This week we have a special guest. Justin Curtis Mavity. He’s been a real estate agent, one of the very few qualified, licensed, real estate agents from America in Italy.

After 10 years in the country, he has a lot to say about buying a property, which areas to pick, which areas to avoid. You can just hear straight in his words now.

Nice to meet you Justin.

Justin: You as well. Luca.

Luca: I think it would be interesting to start from how you got to Italy.

Justin: In 2017. I had been a teacher for about 15 years. I was a music teacher, in a public middle school in a suburb of Denver. And I’d always had this love of Italy. I’d been on several vacations before, and in fact, that’s how I discovered Bologna. We [00:01:00] stopped in Bologna and I said, wow, this place is magic.

I studied Italian for a year, a whole year, and before I kind of started getting my feet under the ground and I could be, you know, functional.

In Italy,

Luca: Did you have a network or did you just pick Bologna because you liked it when you visited? Uh,

Justin: In Denver we have an Italian friend, Lucia, who is from Bologna. And so that was, uh, that was the connection. At least there was somebody, uh, that I could reach out to in case of, emergency.

Luca: So you’ve been there for the best part of 10 years?

Justin: Yeah. For the best part of 10 years. It’s changed quite a lot, honestly. I mean, when I first came to Bologna, it was. It was a touristy city in the summer, of course, but not as much as Florence or Rome or Milan in the last few years, especially after COVID tourism here has exploded.

It’s, it’s noticeable. And then of course, you know, May and July are just, just chaos if you’re in Piazza Maggiore at this point. Yeah,

Luca: That still doesn’t explain how you got into real estate here, right?

Justin: So, real estate in the United States was always going to be my backup plan, my, my second career, I started so [00:02:00] young, I could have retired at 52. Uh, I’m gonna be 45 this year.

Luca: Go 81.

Justin: Yeah, go 81. Exactly. After I got my feet on the ground here, I, of course had to do the, the teaching English thing like many of us do, you know, to get by and to feed yourself and to pay the rent.

That was a several years long process just to even get into the real estate course here and get started. It was already something that was in my mind to do. And so when I came here, I thought, gosh, this is a supernatural fit. I mean, I’m an American. This is something I wanted to do. There is nobody basically doing this here that I know of.

Luca: Huge gap.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

I got my real estate license in the spring in May of 2023. And I’m sure you guys are a bit familiar with this process, that you have to do the, the written multiple choice exam and if you pass that, then you need to go onto this oral exam in front of a panel of experts and a live audience.

I passed that and I thought, gosh, I’m gonna get picked up by, by anybody. So I went to all the big agencies in town and they’re like, you can answer phones and do translations.

Luca: Really? [00:03:00]

Justin: Wow. That’s all. That’s all we can do with you. And then you can work.

But I did find a small local agency. They didn’t quite know what to do with me either, but at least they trained me and supported me with what I wanted to do. I kind of felt ready to go out on my own at that point.

Luca: But you survived.

Justin: I did survive.

I know, but there’s, as far as I know, here in Bologna, there’s no one else that has a license that’s doing what I’m doing.

Luca: Plenty of people without a license.

Yeah, of course. Course. Especially expats.

Justin: Oh yeah, exactly.

Luca: How do you feel about that?

Justin: You can get fined for doing this illegally if you get caught. And in theory, after the third time you can go to jail. No one goes to jail. The danger for a client in this and working with one of these people, my license and my insurance is a guarantee for you, right?

So if I do something bad that hurts your transaction, you have recourse against me.

You chose to work with somebody who’s unlicensed. You have no recourse. You have no way to protect yourself.

Luca: I was curious if you still [00:04:00] specialize in Bologna itself, or you’ve kind of gone countrywide,

Justin: I’ll go all the way down to Puglia and I will work throughout the country. There are areas that I tend to avoid.

I’m not a huge fan of going to Sicily, Rome is its own particular animal when it comes to real estate as well.

Luca: What kind of clients do you get and do these people know generally anything about Italy before telling you I want to find a house by the lake?

Justin: So I’m really clear with clients and say, you know, what are you looking for and where do you want it to be? And it’s really critical first that they have that where identified. Because Italy is very big and vastly different from city to city to region. I mean, nothing is the same.

And so if they don’t have that in their head and they say, well, Justin, I want a house by a lake. Well, there’s a lot of lakes in Italy that are, one is quite different from the other. And the other thing I tell them is you need to have been there first. If I’m going to work with you, if you are going to be looking in Como. Have you been to Como? Do you think you’re going to like Como? Or are you just [00:05:00] buying Como? Because that happens

Luca: a lot though.

