a soul that never ends.

What really made it the widespread cemetery marker that it is today is Napoleon’s Edict of Saint-Cloud, dated June 12, 1804, which made it illegal to bury bodies in churches or within city walls.

Two years later, the edict reached the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and all of a sudden, thousands of towns needed a walled area past the last houses.

The cypress was the obvious answer because the tree didn’t require much land, was cheap, fast to grow, narrow, and evergreen. Plus, it was already the standard boundary tree, and it already carried funerary meaning.

Plots of land were surrounded by cypresses and designated as cemeteries. Easily visible from two hills away.

Two more things

Two plot twists that make the cypress in Italy story even more interesting.

In 2011, the comune (municipality) of San Quirico d’Orcia added a regulation over commercial use of images of its territory. In practice, tourists and journalists were exempted, but advertisers and people using the images for commercial purposes became the target.

The effort by Roberto Rappuoli, the mayor at the time, was to stop people from appropriating imagery of the valley for products and campaigns with no connection to it.

Then in 2013, he had to send a cease-and-desist to McDonald’s over the Gran Chianina burger campaign. It used the famous cypresses and a hilltop farmhouse as a backdrop. McDonald’s replied that it had meant the campaign as a tribute to the region, and offered to promote San Quirico d’Orcia to its 720K Facebook followers. The controversy faded from there.

Seiridium cardinale, a canker fungus from California, was first identified in Florence in 1951 and spread through most of Italy within two decades. By the 1970s, researchers at the CNR in Florence had started breeding resistant clones. The first ones were patented in 1990.

So the oldest symbol of immortality in the Mediterranean now comes with a patent number.

My father gave me the Sienese investors, the trees as markers, and Ovid. He never mentioned the fungus, or that some of those trees would be replaced by patented copies.

He couldn’t have. The lab in Florence was still working on it.

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Sardinia has 377 comuni (municipalities), spread across 24,090 square kilometers. Run a strict livability filter, and you’re left with five.

Not fifty. Not fifteen. Five.

This is part of my series evaluating Italian towns for relocation using objective filters. So far we’ve covered Marche, Tuscany, Veneto, Campania, Abruzzo, Piedmont, and Umbria. Today: Sardinia. The filters were brutal here.

The framework adopts simple filters. Boring questions, really. Is the town big enough to have basic services like a pharmacy, a high school, and a full ER within 25 minutes? Are people slowly but surely leaving, as if they know something we don’t?

We also ask a safety question. Is seismic activity a concern?

Good news and bad news. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about earthquakes in Sardinia. The bad news is that the boring filters alone are enough to make most of the map go dark.

Demographically, Sardinia is kinda dying

Sardinia’s population is in a tough spot. It has the lowest fertility rate in Italy, the average age approaches 50, and nearly all provinces have residents leaving.

Sardinia has roughly three million sheep and 1.56 million people. About twice as many sheep, a ratio that should worry all but the most pecorino-obsessed readers.

Speaking of age, Sardinia does indeed have a reputation as a Blue Zone. The Ogliastra highlands genuinely produce an extraordinary number of centenarians. But longevity is not replacement via newborns, and sooner or later, inevitably, older people die.

Our filtering framework is apathetic about longevity, but does care about how alive a place is now and how likely it is to remain fifteen years from now. When a town loses a tenth of its people over ten years, services soon follow.

Work

Many Sardinian people will resist the label “south” applied to their region. However, when it comes to work, Sardinia is very much a region of the south.

The employment rate is around 57% versus the national average of 63%. Perhaps even more problematic for a would-be expat hoping for a local job, the work is mostly centered around tourism (so seasonal) and the public sector. The private industry that is not tourism-related is genuinely thin.

In other words, don’t plan to find local work. If you arrive with your own income or remote job, however, Sardinia is likely as close as it gets to the digital nomad fantasy of working on a beach from your laptop.

Language

In downtown Cagliari and along the tourist coast, English might be enough in a pinch, but you’ll need Italian to live here.

The locals also speak several varieties of Sardinian, which is a separate Romance language recognized by Italian law, rather than a simple dialect. Around Olbia and Sassari, though, the local speech is Gallurese and Sassarese, which are Corsican-derived rather than Sardinian. Italians, including myself, will not understand much of it unless they are from these parts.

