Where to Move to Italy: Is the South Safer Than the North?

Looking at selected crime stats for Italy, you might conclude that the south is safer than the north. Let’s discuss the crime you will actually meet on the street.

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 members. Join 1,500+ subscribers.

“They got in while we were at the grocery store. Through a window. In and out in less than 20 minutes. The carabinieri were already there by the time we got back.”

This is how a friend of mine described his break-in in a quiet town in the Marche region.

Crime is low in the Marche. Break-ins feel out of place.

Decades earlier, burglars had hit my parents’ place in Ostia, in the then province of Rome. I was six, maybe seven. My father gave me the key to open the porta blindata (the armored door) of our rental apartment. It wouldn’t open.

Thinking I was doing something wrong, he tried himself. No luck. Then the realization hit him that something was afoot. Somebody from the inside had manually engaged the secondary lock, the type you slide.

I remember the sense of violation and the image of my toy safe left open, emptied of its few coins. It was a plastic safe with a single dial, the kind that comes with chocolates in it. They bothered trying each of the 12 possible combinations and hit the jackpot on number 9. The equivalent of roughly $5. They got into the apartment through the roof of the building.

But that was Rome. You expect real crime in 1980s heroin-addicted Rome.

My friend said that roaming gangs, mostly from Eastern Europe, target houses in central Italy and up north. “Sooner or later it happens to everyone,” he said, resigned. “What about the south?” I enquired. “They don’t really go there.”

So I got curious and looked at the burglary statistics across Italy. What I found proves him right.

The four provinces where you are least likely to have your home broken into are Oristano, Crotone, Messina, and Catanzaro (ISTAT, 2023 data). Also well positioned (in the top 15): Reggio Calabria and Palermo.

Read that list again. OK, Oristano is in Sardinia, isolated, so a roaming organized gang can’t quite reach it so easily. But what’s going on with the rest of the provinces?

Crotone, Catanzaro, and Reggio Calabria are all in Calabria. Reggio is the historic capital of the ‘Ndrangheta, the most powerful mafia in the world. It’s also the province with the worst quality of life according to Il Sole 24 Ore’s yearly index. Messina and Palermo have Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia we exported to the US a century ago.

Almost all of the top 15 safest provinces for burglary are in Sardinia, Calabria, and Sicily.

Here’s what we know so far: the safest provinces in Italy for break-ins are mostly in mafia country or on a remote island.

That’s not a coincidence.

Looking at this crime data, on the surface, a paradox appears: the scary south you were warned about looks much safer than the north.

The numbers are real. The conclusion is a trap.

For burglaries, the south is indeed safer. But the reason for this and the bigger picture of crime in Italy are worth discussing.

Before you pick a town to move to, you’ll want to know how safe the north and the south really are, and separate perception from reality.

Get this wrong, and the price is living in a place you’ll never quite be comfortable in. Or one that’s downright dangerous.

Is southern Italy safe?

Whether the south of Italy is safe or not depends on your definition of safety. In other words, what you’re afraid of.

If we go by total crime in Italy, the index cited by most journalists (Il Sole 24 Ore’s, built on Interior Ministry data), you’ll find that Milan in the north is the most dangerous city in Italy. Consistently, year after year for a long time now. Florence and Rome follow it. The safest provinces are all small and essentially invisible to tourists: Oristano, Potenza, Treviso, Benevento.

But that’s misleading. “Total crime” is largely influenced by the most popular crime: theft. So big tourist cities that see millions of people arrive each year have a high crime rate per capita. You’re not getting stabbed in Venice, but total crime doesn’t care whether your phone was lifted when you weren’t paying attention or if a blade narrowly missed your carotid.

To shed some light on crime in Italy, we need to split the data into specific types of crimes. I did, and the numbers paint a much more accurate picture of the country and the gap between north and south. (The rates below come from ISTAT’s reported crime data, per 100,000 residents.)

Summarizing it, the north and center tend to be affected by crimes against property. Home burglaries are twice as common in the north as in the south. Robbery and bag-snatching too.

The south is affected by more serious crimes: homicides, attempted homicides, threats, mafia association, and car theft.

For example, the crimes of mafia association are 0.03 per 100,000 in the north against the south’s 0.41. That’s over 13 times more prevalent.

Your car excluded, the south is safer for your things and more dangerous for your person.