Justin: Yeah. That happens a lot.

Luca: At that point you start holding their hands. They have been to, they have seen George Clooney Villa, and they want the one next door.

Justin: I work very collaboratively with my clients where I put together a spreadsheet and we all add things to it, you know, so they’re adding things, I’m adding things to it.

It’s a big process of elimination. I want them to feel like what they’re seeing is worth their time to see and not just something that I’ve put together for them.

Gillian: I think we’ve been on the tail end of that where you are with an agent who wants to show the seller that they’ve done the work. So they’re taking you to completely inappropriate properties just to put someone through the front door for the sellers.

Luca: Hey, I’m doing my job. I brought you two buyers.

Justin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Look, and they’re foreigners too. I told you I’d bring foreigners to your property. I promised you that right?.

Luca: What do you find the major differences to be between the US system and the Italian system?

Justin: Where do we start?

Luca: We have three [00:06:00] hours. Just on the property side

Justin: Everybody comments on the fact that a property inspection, like we have the United States, doesn’t exist. You can have an electrician come out, you can have a plumber come out, you can have a roofer come out, and you can get a general sense of the house in that way. But there’s no, I’m selling my property and I’m going to have the whole property inspected.

That doesn’t work here. If we want that kind of service, we really are gonna have to provide for that generally on our own.

Another big thing, people find it really strange that they’re required to make an offer and give earnest money immediately and often, uh, you know, people expect that as a seller, they expect that in their hands, but a good agent’s not going to let let that happen.

They’re gonna make that money go to the notary anyhow, which is what I do for my clients.

It’s always going to the notary, even if it costs you a little bit of money to hold it in there with the notary, well worth the protection if the deal falls apart.

Gillian: For example, in England, when you purchase a property, you have to do all the due diligence before the exchange happens, and that can typically take up to four months and then [00:07:00] you could lose it last minute or something can go wrong.

Whereas I, Italy, it’s, it’s much quicker.

Justin: It’s funny that you say that, Gillian, because again I worked with in, uh, Assisi in December with clients from the UK and they explained that to me that the deal can fall through. Even the day that you’re supposed to close, that the sellers can just walk away and say, no, I wanna sell it to somebody else.

Gillian: Correct.

Justin: That’s wild to me. One thing I I disagree with you on though, is the speed. Many of my clients are from the United States, not all but many are, and they’re surprised by how slow it is. Here. So they’re on the opposite side of that and they’re saying, wait, you know, I’m a cash buyer. What do you mean it’s gonna take four months to close? Five months to close.

Luca: It depends a lot on the property itself. I’ve seen properties close in days. And I’ve seen, I mean, we’re on, we’re on a contract now for a property for, what, two years, and it has been extended for another two years.

But it’s the beauty Italian system, I think.

Justin: Yeah.

Luca: Yeah. Because the notary will not, the notary is a very good friend of yours as a buyer.

Justin: [00:08:00] The notary works for you as the buyer. That’s the key thing.

Luca: In fact, a great thing you can do is get the offer accepted. With the knowledge that then the notary will throw every spanner in the works that they absolutely can to get everything spick and span.

Justin: But this is another thing that’s different from, you know, in, in Italy than in other countries. A lot of other countries, the settlers already going to have done. All of this work before putting the property on the market, or at least be really aware of what’s coming up in many, many other countries. I feel like sellers are generally much more prepared to sell the property than they are here.

Gillian: Maybe you have a different experience, but I also find that sold, vacant, and you know, they literally left clothes in the wardrobe, like.

Justin: One key element of of that of course, is to insert that there’s going to be an inspection walkthrough the day of or the day before the closing. With everybody present.

But that property in Assisi that happened, we had stipulated everything’s gonna be empty, everything’s gonna be cleaned out, ready to go. And we got there and all the store rooms were just full of junk still, you know, garbage broken [00:09:00] exercise bikes. And so the notary withheld, you know, 10,000 euros and said, I’m holding this money until you fulfill the obligations in the contract here.

You asked me something I wanna go back to as well. You asked me am I still a specialist in Bologna?

I work less in Bologna than I do outside of Bologna by far. I think that renting and buying here in Bologna have become so expensive in the last few years, and that’s really chasing people away.

Luca: I’m very keen to understand from you where you see, areas of opportunity.

Justin: I think Northern Tuscany. Is a very undiscovered area except for Lucca. I feel like Lucca is almost like going to Disneyland at this point. I go and there are American families pushing kids in strollers. I only hear English being spoken on the street.

Luca: But the Lunigiana, I think is what you’re referring to.