In Alghero, the local language (i.e., Alguerès) is a dialect of Catalan, not Italian, so much so that a Catalan speaker can converse with a local with just a few adjustments.

Of course, Sardinians understand that you’re a foreign speaker, and will use Italian with you. It’s also worth noting that dialects are slowly disappearing among the younger generations. To put it in videogame terms, the ultimate language boss in Sardinia is a 100-year-old lady from the aforementioned Blue Zone.

The provinces are a mess

The provinces of Sardinia that I studied in school no longer exist. It’s almost a joke at this point, but Sardinia keeps changing them. The comune of Genoni changed province four times.

So here is the short version of it: Cagliari and Sassari are two città metropolitane (metropolitan cities). There are 15 in the whole country.

The rest of the region, at the time of writing, includes the provinces of: Gallura Nord-Est, Nuoro, Oristano, Ogliastra, Medio Campidano, and Sulcis Iglesiente.

Below you’ll find a table with only five provinces whose quality of life is measured and ranked by Il Sole 24 Ore and ItaliaOggi for 2025. Five, not eight, because when they measured, those were the provinces in Sardinia.

The one ranking that sticks out

Regardless of the messy subdivision of the territories, it is clear that Cagliari comes out ahead of the rest of the island.

As you can see from the table, in Il Sole 24 Ore’s 2025 quality-of-life index, Cagliari came 39th nationally, the best result in the south. In ItaliaOggi’s ranking, its health system is 8th in Italy. For a place in the south, this is an outstanding result.

Statistically, Cagliari and the rest of Sardinia are practically two different countries.

Crime

Some good news: Sardinia doesn’t have an organized crime problem like the rest of the south.

It doesn’t have much petty crime either. For example, Oristano is the safest province in Italy on Il Sole 24 Ore’s rankings.

The one exception is the Barbagia interior. Nuoro leads Italy for homicides per capita. Before you get too scared, this is a historical pattern that wouldn’t affect an incoming resident.

Crime exists, but it is genuinely not a main concern when choosing to relocate to Sardinia.

Weather

Sardinia is often seen as paradise by Italians. It has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and the weather is stereotypically warm year-round. It’s where rich people from Milan go on vacation, and billionaires go to party. A true jewel of the Mediterranean.

In reality, things are a little more nuanced than that. Yes, the coast, particularly the south, has a Mediterranean climate. It’s hot and relatively dry in summer, and never really gets cold in winter. However, move north or to the interior, and winters can get cold and wet, particularly at altitude.

The Maestrale wind, blowing from the north-west, brings a cold breeze that can last for days, with Alghero and Oristano being particularly affected by it.

I might look silly pointing out the “cold” in Sardinia, typing this from Canada, where real cold was practically invented. However, Sardinia is an island and the weather report matters. The August paradise can quickly turn into isolation in February due to ferry cancellations.

What actually gets you here is fire and water

All 377 Sardinian comuni sit in seismic Zone 4, the lowest hazard tier. Crime is not a concern, and neither are earthquakes.

What you need to worry about in this part of Italy is fire and water. In July 2021, the Montiferru fires burned roughly 20,000 hectares in Oristano province, forcing massive evacuations.

In November 2013, Cyclone Cleopatra dumped a season’s worth of rain in a few hours and killed 18 people, mostly around Olbia and Arzachena.

When buying here, trust the past as a predictor of the future, and see if the property you’re considering was anywhere near wildfires or floods.

Running the filter on Sardinia

In Sardinia, our population filter does most of the cutting. With a band of 15K to 100K residents, we go from 377 comuni to 14. From the excluded list, Cagliari and Sassari are the ones that are too big. The rest of the municipalities are all too small.

Seismic risk removes none of them. Services, almost none. The two exceptions are Sestu and Sinnai, both without a high school of their own. Down to 12.

Population stability is where things get serious: we go from 12 to just five. Nuoro (down 11.4%), Carbonia (11.7%), Iglesias (9.8%), and so on. Oristano is the narrowest miss of the series so far. Down 5.08% against our 5% threshold. It missed the mark by so little that I won’t blame you for considering it.

Five towns remain, clustered in two parts of the island. The Cagliari area and two northern coastal cities. The interior gets entirely filtered out.