The south looks sleepy and safe on the overall index because petty theft is relatively rare there outside of isolated cases like Naples.

Theft tends to follow where money, crowds, and tourists are. That is: Milan, Rome, Florence, Venice. A pickpocket works the Milan tram or the Rome metro, not Lentini in the province of Syracuse in Sicily.

Why the mob towns have the fewest break-ins

Back to Reggio Calabria, there are a couple of reasons why the headquarters of the ‘Ndrangheta has almost no break-ins.

The first reason has to do with control. A mob boss doesn’t want commotion or attention. Petty theft draws police presence in his neighborhood over, essentially, peanuts.

If a talented burglar were to start robbing homes, it would draw a lot of attention from the authorities who might find other illegal activities going on nearby. It also makes the local populace unhappy, which stress-tests their loyalty and ability to keep quiet about other crimes they have witnessed.

Over what? A 200-euro flat-screen TV? Some old jewelry you can pawn for 300 euros? The mob itself would put a stop to the burglar’s career for the sake of keeping the community happy and away from police investigations.

The real money is in drugs, pizzo (monthly extortion of businesses), rigged public contracts, money laundering, and so on. Real crime with millions of dollars in payoff, not petty stuff.

Pizzo is Sicilian for “beak.” The word comes from the expression fari vagnari u pizzu, to wet the beak. A small sip for the protector. A racket dressed as a courtesy.

This is one incidental benefit of hierarchically organized crime. They offer informal, underground enforcement against petty crime. The uncomfortable truth, the intellectually honest acknowledgment, is that the mafia isn’t just coercion. It offers a brutally delivered service in places where the state is missing. Of course, in the process, they also end up being the cancer that eats alive the areas they control.

The second explanation is underreporting. “Snitches get stitches” applies to the south far more than the north. Trust in the authorities and the state is understandably lower. People take matters into their own hands or silently accept the victimization more often, so those crimes never get reported and never become statistics.

This second explanation is partially true but less convincing than the first one. Researchers at Transcrime, the organized-crime observatory in Milan, caution that this hypothesis is real but oversold. Above all, they admit it’s an effect that’s challenging to measure in the first place.

Where I do believe the underreporting is obvious is with extortion. The pizzo, protection money, is a staple of the mob in the south. A large share of businesses in Campania, Puglia, and Sicily pay it, whereas very few in the north do.

Pizzo map. Daygum, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Yet, the reported extortion rates in the north and the south are almost on par (ISTAT again, 2024 data: 21.5 per 100,000 in the south and 19.6 in the north). A crime that even children know tends to concentrate below Naples barely skews south in the data.

Nobody is buying that. That gap is omertà, the code of silence. The consequences of reporting a stolen bag in the south are an hour wasted at the police station. The consequences of reporting your extortionist asking for pizzo are your shop getting firebombed or you getting shot.

Palermo’s Chamber of Commerce recently put a number on the silence: 800 extortion cases documented by police, two or three reported by the victims.

So treat the low burglary and pickpocket rates in the south as real. Your apartment in Crotone is likely not getting broken into. Nobody will steal your wallet at knifepoint there either. Just don’t read that as Crotone having low crime. You might not see it, unless you run a business, but the local criminal organization runs the show in town.

The mafia in the north

You might assume that the mafia is only a problem in the south. They are certainly more prominent and visible there, but the mafia moved north and put on a suit. They are not shooting. They might not ask for pizzo in most places. But Operation Aemilia in Emilia-Romagna showed that the ‘Ndrangheta has roots in the north as well (internationally really, all the way to Toronto). The crimes of choice are false invoicing, laundering, waste, construction, and rigged public contracts.

The crime you’ll see

What matters, arguably, are the crimes you’re likely to experience directly when you move to (or visit) Italy.

The south will quickly introduce you to the concept of parcheggiatore abusivo (abusive parking attendant), an unauthorized thug with clan connections who’ll extort 5 to 10 euros from you when you finally find a spot in a free parking lot. Refuse to pay, and your car will earn a few scratches. Or you might.

The north will smash your car window for leaving a bag or anything of remote value in it.

The south will steal the whole car, sell it for parts, or ship it abroad. On occasion, they’ll phone you and ask for ransom money. Yes, they essentially kidnap your car in a scheme known as “il cavallo di ritorno” (the returning horse).

And we already discussed the issue with pickpocketing in big cities, and burglaries in the north and center.

