Is Making Friends in Italy Really That Hard for Expats?

Italians are social and warm. But making friends in Italy as an expat is harder than tourists assume. A native’s take on what actually works.

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Italians are some of the most social people in Europe, along with our Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek cousins.

We’ll talk to you at the bus stop (something that will horrify my Finnish readers), at the bar, at the post office, even at the comune (town hall) while waiting for paperwork that nobody fully understands.

We’ll pet your dog without asking. We’ll stare, then compliment your outfit. We’ll tell you we love your accent and that your Italian is great. We mean it. Yet, none of it implies we’re about to become your friend.

That’s the honest answer. Visit Italy as a tourist, and the country feels open. Move there, and you’ll find that making friends as an expat is harder than your vacation suggested.

The reason isn’t that Italians are cold. It’s the opposite. Italians already have many close friends, often the same ones for decades. There’s no obvious gap a new arrival needs to fill.

I moved around a lot. Nine years in Rome, then ten in Marche, then Milan, then Ireland in my early twenties, then Canada. Add a short stint in the US. Four countries, probably 20 different cities.

So I take an unusual angle on this question. I know what social life in Italy is like from the inside. I also know how it feels to land somewhere new and start to assemble a social life with no instructions in a language you’ve only begun to speak.

They aren’t the same sport.

Friends in the Dolomites. The kind of group expats spend a year building.

Warm country, closed circles

This is the contradiction many expats face in their first year. When my fiancée Alicia first visited Italy, she was shocked by how social Italy felt.

People chatting loudly in public. Bars packed for aperitivo. Old men arguing about soccer outside the tabaccheria, the all-purpose tobacco/bus tickets/newsstand shop you find at every corner.

Then we sat down with friends I’ve known since I was a kid. They were warm with Alicia, asked her questions, and never let her feel left out. They loved her. She loved them. And yet, under the surface, you could see the insider connections seep through.

They finished each other’s sentences. They made references that Alicia couldn’t possibly know. Even with me as a bridge, there were whole stretches not worth translating. Not because they couldn’t be translated, but because they were conversations that started 25 years ago.

The funniest moment came when we went for coffee with my old high-school math teacher and a few friends. Alicia thought the guy was hilarious, but she walked out worried. “I usually understand the gist of Italian conversations,” she said. “I got none of what you didn’t explicitly translate.”

Turns out my teacher had spoken at full speed in strict Montegiorgese dialect for a solid hour. I had to reassure her that her Italian was fine. The dialect would have lost most non-local Italians, too.

Italian friendships often start in childhood and develop through the school years. That’s thirteen years with more or less the same people, often in the same town. By the time you’re in your twenties, your closest friends are people you have known since you were six.

That dynamic isn’t hostile to outsiders. It just doesn’t have a documented procedure for “new adult wants in.”

Why making friends in Italy takes longer than expats expect

There’s a second factor, and it’s geographic.

Most Italians don’t move much. They are born somewhere and end up living within an hour of where their family is. Often in the same building where multiple generations of their family live. When they do move, it’s usually Southerners going north for work.

When I moved to Dublin, Toronto, or San Francisco, almost everyone I met was from somewhere else. The shared assumption was that we were all new, trying to figure it out more or less together by comparing notes.

In Italy, there is the inverse assumption. We are all from here. Why do I need new people when I already have the ones I want?

It isn’t snobbery. You are simply joining a card game that has already started. The burden of integrating falls almost entirely on you, the expat.

The Italian friendliness map is not what you think

The north is cold, the south is warm, weather and social temperature-wise. Right? Not so fast. This is directionally correct, but there are exceptions.

The ISTAT provides a rather counterintuitive piece of data. According to their Equitable and Sustainable Well-being report (BES) that tracks a metric called People You Can Count On, there isn’t a huge divide between the south and the north when it comes to perceived social support networks. Valle d’Aosta, Marche, and Sardinia all do well, regardless of their vastly different geography, weather, and infrastructure.