The five that pass

1. Olbia

Olbia is a bit of an exception on the island. It’s the only city on this list that is actually growing aggressively, and it’s the demographically youngest in the whole region.

Its economy is powered by the port, the airport, and the money that trickles down from the nearby Costa Smeralda (the billionaires’ playground).

Olbia is also interesting for history buffs. It sits on top of a Roman fleet, dating to around 450 AD, that was discovered by a crew cutting a road tunnel by the seafront. The Museo Archeologico di Olbia holds the wrecks and is shaped like a moored ship.

Sounds lovely and it is. It’s also expensive. Gallura’s coast market is hot. In the summer, you’ll also have a constant stream of ferries and cruise ships dumping literal boatloads of tourists in the same streets you use to grab bread. Then October arrives, and the town breathes again.

Olbia is also where Cyclone Cleopatra did its worst damage in 2013. Make sure you check the flood history of the particular property you are considering.

Provided you have the budget, Olbia is a beautiful town with ancient history, a bustling port, great access to the rest of Italy, white sandy beaches nearby, actual jobs, and a pulse most of the year. Something quite rare on the island, which easily explains that +5.04% population growth over the past decade.

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Facebook groups about migration to and from Italy offer a mezzanine view of cultural differences between countries.

I’m a silent observer, watching people with different faces and different names tell the same stories, which feel like restless ghosts. Familiar ones, as I’ve been through their experiences myself.

A common story is the sociable Italian colliding with Canadian politeness.

You just arrived and start seeing strange social dynamics. Your mastery of the language, or lack thereof, takes the blame for a while, but years pass and that excuse fades. People are courteous, but courtesy does not build friendships.

It’s a bit like the hollow “how are you doing?” It doesn’t mean “come stai?” It means “hello.” The person asking might care about you, but the social script doesn’t know what to do with a real answer.

Extend that idea to other aspects of your social life, and Italians abroad are often caught off guard.

Last night, an Italian couple who moved to Canada complained about it in one of those Facebook groups. They couldn’t understand why people suggested getting together for dinner or grabbing coffee and then never did, or even cancelled on the day of. Multiple people in different social circles. Enough to form a visible pattern for them. The comments largely validated that experience.

To be fair to Canadians, the cancellations are not indifference. Distance is real, winter is real, and most people here build their lives around work in a way that leaves the weekend as the only unclaimed time of the week.

However, much like “how are you doing?”, “we should grab coffee” is not a social contract. It’s an “I like you,” and if you pry deep enough, it’s an “I like you, but Saturdays are essentially the only free time I have in my week, and I must protect my schedule at all costs.”

It’s not a promise, even if a date and time are set, so most locals shrug when things don’t happen, because everyone raised here reads that social grammar correctly.

The most memorable episode related to this happened a while back.

For context, my fiancée Alicia is so used to fellow Canadians cancelling plans that special preparations, if we are hosting, are left for the last minute, because the risk of cancellation feels remarkably high. The two of us have been left with lasagna and tiramisù for six people after hours of preparation, more than once. (Hey, I’m not complaining; my cardiologist is.)

The downside of this approach becomes evident when people actually follow through. It turns into a stressful scramble. But it is a habit we developed because, in our experience, plans here often remain possibilities rather than commitments.

Back to the story, I met a local Italian and invited him and his family over for dinner.

Alicia approached this like we always do, ready for the last-minute cramming in the remote chance they showed up. I told her, “Baby, Italians actually show up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust me, they might be late, but they’ll show up.”

And sure enough, they did show up, and on time. (In fairness, the guy is from the north-east of Italy. If he were from Naples like my relatives, dinner might have been at 9:30 pm.)

Yes, I had to explain to Alicia that Italians actually show up at get-togethers because the experience is not the norm locally.

As I was working on this very article, I received two messages relevant to the conversation.

The first was a Canadian friend cancelling our plans for coffee on Saturday morning. I genuinely laughed.

Thirty minutes later, a second message arrived from someone else confirming dinner for 6:30 pm, also on Saturday. The lovely couple who sent that message are Polish and Venezuelan. I’m highly confident the dinner will happen.

After decades abroad, I’ve noticed that many of the people who became my closest friends were not necessarily from the country where I was living. They were often people who, like me, came from somewhere else and brought different assumptions about what friendship requires.

