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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.
I’ve been retired in Rome for 12 years. It’s a completely different experience than anyone trying to make ends meet. No worries about salary, privileged status, taxes on wages. My experience with bureaucracy hasn’t even been that bad. I read your blog a bit like an outsider, one with a wry smile for having the lifestyle that I do.
By the time I got to #4, my thinking was "yes, all good points. But that's it." Then the next one was right, and the next. The lack of food diversity is real, but it isn't relevant here in Rome. With most of these valid points I find I just get used to it and don't think about it.
Your #9 particularly made me laugh. There is no direct air connection from Rome to central Florida, where I go to visit family. And so I always have a connection somewhere -- usually Atlanta or New York -- and it always makes me realize I'm heading home to Italy when I see how much chaos there is around the gate!
Thank you for the shoutout on my "dietrologia" post!