That said, the stereotype does hold for the most part. A 2024 analysis of the data found that southern and island regions have shown growing community support over the past decade, while several northern regions have seen theirs decline.

Here’s what that looks like for key regions.

Campania, Puglia, Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata: warm people who will loudly extend their hospitality to you early on. You will be invited to come over for coffee or for Sunday lunch. Your local bar will know your order within a week. They’ll teach you dialect words. Bring you figs or oranges from their garden.

I mean, Naples is the place that invented caffè sospeso, the widely adopted practice of paying for two coffees, so that someone who can’t pay can have one on you.

The price to pay for incredible friendliness is a little bit of invadenza (intrusiveness) and slow services. Healthcare outside of major cities is suboptimal, bureaucracy is slower than the rest of Italy, youth unemployment in Sicily and Calabria runs over 35%, and organized crime lives here.

With a remote income, you’ll be immune to some of the issues, but you won’t escape other systemic inefficiencies altogether. So, you’ll wait a long time for a specialist visit, but not even a week for a dinner invitation.

Emilia-Romagna is an anomaly in the otherwise socially cold north. People from Emilia-Romagna are genuinely warm. They eat, drink, dance, and host with an enthusiasm closer to Naples than to Milan.

The region was named Lonely Planet’s best place to visit in Europe in 2018, and visitors consistently report being welcomed in a way that doesn’t match the cold-north stereotype.

If you want northern infrastructure (high-speed trains, good hospitals, reliable internet) without sacrificing social warmth, Emilia-Romagna is the pragmatic answer.

The air quality is a bit of a concern for sensitive populations, but it’s otherwise an objectively strong contender as one of the best regions to move to in Italy. Bologna, in particular, is a university city with a genuinely open social culture, in part because students cycle through regularly and locals are used to it.

Lombardy and Piedmont (Milan, Turin) are the transactional north. Everything works, but don’t expect a whole lot of warmth from the local population.

People here are professional, busy, and direct. Your colleague is unlikely to help you move a sofa. In contrast, in Naples, a nonna you spoke to twice will rile up four different people from her balcony to help you out. One is chaotic and warm. The other is measured and cooler.

On the other hand, Milan has the densest expat scene in Italy and the most events, which helps year one and traps you by year three if you let it. It also has a lot of people from the South who came here for work.

Trentino-Alto Adige, Veneto, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia are the cooler north. Don’t confuse spritz culture with social openness. Venetians and Friulani socialize hard within existing groups, but breaking in as a foreigner is harder than in Emilia-Romagna.

They also have a strong preference for dialect over standard Italian in private settings, making it more challenging for expats. Trentino-Alto Adige is closer to Austria culturally than to the rest of Italy.

All beautiful regions to live in. Slower places to make friends.

Marche, Umbria, and the small-town center. The slow-integration zone.

Marchigiani are friendly and welcoming but reserved. Umbria (and to some extent Abruzzo) is not much different. Follow the advice further down, and you'll get there.

Tuscany and Lazio (Rome). Tuscans are charming, funny, and a little smug. They are well aware that they invented Italian and the Renaissance.

Romans will be warm, funny, and often late, especially if stuck in traffic on the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the ring road around Rome.

Both regions have heavy expat populations, which means the same pros and cons as Milan. Easier landing for you, but also a higher risk of the bubble.

Liguria and Sardinia are the wildcards. Both are islands. Well, one metaphorically, as it is trapped between the sea and the mountains, and that geography affects the social culture.

Ligurians have a famous reputation among Italians for being reserved and a bit suspicious of outsiders, which softens once you’re in.

Sardinians are proud, stubborn, deeply hospitable, but slow to extend it. Gorgeous places to live, genuinely good people, but neither of them offers the easiest entry point.

Quick aside, because it catches a lot of expats off guard. Italian work colleagues rarely become close friends in the American sense. The line between collega (colleague) and amico (friend) is real. Don’t expect the office to be your social pipeline.

How long does it actually take to make Italian friends?