Justin: Exactly. Really beautiful. You can buy wonderful houses made of stone in these little villages that are walk-in only for like 30,000, 40,000 euros.

Luca: Has an interesting history because it, it used to be a very poor area [00:10:00] and it is also may surprise you the rainiest area of Italy. So you’re not going there for the sun necessarily? No. But with the global warming. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea. When you go there in the summer, it’s like, oh, this is actually nice

Justin: it’s really pleasant. Another area, and I have to, you know, put a shout out to my home area here. Bologna is its own thing, but the Bolognese Appennines and Modenese Appenines and that area, you can still buy again, really gorgeous properties, stone villas, farmhouses, whatever you want for really reasonable prices.

The hills are a little different than, you know, Sienna. We’re not talking about that rolling, undulating, uh, lovely greenery, but it’s still absolutely stunning. Opportunities left and right. No one knows about that area yet.

Luca: No, of course not. And they are areas where the depopulation has been massive, uh, in the past 30, 40 years, and therefore people are desperate to get rid of the [00:11:00] grandparents’ house.

Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not beautiful. In fact, as you say. Maybe if you got some of the Tuscan crowd over there, they might struggle to see the difference. I often say to people that if you blindfold them, you take them around Italy and you say, this is Tuscany, they’ll be like, yeah, I can see that.

That’s Tuscany. Yeah, that’s not Tuscany.

Justin: It’s not Tuscany. Yeah, exactly.

Luca: Yeah. Except take a zero off the selling price and then you see how the, you know how the reality is different.

Justin: The other thing about this area too, over here near Bologna is that of course we’re really well connected. You know, we have, uh, the airport in Bologna, which has a zillion flights coming in, out, in and out every day. The train station in Bologna, of course, is a major hub, uh, for trains all throughout Italy that are going north and south. So, I mean, for anybody arriving. It’s a great place to start out.

Luca: It is for the taking for the people that take the time to get out of the beaten track. I hope that we get more and more of the, you know, the foreign crowd to go and explore and, uh, try to revitalize these places, which frankly need it. We don’t need as [00:12:00] many 2 million euro sold in Tuscany. We need more of the a hundred thousand farmhouses in Emilia Romagna sold,

Justin: Exactly. We wanna re revitalize and maintain, you know, the culture in these areas. That’s really, really important.

Anna: I just have a question, I’m talking about people that have never been to Italy, and then just have the idea in their mind and realize later that that’s not like the right place for them.

Justin: Well, I think it’s kind of wherever the “in” place is at the moment.

You’re probably following these trends on social media. I mean, I feel like Puglia, these last couple years has really been all over social media, but people get in to Puglia and it’s, yeah, it’s gorgeous. It is really a wonderful place.

But if you’re moving down there to live full-time, you really have to be knowing what you’re getting into and the area you’re buying into. One of my colleagues was recently talking to a family, an American family who fell into this trap in Puglia, bought in some little village, a really gorgeous house, you know, of course made of stone and wonderful. And they [00:13:00] paid nothing but. They said, we have to get out of here. It’s, it is wonderful if you’re vacationing perhaps, but to live here full time, in the winter there’s nothing going on. We find the people kind of closed off. It doesn’t have all the services that we want. And so, they, to go back to your question, they kind of get sucked into whatever this social media trap is at the moment or whatever the big publicity is at the moment, so now it’s Puglia, the last couple previously, of course it was Tuscany and Umbria. And of course the, they still kind of also dominate. Who knows what will be next. I see Sardinia popping up a lot, uh, recently, and you know, people are gonna get sucked into that trap as well, you know. Yes. Living in Sardinia would be wonderful. I mean, we just, we spent, several weeks in, in Sardinia last summer. It was great. Would I have wanted to live there all year round in December, January, February, with nobody around, no services?

These stereotypes only show the positives. You know, that’s all that people are getting is they don’t get the reality of these places.

Luca: We talked a lot about buying. But a lot of people come here wanting to rent [00:14:00] and they know from experience what a cultural shock that is. Can you tell us a little bit about the foreign perspective of what it’s like to actually find someone to rent?

Justin: Yeah. Boy, that was a challenge for me 10 years ago, and now it’s gotten even more challenging. It’s not like in the, in many countries where if I go into a rental agency or even meet a landlord for a property and I have a wad of cash, I can just kind of throw that wad of cash at them and I’m probably going to get the apartment, this happens a lot in the United States.

Of course they’re gonna let me sign a rental contract and pay money up front. Italy doesn’t work like that because of course we have a lot of tenants protections, tenants rights. You put somebody in that property with a registered contract and it is really hard, as we all know.

