Moving to a Tiny Village in Italy Is Almost Always a Mistake
Five thousand of Italy's roughly 7,900 comuni are dying. A smart framework for finding the right size of Italian town instead.
Italy with Antonio. Honest guides for moving to, traveling in, and understanding Italy from a native Italian. Three articles a week, with deeper resources for paid subscribers. Join 1,000+ subscribers.
Somewhere along the line you came to the realization that the way you’re living isn’t sustainable. Stress kills. As you think of a solution, Italy keeps popping up as the answer.
So you book the flight to scout the country for hidden gems. You rent a car, drive into the hills, and find a charming village forty kilometers from the coast.
The piazza is fairly busy. You see people eating at a trattoria, kids kicking the ball around, a few old people playing cards outside a café. There is even a van selling delicious porchetta.
Could this really be it?
Not so fast. What you don’t see, because you flew back home a week later, is that same village in February. It’s actually fairly cold. The one bar is open but has selective hours. The trattoria is mostly empty. The piazza, silent.
You also don’t see the scuolabus carrying only a handful of kids to school. The ambulance taking forty minutes to get to town. The two cars driving by each hour.
Which version of the town did you bring home with you?
The gap is the real issue. The town didn’t lie to you. You showed up just in time to see the village’s best weeks of the year.
By “tiny village” in this article, I mean a town of 3,000 residents or less. That’s more than half of all Italian comuni (municipalities).
The July mirage
The July version of the village you fell in love with is real. But so is the empty February one. Tourists made it seem alive, but it’s a shot of adrenaline that is missing the rest of the year.
Nortosce, in Umbria became famous for being one of the ghost towns with only two year-round inhabitants. Extreme, for sure, but also the general direction many Apennine comuni are headed to.
Borghi (plural of borgo, small historic villages) are genuinely charming. Their beautiful architecture endures whether they are busy or sleepy. The problem is the thinning community.
My number one tip is to visit any candidate place in Italy in February or November, not just in July. If it feels 80% less alive, believe that 80%.
Before we proceed, I need to clarify that this isn’t an anti-moving to Italy piece. In fact, I’m a big proponent of moving to Italy under the right conditions. It is a warning to save you a lot of money, time, and loneliness when you pick the wrong size town to move to. I’m here to help you find the right fit.
Many municipalities in Italy are dying
Italy has almost 7,900 comuni. Five thousand or so have been depopulating for years. A thousand are essentially ghost towns. In the remaining rural towns, only a fraction of the residents are under the age of 24.
Most smaller Italian comuni are dying. It’s not a problem that is exclusive to the south either. Northern inland borghi face the same challenges.
The Italian word for this is spopolamento and it’s a subject that has been discussed in Italy for decades now. Young people leave the small towns for the bigger cities. Older people that remain eventually die. The borgo empties. There are literally two million abandoned houses across rural Italy, many of them in the Apennines. Those villages are cheap for a reason: almost no locals want to live there.
The romantic, almost naïve question to ask is, “which tiny village do I want to move to?” The more realistic and prudent one is, “which village will not become a ghost town in five to ten years?”
Pick any comune montano (mountain municipality) without considering its collapse curve and you are choosing a charming place to be lonely in.
The €1 house is usually a trap
Let’s briefly address the one-euro houses deals you see advertised. They too are often located in small, depopulating villages.
The deal still seems sweet enough, though. €1. I mean, even if it’s lonely I don’t have to live there year round. For €1, come on.
Here is the thing: €1 is not the real price.
First and foremost, there is usually a bando (public call) listing the dilapidated homes. People will bid, so the €1 price is virtually never the winning bid. €5,000 to €25,000 is more realistic.
You’ll be asked to put down a €5,000 deposit and commit to renovating the property. You’ll need to start renovations within a year, and finish in 2-3 years. Miss the deadline and you lose your deposit (or in some cases, the property).
And don’t think about North American renovations. You’re working with locals who speak zero English. They are often off a very short list of contractors you can use. Keeping them on task is a challenge in itself.