A rough timeline, based on what expats I know in Italy actually report:

• Months 1 to 3: You’ll feel socially empty but also quite busy setting things up. You’ll have acquaintances. You’ll have the bartender’s name memorized. You won’t have a single person you’d call if your car broke down at 11 pm.

• Months 4 to 9: The invitations start arriving. The first one is out of politeness, the second one is for real. You’ll also start spotting expats who’ve been around a while and have figured out a workable life.

• Months 9 to 18: If you’ve stayed in one place, gone to the same bar, and visibly tried to speak Italian, you’ll have a small circle forming. It will be smaller but also deeper than what you’d build in the same time in Toronto or Dublin.

• Year 2 onward: Played your cards right? You're finally in.

Italians don’t make instant friends the way Americans do. Once you’re in, though, you’re usually in for good.

The novelty factor is a real advantage. Use it.

Conventional advice says go where the expats already are. It’s not wrong. Florence, Rome, and Lake Como are all easier places to land. There’s another option worth considering.

In small Italian towns that haven’t seen a foreigner in years, you are an event. A town of 4,000 in inner Abruzzo, Basilicata, or southern Marche notices when an American, Brit, or Canadian moves in.

The butcher will know who you are by Wednesday. If the town is small enough, the mayor might actually want to meet you. Your foreignness works for you in a way it absolutely does not in Florence, where the locals stopped being curious about foreigners around 1987.

The trade-off is that you have to leverage it while the time window is still open. If you stay quiet and reserved, the novelty wears off, and the curiosity is replaced with a polite, permanent distance.

Show up at the bar, attempt the local dialect badly (they’ll laugh with you more than at you), let yourself be the slightly exotic guest at a few dinners, and the curiosity converts into a real network surprisingly quickly.

I’ve watched this happen in the Marche region. Expats who picked a town with no other foreigners and committed to being visible had a richer social life by year two than those who landed in expat-heavy Tuscany and never left the English-speaking WhatsApp groups.

If you don’t speak Italian and don’t plan to learn, don’t move to a village of 4,000 in Basilicata, though. You’ll get a month of curiosity, a slow fade, and ultimately social isolation.

Learn the language. There’s no way around it.

I keep saying this, and I’ll keep saying it until it registers. Real friendships in Italy happen in Italian.

You can have basic English conversations in pockets of the country. Heck, you can even hold a job in English in a handful of cities, if you luck out.

What you cannot do is have authentic conversations at the dinner table with Italians whose basic English is functional, but flavorless.

Italy ranks among the lowest in the EU on the EF English Proficiency Index. Outside cities and among people over 40, very few speak it at all.

The neighbors who are happy to watch over your house while you are temporarily away, the 70-year-old lady upstairs with the recipes and all the hot gossip (the FBI’s got nothing on her), the 50-year-old guys at the bar who’d take you mushroom hunting. They don’t speak English.

You don’t need advanced fluency to start. You need enough Italian to talk about food, soccer, or weather, without making it the other person’s job to slow down for you.

Test your Italian level on Linguetto, my Italian site that lets you practice with adaptive quizzes.

What actually works and what doesn’t

Here is what works in my experience:

• Join a language school. Just find one in person, not online, for two reasons: 1) You'll make friends with people in the same situation as you. 2) Your Italian proficiency will be a determinant of your ability to make friends with Italians.

• Become a regular somewhere. Same bar, same bakery, same butcher. Italian social life is built on familiarity through repetition. You don’t have to be charming. You just have to keep showing up.

• Join something with a fixed schedule. A trekking group, a wine course, a CAI (Italian Alpine Club) chapter, a dance class, a group sport. Italians make new connections through shared activity, not through “let’s grab coffee sometime.” The coffee invites will arrive as a consequence of the relationships you build.

• Volunteer somewhere. There are countless volunteering opportunities in Italy. If you can’t find one you like, start with the local pro loco (the volunteer-run tourism and culture board most towns have). It’s a fast track into the actual community, not just the expat layer of it.