My theory is that, regardless of nationality, immigrants don’t have the built-in social network the locals assembled in their formative years. So they largely embrace the idea that relationships require showing up and are willing to make the extra effort with new prospective friends.

Still, showing up is the default assumption in Italy. In my experience, Poland and Venezuela fall in the same bucket of countries where a social invitation binds you. Canada sits outside of it.

For people thinking about moving to Italy, this is easy to underestimate. Bureaucracy and wages are the headliners, but nobody warns you about how much of your calendar belongs to other people in a society like that.

If dinner is a promise, then your presence is a promise too. Your cancellation requires a legitimate reason. Feeling a bit tired won’t cut it; you’ll burn your social reputation quickly.

The other side of the coin in a society that values personal interactions is intrusion into your life and your time. For some, it’s social bliss; for others, it’s Kramer barging into Jerry’s apartment unannounced. It’s a trade-off (a fair one, even), but you should be aware of it before you move.

I know expats who relocated to Italy expecting to make lots of friends, then declined invitations or cancelled the ones they accepted, a little too often. Until invitations simply stopped coming.

In Italy, dinner is not just something that happens before an event. Dinner is the event. A three-hour meal with friends is not considered a waste of time. Conversation at the table is one of life’s great pleasures. So it is savored, and nobody asks for il conto (the bill) just because the plates have been cleared.

A friend who watched Perfetti sconosciuti told me he liked it, but felt it wasn’t realistic. “Who sits around the table for a whole two hours?” I told him, in Italy, that’s the most realistic part of the movie.

I don’t think one culture is just better than another. It’s a matter of what each society prioritizes and whether that priority jibes with what you want in life.

I grew up in Italy. To me, “come over for dinner” will always mean showing up and sitting at that table until nobody has anything left to say.

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“Pace” (pronounced pah-chay) is the ever-so-simple Italian word for one of the hardest things to get: peace. Many non-Italians find the flag depicted above intriguing, as it is not very well known outside of Italy, despite its international intentions and being in existence since 1961.

Firstly, one clarification. The colours vary slightly from the better-known rainbow pride flag by featuring seven colours, rather than six, and colours that often slightly differ in terms of shade. The colours are (from top to bottom) purple, blue, azure, green, yellow, orange, and red.

“With nonviolence, we recognize the right of everyone to exist; with non-mendacity, the right of everyone to truth.”
— Aldo Capitini (Poet, Activist, Philosopher, and Educator)

On December 23rd 1899, in Perugia, Aldo Capitini was born into a modest family, the son of the custodian of the town hall’s bell tower and a seamstress. Money was tight, and he was steered into practical accounting studies rather than the literature he loved. So he taught himself. As a young man he took up Latin and Greek as an autodidact, reportedly studying up to twelve hours a day, and the strain left him physically exhausted and frail. It was in those years, by his own account, that he first felt the fragility of a human life caught between birth and death. This physical struggle, and the solitude of a self-made scholar, led him to become a deep thinker.

Capitini was intrigued by philosophy, literature, and religion from a very early age in an attempt to find answers. Those proficient in war history may have noted the era of his birth as one which experienced the seemingly endless horrors of World War I. Capitini, despite being the perfect age for the draft, was not enlisted due to his poor health. However, that did not mean he was immune from the tragedies of the war. No one was, even if they were ill and on the sidelines. One notable quote that captures this:

“Forgetting the deeper unity beyond the war? I remain here, isolated from everybody, working for deeper togetherness.”

The neighbors who did not come home, the stories of friends and families meeting a horrible end, and the economic hardships were apparent to all who were living. There is little doubt that this left a profound impression on the young Capitini. The war was the catalyst that led him to pursue deeper meaning through philosophy, and eventually motivated him to find ways to share his vast knowledge for the hope of a better and more peaceful world. With the war ending, he worked toward a master’s degree in philosophy, and like many young people, worked on finding his identity both politically and socially.

In the late 1920s, Capitini found himself captivated by the teachings of Gandhi. These readings and the political changes surrounding him led to a great change in his philosophy and lifestyle. In an effort to become even more pacifistic, he became vegetarian. In a country that loves its traditional meats, in an era where conformity was praised, that was an incredibly radical and rare form of activism in itself. He had found deep comfort in faith, but soon that faith was shaken, and personal change followed.