It’s easier to divorce, it’s easier to divorce than it is to get the tenants out of your property. And so property owners are really leery about this. And then of course, we have this mafia history. So you show up with this giant bag of cash. You say, I can pay you 10,000 euros [00:15:00] today. What are these landlords supposed to be thinking?

Italy doesn’t work like that. You really have to demonstrate your value as a tenant.

So again, you have to have a job and that you have income coming in. You hopefully have a letter of presentation from that company that explains what you do and how much money you make.

You have to show a tax return. They need to see that you have consistent income coming in. Wherever it’s from, it’s not what you have some value to offer to the landlord. You have to present yourself in the best, most secure way possible.

Luca: It’s like a job interview in

Justin: a way.

Luca: Yes.

Justin: Landlords will let their property sit vacant rather than put the wrong tenant in a property, right? Because they don’t wanna risk putting the wrong person in there who stops paying.

Luca: Changing, I feel a little bit with these, uh, transitory, like, you know, the up to one year contracts.

So there seems to be a little bit more flexibility because people feel like, uh, if they put a tenant down as a tourist, that the tenant loses a lot of the protections under the law, whether they that is actually [00:16:00] enforceable or not. Yeah. Well that’s,

Justin: yeah.

Luca: There’s still the issue of the furniture.

Meaning that you do find eventually this apartment, then you find that you have to bring not only all the furniture, but very often even the kitchen. And that is shocking.

Justin: That’s not, not so much the case anymore. I’ve found, and again, I, and I, I mentioned this to everybody. That’s very uncommon anymore that you find an apartment with, nothing.

I think that here in this area, it’s more common to find in furnishings included of some kind, at least a kitchen, you know, maybe also a washing machine, maybe also some general furniture of the house. Um, but that is surprising when people see that they say, wait a second, it says fully furnished, but maybe it doesn’t literally have every single thing. That you can think of, you know, maybe it’s fully furnished and it has a, you know, kitchen table and chairs or dining room table chairs and a bed in each room and a wardrobe in each room. And that’s really about it.

Other thing about security that landlords want is they want somebody who’s going to be in there paying rent on time, and they want somebody who’s gonna be in there paying rent on time for a long time, right?

They want that income [00:17:00] year after year. So here, at least in my area, they’re looking for, you know, traditional four plus four or three plus two contracts, uh, with tenants. Do

Luca: you find that people are surprised that when they come to Italy and they find that renting generally means, uh, hey, I’m signing a contract for three or four years?

Justin: Yes, I do my best to explain this to ’em, of course, upfront and say, you know, generally there’s going to be a, an escape clause of three months, you know, for whatever reason for you, you know, we’re gonna try on our best to make sure that happens. And there, and as you know, there has to be an escape clause anyhow in the contract.

So you have to do a little preparation and understand. Yeah, it seems scary. I could be locked into this thing for eight years, but yeah, that’s an eight year contract that I can break anytime with three months notice, so that becomes way less scary.

Luca: I assume you have to run.

Justin: Yes. I should probably go even though I’m really enjoying myself and I could keep talking for hours.

Luca: We’d happy to do a follow up.

Justin: I always see these articles on CNN about how wonderful it is to move to Italy and buy your one euro home and renovate it and look how, you know, how happy this 75-year-old [00:18:00] couple is that, you know, it’s just what

Luca: That is one great story because we were talking last week about this woman we met in a one euro home town. She was like, like the one I you mentioned before in Puglia. Get me out of it. Get me out.

Justin: What is there to do there?

Luca: There’s a reason why they can’t sell the homes, but then again, if they sell enough of those homes, they

Anna: fix that

Luca: if it fixes the problem. So

Justin: it does, it does. It really depends on the village though, doesn’t it?

It has to be just the right village and just the right place. With just enough level of services. I, it’s one in a

Luca: thousand.

Justin: Yeah. A lot of these villages really have nothing. They have nothing. It’s just a glob of houses, a collection of houses, ruined houses. It doesn’t even have the post office. Right. What attraction is there?

Luca: We hope to talk to you soon again.

Luca: Thanks to Justin. It was great fun to have him. We’ll be back for part two with him. What do you think, Gill? You’ve spoken to him a couple times.

Gillian: I thought he was fantastic. People have lives and varied requirements and people want different things and he [00:19:00] seems to, to understand that.

Luca: Yeah. And we certainly understand that. After all, that’s what we do. Try to highlight a huge country in all its multifaceted variety.

Gillian: One thing I thought you said that was very interesting was doing your research and doing your homework before you, you know, outta the blue turn up and say, I want a house in.

Luca: Tuscany.

