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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.)