Life in the shadow of fascism

A charismatic dictator named Mussolini arrived on the political scene, quite uninvited, bringing violence with his army of Blackshirts and the deaths of many who opposed him. After gaining power, and under much pressure, Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty in 1929. It resolved a rift that had lasted since 1870: the Vatican secured recognition as a distinct sovereign nation and was compensated for the Papal States that Italy had absorbed decades earlier. The irreligious Mussolini now had everything in place to keep Catholicism from interfering with his larger goals. To Capitini, this was a betrayal, and he saw the church as complicit in the rise of fascist power.

By 1930, he secured employment at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa as its secretary. He found himself surrounded by like-minded, or sympathetic, students who also shared a desire for political change and pacifism. Soon, he made two bold moves that would cost him his employment. Capitini became a conscientious objector, and also declined an invitation to join the Fascist Party that was extended to him by the director of the school. This was the end of his formal employment, but in a sense provided him with greater freedom.

He returned home to Perugia and began to teach private lessons. He was no longer under the thumb of an institution and could continue his research, writing, and activism more readily until the end of the war. Amazingly, he even managed to publish three books during the fascist era that passed censorship and were widely praised.

Post WW2 activism

While settling into the life of a citizen in the new Italian Republic, Capitini formed the Centro di Orientamento Sociale (Centre for Social Orientation). Despite its initial success and spread across Italy, this movement soon faded into history due to opposition from the Christian Democratic Party and lack of political support in general. He had hoped left-leaning political groups would take interest, but he was left disappointed.

Soon he found himself touring Europe as a public speaker, meeting with like-minded people at conferences in Rome, London, and beyond. He spoke of non-violence and vegetarianism, and enjoyed discussions around the teachings of his mentor Gandhi. The fame that followed him soon landed him in Sardinia as a professor at the University of Cagliari, and eventually things went full circle and he was approved for a transfer to the University of Perugia.

The 60s were the perfect era for Capitini, as you can well imagine. He now found himself in an era where the public desire for peace was greater, questions were being asked of superiors, and the public felt safer to demonstrate. He now had a captive youthful audience and realized this was the time for on-the-ground activism.

Upon reflection, he realized every movement needs a symbol to unite under, and to convey a clear message. The fascists had a bundle of wooden rods with an axe, the communists had their hammer and sickle, and yet he was without one to represent the contrary. He soon found himself looking to other movements for one to adopt, or even modify.

The flag is raised

In 1912, a U.S. Methodist pastor named James Van Kirk created a “World Peace Flag.” It featured a blue background with yellow stars, and in the foreground the Earth with a rectangle of rainbows beside it connected by lines. He felt this idea came to him from God himself. Van Kirk wanted to express the many colours of the human family in the rainbow (with a nod to the biblical rainbow after the Great Flood), represent international cooperation through the connected lines, and add stars to represent nations. This flag was used in various forms at demonstrations and became the inspiration for Capitini and others.

Despite Capitini’s aversion to organized religion, many close to him speculated that he was inspired by seeing this flag from the campaign for nuclear disarmament in England. The rainbow was seen as a symbol of peace and hope after the great storm that was WW2.

Capitini urged the 12-year-old daughter of his friends on the committee, Francesca Siciliani, to gather fabric. With the help of two older girls, they sewed the first flag. The colours differ from those of today, perhaps due to a sense of urgency, fading over time, and limited materials. But the moment of its creation was symbolic in itself: a group of people collaborating, using what they had, and creating something in the name of nonviolence for the world. Something bright and uplifting contrasted with the starkness of black, brown, and red used in violent movements.

The flag debuted in Perugia in 1961 at the 24 Km “March for Peace and the Brotherhood of Peoples” with the intent of encouraging people to ease international tensions. Along the way, Capitini saw, much to his frustration, many marchers holding the blood-red flag of communist movements that had swept much of Italy after the fall of Mussolini. According to Francesca, he was frustrated as he felt “peace in the world should not take political sides.” After the march ended in Assisi, Capitini gave the flag to Francesca.