Gillian: Yeah. Tuscany.

Luca: Yeah. Don’t call from Antarctica and say you wanna move to Tuscany if you haven’t been there because, uh, well at least don’t call Justin because he might not like that. I hope you have a fantastic weekend.

Gillian: Thank you guys.

Anna: Yes, ciao a tutti. Hi everyone. Today we’re diving into some fascinating new findings from a demographic study, Magic Towns Italy conducted using data from 2019 to 2025.

We’ll talk about which towns are growing or shrinking, how well they keep young people, and how much pressure they are under from aging populations. So if you’re a retiree or an expat thinking of relocating here, this is definitely for you.

Luca: Exactly. So we analyzed detailed population data for over 7,500 Italian towns.

And, uh, before you tune onto another [00:01:00] podcast, because you’re not a huge data fan, what we’re gonna be sharing with you are the implications of the study. Consider this for instance, that the idyllic village that you’re looking at could within 10 years turn into a place that doesn’t have a pharmacy, doesn’t have a doctor, or doesn’t have a supermarket.

This happens in Italy, so it’s worth looking out for this. Demographics make a huge difference as to whether a town thrives or fades. So if you’re looking for a place to live in Italy for the long run, you will want to look at the signs.

Anna: Yeah, I mean, nobody wants to move into a beautiful town, only to find out 10 years later that it’s become a ghost village. Let’s start with the big picture. What did the study look at?

Luca: We focused on three simple but very important questions. Number one, is the town growing or shrinking? Two, are young adults staying or leaving? And three, how quickly is [00:02:00] the population getting older.

Anna: and what are the key insights?

Luca: Let’s start with a sad fact, which is the most Italian towns are shrinking. In fact, across the towns we looked at the general trend is for a loss of, uh, about half a percentage point of population per year.

And only about a quarter of Italian towns are actually growing in population. That’s one in four. And if you look at it the other way around, it means that three out of four Italian towns are shrinking. The towns that are growing at disproportionately medium sized towns, imagine towns around 10 to 20,000 inhabitants, which are service centers or commuter towns rather than, uh, huge cities or tiny villages.

Anna: Oh, so three quarters are getting smaller. That is huge. So the typical little village we all imagine, chances are it’s quietly empty out. And the ones that are growing tend to be market towns or places within reach of cities, not the remote hilltop [00:03:00] hamlets.

Luca: Exactly. Now talking about youth retention, the ability to retain young people, we found that about 50% of towns are able to retain or attract young adults.

Unfortunately, the other half are losing the 20 somethings and the 30 somethings. And not surprisingly, larger towns and cities have an edge here, meaning that, uh, they’re more likely to attract young people for university or jobs.

Anna: It makes sense. Young adults often move to cities like Milan or Bologna for work or study, but yeah, it’s interesting that only half hang on to their youth.

If a place lose its young people, it’s basically losing its future, isn’t it?

Luca: Yeah. Sad but true. And the last part getting older. Aging. This is just a countrywide phenomenon. We saw that pretty much every town has an aging population getting older on average. Even those that attract some young [00:04:00] people.

And of course, and we’ve discussed this in several podcasts, the low birth rates across Italy mean that the overall population is aging.

Anna: But I know there was some silver linings in your study too.

Luca: Big takeaway if you ignore everything else, town size matters. Medium-sized towns are the quiet winners in this. They had a good balance. Our preparation, stability, youth attraction, they outperformed the tiny village.

Anna: I love that insight.

It means those mid-size community often hit a sweet spot, big enough to have services and live, but. Not so big that they lose their charm. So that’s exactly the kind of place many of our listeners dream about. A town with the hospitals, schools, cafes, local markets, but with all the crazy traffic or costs of a major city.

Luca: Yeah, that’s what we see in our data. And conversely, the smallest villages, uh, the kind quaint postcard ones, uh, a lot of those 7% town that we always talk about, are the ones that [00:05:00] are struggling the most, they tend to have the steepest decline in population.

They tend to have, uh, the oldest population on average, and they are losing young people. So they have a pretty bleak future, if I may say so.

Anna: Yeah, it’s not as simple as the north is fine and the south is declining, or, um, old small villages are dying. In fact, your analysis shows that the familiar stereotypes don’t tell the full story.

Sometimes a town just a few kilometers away from another, can have a completely different trend. So we really have to dig into the local details.

Luca: Exactly.

Anna: So based on the study, which parts of Italy have more of these resilient, demographically healthy towns?