Immigrants and maranza

Immigration affects the crime numbers as well, so I’m going to touch that live wire. It also acts as useful context for understanding much of the current political discourse in the country.

Italy has received massive waves of immigrants over the past few decades: Albania, Romania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh. It’s not France by any means, but we have over 5.5 million legally resident immigrants. More if you count the undocumented ones. Most of them moved where the jobs are, which is the prosperous north.

This has an impact on crime, and I’ll give you the numbers. But first, the lens to read them through. There are many factors explaining why immigrants are so overrepresented in the crime statistics, and I could fill an entire essay with attenuanti (extenuating circumstances).

Very briefly:

• The immigrants are largely single, young males, a group that always skews high on crime. (Testosterone is a hell of a drug.)

• The gap between natives and immigrants is particularly high among the irregular immigrant population. Regular residents still offend more often than Italians, but the multiplier factor is much smaller.

• Immigration offenses are part of the overall statistics, and Italians cannot by definition be arrested for staying in Italy illegally.

• Immigrants from the aforementioned countries tend to take low-paying jobs and live at the margins of society where crime levels tend to be high regardless of nationality.

Now the numbers. Foreign nationals are just over 9% of the population and 31% of imprisoned people (Ministry of Justice data). That’s an overrepresentation by a factor of 3 to 4 times, depending on how you count.

The gap lands on the visible side of the equation: the crimes involved tend to be the detectable, street-level kind, and they concentrate in the north.

Maranza are young males, often (but not always) second-generation immigrants from North Africa, who act up in public. Typically bullying and threatening, occasionally pulling out a knife. This is a north problem.

Speaking of knives, I still remember, as a kid of roughly 12, when an Albanian we knew loudly complained about Italy to a group of us. I naively asked him why he came to Italy if he hated it so much. He pulled a knife on me and put it to my face.

A grown man, of perhaps 30, pulling a knife on a literal child, for a comment, an irreverent one in hindsight, but still just a comment. An uncivilized individual, not a people. Some of the most lovely people I have ever met in Italy were also Albanians. They largely managed to integrate into Italian society and contribute to it at all levels.

Many Italians are unhappy about the crime gap between immigrants and natives. Millions, in fact, feel that the immigrants are coming here to behave however they please.

“These sneaking and cowardly [people], the descendants of bandits and assassins... are to us a pest without mitigations.”

That last paragraph was actually from the New York Times Editorial Board (March 16, 1891). It expresses how millions of Americans saw southern Italian immigrants over a century ago. The word I bracketed was “Sicilians.” Now many Italians in the north see immigrants from selected countries in a similar light.

This is part of the reason why the right-wing ex-general Vannacci (more on the right than Prime Minister Meloni) and his new party, Futuro Nazionale, are growing in the polls with the “remigration” idea of somehow sending back the immigrants we accepted. A sort of Italian ICE operation for closing the barn to the tune of an estimated 5 billion euros a year after the horse has bolted.

Visible vs invisible risk

On the surface, the north is taking a beating. But the useful distinction is between visible and invisible risk, rather than a flat read of south safe, north unsafe.

The visible risk is pickpockets and burglaries in the center and north, smashed car windows in Milan, maranza harassing you on the bus. And in the south, it’s parcheggiatori abusivi, your car disappearing, and a thug shaking you down each month for the privilege of running a business.

The south is more insidious than the north, despite appearing safer, because of its invisible risk. It’s the economy the clans run and the informal order they enforce.

Statistics often fail to appropriately capture the lawlessness that casts a shadow over aspects of society in the south.

One last thing

If you are visiting Italy, simply worry about pickpockets. Get a borsello or sling, wear it across your front, and keep a hand on it in tourist hotspots and on the metro.

If you are moving there, crime should be a real filter for you. Both in terms of the type of crimes you are sensitive to (I’m personally partial to not being killed) and your tolerance for visible cues of criminal activity.

But it should be one filter, among several others. Italy is a relatively safe country. Safer than the United States and France on the Global Peace Index, with the lowest homicide rate in the European Union alongside Slovenia.

And if crime is still a major concern to you, the statistics are clear: focus on small, quiet provinces, not on north versus south.

Oristano has spectacular beaches.

---

Italy, minus the filters.

New posts every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: cultural pieces and in-depth guides for people planning a move or simply in love with Italy.

Paid subscribers get every post; free subscribers get a large selection.

---