One may wonder: what became of the flag over the years? This would not be an Italian article without the usual dose of controversy. There are two rival claims to the original. The Imago Mundi Foundation, in Treviso, has exhibited what it calls the only surviving example of the flags made for the 1961 march, the one it says Capitini gave to Francesca. But a second flag, kept in Perugia, makes the same claim; it came down through Lanfranco Mencaroni, a friend and collaborator of Capitini, who handed it to the city in 2011. Both carry their own stories of previous owners and of how they arrived where they are.

Pace da tutti i balconi

After the death of Capitini in 1968 (a mere seven years after the famous 1961 march), the flag lived on and carried out its purpose. It even received a makeover. Somewhere along the way, it began to appear with the white lettering of PACE. It is unknown when exactly this started, but these versions began to appear in the 1990s. Some say it was added to differentiate itself from the Pride flag, but this is not confirmed.

In 2002, the pace flag received its biggest moment, one that made it visible again to younger generations and cemented it into Italian history.

As the Iraq war loomed, with the war in Afghanistan already underway, a campaign called “Pace da tutti i balconi” was launched. It translated as “peace from every balcony,” and asked everyone to hang the flag from their balconies as a call for peace.

Many say the founder of this movement was the missionary Father Alex Zanotelli, but it has been clarified that he was the face of a larger collective movement organized by the Catholic movement “Pax Christi.”

It was a success. Italians who felt weary of war, even if it was beyond their shores, felt the same frustration and helplessness that was at the core of Capitini’s early experience. In a moment of unity, they began to hang the flags from every balcony, and soon every piazza was cloaked in a patchwork of peaceful solidarity for all to see. This moment solidified the flag’s place at future protests and events, and as an everyday reminder that peace starts with us.

In closing, a boy from a poor house beneath the town hall’s bell tower taught himself in near-monastic solitude, then rose from his desk and stepped outside. He started to walk. His walk became a purposeful march, others joined him in this journey, and he marked his place in history with a flag for everyone.

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Umbria is a region in central Italy. It sits between Tuscany and Marche, sharing some of the landscape and cultural characteristics of both.

The pitch is this: it’s cheaper than Tuscany by a wide margin, and you get fewer crowds. If you love great food and wine, nature, and medieval towns, you can’t go wrong with Umbria. It’s called the green heart of Italy and, for the most part, it’s a slice of peace.

The price to pay is the lack of coastline (beautiful Lake Trasimeno notwithstanding), shaky ground, and young people leaving.

This is part of my series evaluating Italian towns for relocation by applying objective filters. So far we’ve covered Marche, Tuscany, Veneto, Campania, Abruzzo, and Piedmont. Today, we’re covering Umbria.

When I delved into Piedmont, we started with 1180 comuni (municipalities) and reached 40 candidates by applying our usual criteria. We actually deployed an extra filter to get to a more manageable shortlist of 20 towns.

Umbria has the opposite problem. We are starting with only 92 comuni, so instead of adding filters, we’ll relax one and end up with five livable candidates.

Assisi makes the cut. Some of the other famous names like Spoleto, Orvieto, and Gubbio do not. In Umbria, three filters do virtually all of the work: population, seismic risk, and depopulation.

What Umbria is actually like to live in

Umbria has roughly 850,000 people spread across just two provinces: Perugia, the capital of the region, and Terni.

Perugia is a proper full-sized city that stays vibrant thanks to its two universities. It’s big on art, history, and chocolate. Terni is a strange one. It combines an industrial steel legacy with a romantic side (St. Valentine was born here) and Roman roots (the Cascate delle Marmore, built by the Romans, are the tallest manmade waterfalls in Europe).

Il Sole 24 Ore’s 2025 quality-of-life index placed Perugia 37th out of 107 provinces and Terni 48th. ItaliaOggi, using a different method, put Perugia 40th and Terni 45th. Both indices agree: they sit comfortably in the middle of the table, which is fitting for a region in the center of the country.

If we dig further, more useful details emerge. Perugia does well on climate, demography, health, and education. It fails on theft and workplace safety. Terni is cheap, fourth in Italy for rental costs, but people are leaving, and it’s almost dead last for climate (literally 106th out of 107). Its frequent extreme heatwaves make it unbearable in summer. (As I write this, the temperature there is 37ºC / 99ºF at 5 PM.)

The region is also split from a seismic risk perspective. 18 comuni sit in Zone 1, the riskiest tier (most along the eastern edge). Notable examples include Foligno, Spoleto, Trevi, and Campello. All of these are excluded as candidates.