Luca: Geography does matter in spite of what we just said. Now, north versus south, it is a bit north versus south. There’s a clear cluster of resilient towns with a bright future in northern central regions, Emilia Romagna, Trentino, Lombardy, Veneto, [00:06:00] uh, Tuscany. These fit within our Growth plus Youth Inflow pattern.

Anna: That’s encouraging for the north and the center. And what about the more fragile side of the equation?

Luca: Unsurprisingly, the data shows that several southern and island regions like Calabria, Sardinia, Molise, Puglia, and Campania have an especially large concentration of towns that are losing population and losing young people.

Anna: That matches what we hear about people from the south moving north or abroad. But I remember you saying that we shouldn’t just write off entire regions.

Luca: That’s exactly right. There are towns in the south that are doing fine. I posted a chart about Calabria that shows that there’s a coastal area that does especially well with growing and attracting people while the rest of the region is basically bleeding the same, um, young people and, uh, getting older. You can’t just look at the region. You [00:07:00] have to look at the individual town.

Anna: No region gets a free pass, nor region is completely hopeless either. Why don’t we talk about some specific town examples.

Luca: Just mention a few success stories and frankly data that surprised us because they’re not many cases famous towns. One example is Monfalcone.

Monfalcone is in the very northeastern part of Italy in Friuli Venezia Giulia. Which really stands out for retaining young people, getting young people, and even had positive population growth. And if you know the area there’s a fair bit of industry

Anna: Is like a big ship building industry. And it’s also not far from cities like Trieste, Udine, so I mean that connectivity helps. Um, another good example you found was Salsomaggiore Terme in Emilia Romagn a, right?

Luca: This is an interesting case because I actually looked at Salsomaggiore when I decided to come back to Italy.

It was on my short [00:08:00] list. It’s a spa town, a bit like Recoaro of which we spoke about last week, and it was in decline for many, many years. Even though you remember Anna another used to do Miss Italia from, uh, from, uh, Salsomaggiore. I don’t know if they still do. So anyway. It had the declining population plummeting property prices, uh, and recently has turned around with the both working age people and population growth.

It has a good pull for people in their twenties and forties and, for people that are looking for bargains, sometimes a town that is down on its luck can rebound, especially when the fundamentals in that case, architecture, history, proximity to big cities warrant that.

Anna: I imagine those who bought property there when prices were low must be pleased to see a revival.

Luca: The prices are still pretty low, but I won’t go as, uh, far out as to advise people to buy there yet. We have to see how things develop anyway. And, [00:09:00] uh, talking about another example, Anzio Anzio is on the coast near Rome.

And among the larger towns that we looked at, this is one of the most impressive because it has both a strong influx of students and young people. Of course it is within reach of Roma, you probably know the area better than I do. With an annual population growth of around, uh, 2.5%, which is huge by standards.

The common theme for me is that resilience often comes from being well connected with broader economic area and while still offering the kind of high quality of life that people look for in Italian smaller towns.

Now at the same time, uh, just as we have surprises on the upside, we saw a lot of surprises on the downside towns that stood out for doing especially badly Camerino, Marche, which is actually really sad because Camerino has a university not as big one by all standards about, uh, I was surprised to find it on this list of [00:10:00] towns on the decline. Several towns in Calabria, like Cutro, Atri, Vietri in Campania, these are all in the south. These are a pretty bad combo of steep population decline. Uh, poor ability to retain young people and a rising old days pressure. So, people are getting older and the places are emptying out.

Anna: And what about larger towns or small cities? Were any of them struggling in particular?

Luca: Yeah, the two that kind of stick out are Trapani in Sicily and Crotone and Calabria.

Anna: Yeah, that’s sad to hear because places like Crotone or Trapani have so much history and character.

I mean, it’s not that they lack charm or beauty, but yeah, the opportunities there are limited,

Luca: That’s right.

Anna: So based on this data, how do you think our listeners can evaluate a town’s prospects themselves?

Luca: So we’ve recommended, if you go to Magic Towns, you read the article we [00:11:00] published yesterday.

We recommend three quick checks that you can do by yourself on the Town Explorer, number one, are the young adults staying, and if people in their twenties and thirties are all leaving, that means that the town is losing its lifeblood. So a good sign is if the town attracts younger residents or at least manages to keep. The second is, uh, is the population stable or shrinking? If the population declines, little by little and over time, as is the case for many thriving cities in the north then that’s manageable. What you don’t want is a steep, ongoing population drop because that will lead to fewer services, closed shops, and a lot of empty houses.

So bad stay away. Three is aging under control. Population will age in Italy. You’ll find very, very few places where the average age is dropping, so that’s not your goal. What you want [00:12:00] to avoid is towns where the town is aging rapidly and the population, the working age population is shrinking at the same time for the same reason, because essential services will start to struggle and, uh, you are going to be on the receiving end of, uh, a less vibrant community.