And the real renovation cost? Best case scenario €30,000. Worst case scenario over six figures.
The €1 price is a marketing entry. Real total cost runs €40,000 to €400,000.
A Chicago buyer won a Sambuca (almost 6K people, in Sicily) one-euro home. It ended up costing her shy of half a million dollars. She ended up with a beautiful home, but half a million dollars buys you a gorgeous home in most of Italy.
For much less, you can buy something liveable from day one in a town with a working hospital, a high school, and a degree of aliveness that survives past the summer.
The practical purpose of the one-euro homes is to transfer the cost of restoring unwanted properties onto foreign buyers, because Italians have no appetite for them.
Owning a house also doesn’t get you residency. That’s a separate problem.
Universal healthcare is not so universal
In January 2025, the mayor of Belcastro, one such tiny comune in Calabria, decided to draw attention to the healthcare challenges by launching a provocation.
He passed an ordinance making it illegal to get sick, especially during the weekends. Their clinic is mostly closed. The guardia medica (after-hours on-call doctor) often isn’t staffed. The nearest pronto soccorso (ER) is 45 kilometers away in Catanzaro. Roughly half the residents are over 65.
Italy’s national health service is universal on paper. In practice, it’s managed by the regions and there is a huge gap between the south and the north, and between small towns and big cities.
Even in the north, tiny towns struggle to have adequate healthcare if they are not adjacent to larger cities.
The single most important healthcare metric when considering a village is the drive time to the nearest pronto soccorso. 15 minutes is ideal. 25 minutes is acceptable. Over that, and anyone with kids, a medical condition, or over 60, should honestly reconsider their choice.
The earthquake zones are recruiting too
By now you know that the one-euro homes are mostly a trap. Here’s another one: homes in the so called crateri sismici (areas of the country heavily damaged by earthquakes).
If you’re not familiar with it, the short version is that central Italy was hit by major earthquakes in 2009 (L’Aquila), then again in 2016-2017.
A lot of beautiful inland comuni in the Marche, Umbria, Lazio, and Abruzzo region were genuinely affected.
As you might expect, most people have left such towns at an even greater rate than other isolated towns in Italy. So the government is trying to recruit foreign retirees with the same 7% flat tax that applies to south Italy. That means you could get this sweet tax deal on your foreign pension without many of the shortcomings of the south.
The goal of the government, and I’m quoting here, is to make the cratere “the new Portugal.”
It’s not. They are still towns sitting on fault lines. They are still often struggling with reconstruction a decade later.
If you’re going to move to a tiny village in Italy, this is likely the riskiest choice you can possibly make.
“We’ll just drive” is not the answer
The trouble with tiny towns in Italy is that they often lack services in-town. Need a grocery store? The local alimentari (foodstuff shop) will have some basics only. You’ll need to go to the larger town a while away.
Want restaurants? One or two if you’re lucky. Pharmacy? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. School? Again, next town. Hospital? Well, no, the bigger town over does, however.
The bus that does take you to that larger town runs twice a day, except on Sunday. Be sure to not miss it!
“We’ll just drive” sounds like the solution until you start realizing what it actually means. Every errand will now take a 45-90 minute round trip. In an emergency, where you really shouldn’t be driving, the ambulance might take what seems like an eternity.
And about that driving thing. Most non-EU licenses, including American, Australian, and Canadian licenses, stop being valid twelve months after you establish your residency. There is no reciprocity with Italy and you can’t convert yours to theirs.
So you’ll have to enroll into an autoscuola (surprisingly expensive), genuinely study for weeks or months, pass a theoretical exam with very technical Italian that trips us Italians too, and then pass a strict driving test.
“Well, I’ve been driving for 40 years” you’ll tell yourself. That’s the actual problem. You picked up habits they don’t like. You’ll have to unlearn them, at least for the Oscar-worthy performance you need to put on during the exam.