Local jobs outside of the two provincial capitals are few and carry modest wages. You move to Umbria for the slow life, ideally with your own source of income, not for a career.

The one genuine upside is that Umbria became the third Italian region to finish the government rural-fiber project, reaching 77 small comuni. So remote work from Umbria is a viable option without having to get Starlink.

English-wise, Italy is last in the EU, and Umbria is mid-pack at best in Italy. You can expect some English while shopping in Perugia or visiting Assisi, but plan to speak Italian for everything else (Linguetto can help).

Being a region of the center, Umbria doesn’t qualify for the southern 7% retiree tax regime. The few comuni that would are those included in the crateri list. In other words, it’s an incentive to get you to live in areas massively affected by the 2016 earthquakes. We exclude such towns by design in our framework, so no town on our shortlist qualifies for the 7% program.

Where to live in Umbria: running the filter

As a recap, our filters are: a town of 15,000 to 100,000 residents, no seismic Zone 1, a full emergency room within a 25-minute drive, a high school inside the comune, supermarkets and fiber, and a population that hasn’t declined 5% or more in a decade (ISTAT counts, 2014 to 2024).

For Umbria, this aggressive filtering leaves us with a very small shortlist, so I relaxed the population floor from 15,000 to 10,000 and checked that the resulting additional list still had all the services you’d need. One of them did.

Starting with 92 comuni, we lose 75 to size: Perugia (162k residents) and Terni (106k residents) are too big, and 73 are below 10,000 people.

Foligno and Spoleto are the right size but excluded, as mentioned above, on account of their Zone 1 seismic classification. Corciano and San Giustino have no high school of their own and are out.

Depopulation is where the screening gets serious. Many viable candidates are emptying, including towns well known for their beauty: Orvieto, Todi, Narni, Gubbio, Città di Castello, etc. All above the 5% decline threshold.

Let’s review the five that survive every filter.

1. Assisi

• Province: Perugia (PG)

• Population: 27,400

• Seismic risk: Zone 2

• Stability: -2.82% (2014-2024)

• Price range: €1,050-2,500/m² (avg €1,474)

• 7% eligible: No

• ER: In town

• Train station: In town

Assisi is the most obvious choice on the list. Just the right size, well-known, beautiful, well-serviced, and, in the center, many shopkeepers speak basic English.

Before you get too excited, a clarification is in order. The comune of Assisi has several frazioni (hamlets), the most well-known of which is Santa Maria degli Angeli on the flat, where the train and the Flixbus drop you off.

When you see relatively cheap real estate prices (around €1,400 a meter), you’re dealing with properties in the hamlets on the flat. The Assisi center on the hill will push you to €2,500 per square meter, sometimes more.

The hilltop Assisi is also a major tourist destination. Think over 5 million people a year, a mini Florence. Many of the visitors are pilgrims devoted to Saint Francis, Saint Clare, and more recently Saint Carlo Acutis.

My fiancée Alicia called it Catholic Disneyland, and it does have that feeling. A city fully catered to its Catholic visitors, including sacramentals in every other shop.

I recently re-visited it in May during the 800th-anniversary year of the death of Saint Francis, and it was as charming as ever. That said, I think overtourism has changed the city, making it more transactional and less hospitable than nearby Umbrian towns.

It’s a city that punches well above its weight in terms of services. The hospital has a real ER, and it’s good. There are schools all the way through liceo (the better high schools). The train station is on the plain, but it’s in town and well connected to Perugia. Frequent trains get you there in 20 minutes. The population has been stable for a decade.

Budget and tolerance for tourism would determine where you’d live in Assisi. If you can splurge and don’t mind the crowds, the hilltop is enchanting. If you prefer more peace and cheaper housing, Santa Maria degli Angeli or one of the many other hamlets is the way to go.

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

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

The two walls

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

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

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

Without cheating, this is what I think it means:

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

The real translation is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A B2 reader can translate every word:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tier 1: Easy Italian books

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tier 2: the bridge to B2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tier 3: the traps

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

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

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

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

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

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

It takes a genuine C1 reader to tackle this.

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

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

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

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

How to climb the two walls

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

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

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

That is the day the second wall comes down.

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