Anna: Yeah, I mean, you can often sense, uh, towns age balance by observing are there schools and are they full of kids? Do you see, I don’t know, teenagers and young families around, or is it mostly grandmas on the bench?

Luca: How do you go about doing this kind of analysis so you can, of course, find your own population data online, on the Italian statistics portal or Wikipedia. And of course, I’m always gonna say to save time and do a good job, use our own Town Explorer tool. We added two new filters last week that allow you to search for a town’s demographic [00:13:00] trajectory. Read Anna’s post today on Magic Towns and get informed because frankly, the idea of playing around the numbers to find a place to live may not be for everyone. But, uh, when you’re making a long-term life decision, you know, spending five minutes with useful filters may save you from making some terrible, terrible decisions.

You can find thriving communities everywhere in Italy. Just if you know what to look for and, uh, match it to your own desires and, uh, meet with the reality of life.

We hope this was useful to you. Next week will be back with a lighter theme and, uh, we hope that you have a great weekend.

Anna: Thank you so much, guys. And feel free to reach out to us if you

Luca: need to.

Yes, reach out to us. Uh, if you have any ideas for the podcast, actually we would love to hear them. So keep in touch and follow us on Instagram, [00:14:00] Facebook, Spotify, and on our website. Ciao.

Luca: Welcome back. Happy Saturday everyone.

Anna: Happy Saturday. So, yeah, today we’re talking about, one euro homes, Sicily, visas.

Luca: And before you say, oh no, another episode about one euro homes, we’re actually starting with something completely novel, which is the first one euro home program in northern Italy.

Anna: What?

Luca: Really? Yes. Anna don’t act all surprised. You wrote an article about that.

Anyway, it’s just an inside joke. So this week?

Anna: Yeah, tell me more about that. Sorry.

Luca: Yeah, so this week the towns of Recoaro, [00:01:00] Posina, and Valli del Pasubio, very near Vicenta. And for those who know where Vicenza is, that’s very near Venice have announced that the first batch of one euro homes in those, uh, lovely mountain villages.

Anna: Oh, okay. And why just now?

Luca: Well, you see, it’s actually a very interesting area that I personally know. I would say intimately. It was a magnet for tourists about a hundred years ago. Even Nietzsche, the German philosopher, used to go on holiday there and

Anna: are you joking?

Luca: No, no. Really is true.

There’s proof of it. He wrote about it. He wrote, that, it was one of the most beautiful places they had ever been to, but, it kind of fell off the map tourism wise. Because, uh, spas are not as popular now as they used to be in the past in Italy at least. And so even when I was a child at this [00:02:00] place, which was in huge tourist magnet had become less popular in the past few years. It has suffered a massive exodus of people that go and work and live in the nearby cities.

So there’s a lot of empty homes and quite simply the local governments decided to make them available to investors and people that want to move there preferentially to restore very much like the schemes in southern Italy.

Anna: Yeah, but these are just the first ones in Northern Italy.

Luca: Exactly. First ones in Northern Italy.

So if you wanna know more about this, go to magictowns.it and read the article in which we cover everything about this brand, brand new program.

Anna: And be the first one to buy them.

Luca: Yeah, maybe. And then we can have a chat with there about how you feel about that. That is, if Anna and I don’t buy them first.

What else is on our episode today, Anna? We have an interview right?

Anna: Yeah, we met George after visiting Mussomeli ourselves, and it was, how was it, Luca, because you went [00:03:00] there.

Luca: George is the English beating heart of Mussomeli now.

We spent, half an hour chatting with him about how things are going, how the city is changing now that he has brought in his massive social media following. He also has some new plans that he briefly mentions and he’s going to officially unveil in the next couple of weeks.

So without further ado, here’s a little excerpt of our chat with George.

Hi George. How are you?

George: Hello. How are we doing?

Gill: Hi. I think we missed you by a day in Mussomeli

Luca: But we met some of your fans. Even the people that haven’t met you, they’re basically all there for you, which is very interesting. We’ve actually never seen anything like this.

George: It’s been great for Mussomeli. All the locals are very happy, all the one euro houses have been sold now, all the prices are slowly starting to creep up and everyone’s spending money at the businesses. So it is just a win-win situation for everyone really.

Luca: Absolutely. You know, we live in the north. And we found [00:04:00] out that for the first time, just today, they have started the one euro home scheme, just near us, 10 miles away.

George: Wow.

Luca: So that’s quite exciting because, you know, so far it has only been in the south.