• Get a dog. I’m only half joking. Italy is very dog-friendly, and a dog gives you a daily reason to be in the same park, at the same time, alongside the same humans, week after week. That kind of repetition is exactly how Italian friendships start. Don’t be surprised if it leads to you being invited to someone’s nephew’s birthday party.

What doesn’t work: waiting to be invited, trying to recreate your existing social life in a different cultural context, and living entirely inside the expat Facebook or WhatsApp groups.

The expat bubble is a bridge, not a destination

Expat groups are useful in your first year. They’ll help you find a plumber, recommend a commercialista (accountant), understand the codice fiscale (Italian tax ID), and complain about bureaucracy with people who went through the same process.

They’re quick relief for the loneliness, especially in places like Florence or Lake Como, where there’s already a substantial English-speaking community. But they are a crutch.

The trap comes later, and it isn’t really about English. It’s about never cutting the umbilical cord. As one American who recently moved to the Azores put it, when his countrymen gather abroad, “Conversations default to politics. To outrage. To cultural grievance.” The same is true in the Anglo expat circles in Italy.

Same arguments you packed up and supposedly left behind, now resurfaced over an Aperol spritz in Chianti or not far from George Clooney’s Italian villa. If most of your dinners go that way, you haven’t really moved. You’ve just relocated.

If your social life is still 90% expats after two years, you’ve effectively built an English-speaking colony with better food. And if you are British or Canadian, with better weather.

That’s a legitimate choice. It’s also not the same as moving to Italy. It’s the reason some expats leave after a few years, saying, “I never really felt at home.” Of course, they didn’t. They were home-adjacent.

If you want to know whether you’re cut out for the deeper version of the move, the question of which Italian region you choose matters less than how willing you are to be the new person, with bad grammar and zero local history, for a year.

That’s the real entrance fee. One I personally paid multiple times, and it always paid off.

So, is it hard to make friends in Italy as an expat?

Yes. And no. It’s hard if you’re measuring against the rate at which friendships form in a mobile, mixing country like Canada or Australia. It’s hard if you don’t speak Italian. It’s hard if you stay only inside the expat bubble.

It’s not hard in the sense that Italians don’t want you. They mostly do. They’re curious about you, they think you’re brave (and a little nuts) for moving to Italy.

They’ve already mentally cast you as the interesting foreign character in their next dinner party story. You just have to keep turning up long enough for the role to become permanent.

Because in Italy, friendship isn’t about instant chemistry. It’s about loyalty and loyalty compounds over decades.

Have you made the move and tried to break into an Italian friend group? Where did it click, and where did it stall? Tell me in the comments.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Are Italians friendly to foreigners?

Yes, Italians are generally friendly and curious toward foreigners, especially in smaller towns where you’ll be a novelty. The friendliness translates quickly into warm interactions, dinner invitations, and recommendations, but more slowly into deep friendships, because most Italians already have tight circles formed in school.

Which Italian region is friendliest to expats?

Emilia-Romagna is the most balanced answer. It combines northern infrastructure (good healthcare, high-speed trains, reliable services) with a southern-style social warmth that’s unusual for the north. The deep south (Campania, Puglia, Sicily) is socially even warmer, but with weaker services.

Do you need to speak Italian to make friends in Italy?

For surface-level connections, no. For real friendships, yes. Italy ranks among the lowest in the EU for English proficiency, and most Italians over 40 outside major cities don’t speak English well enough to bond in. You can start meeting people in English, but you’ll plateau quickly without conversational Italian.

How long does it take to feel socially settled in Italy?

Most expats describe roughly the same arc: three months of loneliness, six months of tentative social life, a real circle by year one, full integration by year two. That’s assuming you’ve stayed in one place and made an effort with the language. Italian friendships build slowly and last forever, which is the trade-off.

Is loneliness in Italy worse than in other expat countries?

It can feel sharper because the public warmth is so visible. You’ll see groups of friends laughing in piazzas while you eat alone, and the contrast stings more than it would in a quieter culture. The loneliness usually lifts once you have a regular schedule and a few familiar faces, but expats consistently describe the first six months as the hardest.

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