How to Choose Where to Live in Italy
A new series to help you choose where to live in Italy, region by region. Starting with the criteria that separate a town you'll love from one you'll regret.
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You decided to move to Italy. You’re both excited and scared. You might even have a region or two in mind. The real question becomes: where, exactly? There are almost 8,000 comuni (towns) in Italy to choose from.
Pick right, and your experience in Italy will be largely wonderful. Pick wrong, and the experience becomes far harder than it needs to be.
In a previous post, I argued that moving to a tiny village in Italy is almost always a mistake. In the process of writing that article, I developed a framework to identify worthy candidates for relocation. The target is città di provincia. Cities that are neither too small nor too big.
I refined that framework for this new series and will present it here with its rationale. You’ll then be able to use it yourself to find places to consider for your move to Italy.
Note
This framework is designed primarily for remote workers, retirees, and financially independent expats. If you need to find local employment, job opportunities will dictate where you move. (Spoiler: You’ll likely end up in large cities like Rome and Milan.)
In future posts in the series, I’ll do the work for you, saving you countless hours by applying the framework to each region, one post at a time. Each of the twenty posts will give you specific towns that passed all criteria for your consideration. I expect a handful or two of comuni per region to pass these filters, giving you a narrow shortlist of candidates.
Paid subscribers get the full homework, including details of the candidate cities. Free subscribers get the regional overview and the details for one candidate city. Subscribe if you don’t already, so you don’t miss it.
Italy’s main problems
Zooming out, Italy is a wonderful place to live. It also has a few systemic problems. In short:
Bureaucracy
Lack of jobs
Stagnant salaries
Depopulation and lack of public services in inland villages
Aging demographic
Lack of integration of new populations
Seismic risk in some regions
Air pollution in the Po Valley
Organized crime in some regions
Our framework will address most of these, minimizing these systemic problems as much as possible.
Requirements for our candidate towns
No amount of filtering fixes all of Italy’s problems. But we can screen out cities and towns that make things worse for a would-be expat.
So here is a checklist I came up with, split into must-haves and genuinely nice-to-haves, but not mandatory.
Must-have
Population between 15,000 and 100,000
Not in Seismic Zone 1, or any current red-zone or active post-seismic reconstruction designation.
A hospital with an ER (pronto soccorso) within 25 minutes
A scuola superiore (high school) in town
A full supermarket in town
Fiber internet available
A stable population: no more than a roughly 5% decline over the last ten years
Nice-to-have
A train station
Within 30 minutes of a capoluogo di provincia (provincial capital), or is one itself
Why these filters
Let’s review why these filters in particular:
A population between 15,000 and 100,000 does most of the work for you. It’s a size that ensures neither big-city chaos nor a lack of community, while preventing you from living in a semi-abandoned village that lacks key services. Around the 15K threshold, most comuni begin to have essentials not explicitly listed in our filter, like pharmacies (plural), schools, full-time municipal staff, etc.
The seismic filter protects you from the most dangerous earthquake areas.
A real hospital no farther than 25 minutes away ensures true emergencies (e.g., a heart attack) are handled promptly. It’s also generally a proxy for the existence of specialists and other healthcare providers in the area.
A high school in town is a good signal about the demographics. It means there are enough young people around to justify its existence, and you are not moving into a town where you’ll be the youngest resident at 35.
Most towns will have a bar and an alimentari (a small food shop). But commuting to the next town over for proper grocery shopping gets old fast. Having a full supermarket like Conad, CRAI, Eurospin, etc. ensures your essential needs are covered right in town.
Fiber internet being largely available in a city or town is important because the majority of people pulling off a move will do so as remote workers. If this isn’t you, you can ignore it. But I think it also acts as a proxy for other modern services and technology infrastructure investments in the area.
The stability check is there as a ghost-town test. Even if a place has 15K people today, it could be a bad candidate because it has been bleeding people. This filter ensures spopolamento (depopulation) is not a major factor affecting your chosen town.
The train station is a nice-to-have. Many lovely places in Italy won't have one. However, its presence gives you easier access to the rest of Italy. Trains in Italy are efficient, ubiquitous, and cheap. Having a train station right in town makes your weekends significantly more exciting. It enables countless day trips that would otherwise require a car.
A provincial capital being nearby is a major plus. Whatever your little town lacks, the province nearby will have. Plus, the Questura (where you renew your permesso di soggiorno, that is, your residence permit) will be at a sane distance.
Where a region clears 20-plus comuni, I'll cover the 10 I'd shortlist myself and list the rest in full.
What is not on the list
The filters are admittedly missing a few important factors that cannot be reliably included in this filtering exercise.
Air quality. There is no monitoring for all 7,900 comuni. So I won’t pretend to know exact numbers and filter towns on this basis. In regions where this is an issue (mostly those around the Pianura Padana, the Po Valley), I will mention it at the regional level, and you can decide if it’s a factor for you.
English proficiency. It would be amazing to have reliable English-level proficiency data at the town level. But it simply doesn’t exist. Even regional English-level data is shaky at best. So I’ll let you know if a given region has particularly good or bad English proficiency, but we cannot filter towns on this basis. Assume that anywhere outside major cities will require Italian. (My site Linguetto can help you learn, by the way.)
Organized crime. It remains a factor in parts of southern Italy and other selected pockets of the country. I’ll give you regional context, since there is no reliable source for organized crime data at the town-level. There are some egregious examples (and I’ll mention them if they pass the rest of the filters), but it will mostly be a discussion at the regional level. And I’ll let you know if and how this affects you if you move there.
One rule for the whole series
Some regions will have few comuni that pass all our filters. In fact, some regions might have none.
When that happens, I will relax some of the criteria and explain why I chose those. I will disclose when this happens, and the fact that I had to adjust a given region should be useful information in itself.
Stay tuned for the first post in the series later this week.
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