Older village homes are also often without central heating and AC is usually nonexistent. The typical energy classification is G, the worst possible rating, which has two unpleasant implications: 1) Your heating bill in the winter will be hundreds of euros per month; 2) Current EU plans are pushing toward stricter energy-efficiency requirements by the 2030s, potentially requiring costly upgrades for poorly rated homes.
And if you are a remote worker, prepare for very slow internet speeds. Yes, fiber is increasingly common in Italy, but not in isolated mountainous villages.
If your nearest ER, supermarket, fiber address, or high school is more than 25 minutes away, the village isn’t your new home. It’s an isolation exercise for misanthropes or masochists. In Italian. Often in dialect.
Small comuni have slow bureaucracy
You might think that a small comune will have faster bureaucracy. Fewer cases to handle equals less time, after all. Except, tiny towns have limited staff to handle the bureaucracy.
A tiny town of 2000 people might have a couple of clerks open to the public on selected mornings of the week. And yes, they would have processed zero non-EU residency practices before yours. You get to learn the process together. How exciting, slow, and error prone.
Permesso di soggiorno (the document that allows you to stay in Italy) renewals do not happen at the comune. They happen at the Questura (police headquarters) in the capoluogo di provincia (provincial capital).
From a tiny inland village, you can often expect a 60-90 minute trip each way, each time you need to renew it or you missed some document.
The resale wall
“OK, Antonio, I hear you, but I can try, and worst case scenario, I’ll sell.”
I’m gonna stop you right there. In a tiny, depopulating comune there is no resale market. Your house will not move 60 days later because it’s a slow market, as it would in your home country.
The house will stay unsold for many months if you are lucky. More realistically, many years.
The one-euro homes are an extreme case of that, but they exist precisely because no private buyer in Italy is interested in them.
And the foreign demand has mostly to do with clever marketing around a handful of villages (e.g., Mussomeli, Sambuca) where international media ran with the stories and provided million dollars’ worth of marketing for free. It doesn’t generalize to the rest of the tiny villages.
Most depopulated comuni have OMI (Agenzia delle Entrate per-square-meter values) as low as €200 to €500 per square meter. Again, because virtually nobody is willing to buy.
Treat any tiny village purchases as a likely sunk cost. Don’t buy it if you expect to sell it.
Where to actually buy in Italy
The fix isn’t “stay home.” The fix is going up one size.
First, figure out in which region you want to live. Once you know, start searching for towns and small cities in the 15,000 to 50,000 range, ideally within 30 minutes of a capoluogo di provincia.
This is the sweet spot. The one that still gives you a walkable centro storico, daily or weekly markets, a proper piazza, slow pace, and affordability (in most places). You also gain a working secondary school, a hospital with an ER, a Questura nearby, and a rental market that might be slow but does exist if you decide to leave.
This is the must-have checklist I’d recommend:
Population 15,000 to 50,000
Hospital with an ER within 25 minutes
A proper supermarket in town
High school in town
Fiber availability
Not in a Seismic Zone 1 (the worst zone) or on the crateri sismici list
Nice to have:
Has a train station
Within 30 minutes from a capoluogo di provincia
This is not an extensive list, but it’s a proxy for many other requirements we don’t need to explicitly state. A 15,000+ town has pharmacies, plural. It’s the threshold where Italian law starts guaranteeing a lot of essential services.
Most of inland Italy is Zone 2, which means real seismic risk but historically not as damaging as Zone 1. If you’re buying or renting inland in Zone 2, check for seismic retrofitting. A modern reinforced building in Zone 2 is pretty safe and I would comfortably live there myself.
Let’s find a town
Let’s test out the approach to find a target town in Abruzzo.
It’s geographically in the center of Italy but classified by ISTAT as a southern region. So retirees also get the 7% flat tax advantage in towns below 30,000 inhabitants.
Plus, the weather is nice, the air is clean, the people are friendly, the food is amazing, and it’s inexpensive. It’s a very defensible choice.