George: I think a lot of the times, you know, one of the reasons people have sort of come to Mussomeli. It is purely just because it’s one of the few towns in Sicily, which someone’s really marketing it heavily.

All these towns are pretty similar and they all offer similar cultural experiences, similar house prices. But Mussomeli I think has just got very lucky. And the mayor has been a huge positivity because so many of these places, they have so much red tape.

You know, with the one euro house scheme I went through, there was no upfront deposit. You had three years to do the roof and the facade, which they’ve now scrapped that rule and to incentivize people to keep coming, they’ve now introduced a new rule where you can remove the roof of your one euro house and make a garden.

The only time I’ve heard people having bad experiences in Mussomeli is by using contractors who want to charge you upfront. I know one girl at the [00:05:00] moment, she’s from LA, she spent 20 grand in the house. I think she agreed to 120,000 pound renovation budget. And she paid someone upfront or didn’t pay them upfront and now the builder thinks they’ve done 40,000 pound worth of work.

She doesn’t think 40,000 pound worth of work has been done. She’s in legal battle with another contractor. So that’s one of the reasons why I like to do a lot of the work myself, because all the times I’ve heard about bad experiences always ends up by employing someone you employ, unfortunately.

Gill: We’ve been through that. And then when you employ someone new, they blame the old guy. And you never know where the train of responsibility ends or finishes. So it’s even no matter what, it’s a disaster going forward.

George: And you don’t know if they’re cousins or the person you had before. You know, everyone seems to know everyone will be related to someone somehow.

Luca: And so you have to be careful, because if you raze the ground around you in these small towns, it’s over.

George: Yep.

Luca: Do you have any plans to rent out your properties?

George: Yeah, I mean, for my first two properties, I’ve got a waiting list of about 500 people waiting to stay at the moment. I’m gonna start [00:06:00] taking bookings on my website. But, you know, my departments aren’t being ready for at least two or three months. Once they’re ready, they’ll just be rented out.

Gill: You know, from living in London, the price per square meter is just insane. So you see it and you see the value, but then you have to think about the money it cost to fix.

George: Yeah, I was watching, a YouTube thing about these women renovating a palace in Palermo, and they were saying that the local Municipio wanted a 500,000 Euro, for a grant to start renovating or just to even begin the process. They wanted half a million. Just to get the

Luca: oh, like the bank guarantee? Yeah. It must have been a historical

George: it was a historical one right in the center where you’re looking over the main square, like the huge ones on the corner.

She was just like, we may be millionaires on paper, but we don’t have half a million pounds just to pay for a permit

Luca: What kind of incentive is it? Italy is riddled with old properties. You should do everything you can to make things easier.

Gill: I guess the one thing everyone here believes in, we believe in Italy, we believe the property’s cheap and we believe we should be doing more to bring people in.

Luca: That’s what we’ve been working on. Finding towns where the local [00:07:00] government is supportive. Because as you know, everything changes from town to town.

George: It puts me in a very good position, and, every time I sell a house for Mussomeli, I don’t get paid for it. I’m just doing it out of goodwill. The reason I left London is I couldn’t afford half a million pound for one bedroom flat, so now I’ve got more chance of buying a house in London in a few years than I did staying there.

Luca: Hopefully we’ll get you to move to Italy permanently. You’re working on getting a visa, right?

George: Well, that’s the thing. At the moment, I don’t have a visa. I can only say ninety outta a 180 days. So for the last probably 40 months now, I spent two weeks in Mussomeli, two weeks in London. I’ve been doing that on rotation every month for 40 months now.

So at some point it would be nice to spend longer than a couple weeks at a time. But as far as I’m aware, either I get a student visa, which I have to go into college five days a week, four hours a day, and you know, I dropped outta uni after first days.

Luca: Now they have changed the law. You need to have at least a B1 in Italian in order to get the visa. So you must have Italian before you can enroll at university.

George: And the only other option is get a digital [00:08:00] nomad visa, which I could probably be accepted for.

Luca: Nowadays they just sped up the process. You can get one in probably 45 days.

You could also marry an Italian. Just be careful of the husbands.

George: Basically 20% of the people I bring to Mussomeli realize they don’t wanna live in Mussomeli. Actually. They wanna live by the beach. And it’s just been a rule of thumb. I’ve realized averagely about 20% of all people end up moving to the beach after coming to Mussomeli.

Luca: It’s funny that you mentioned this thing about people, things, their minds, because like we spoke to this Australian woman, she’s like, you know, I need to be somewhere else.

I like to be in Italy, but I’d like to be somewhere else as a full-time thing. so finding the few different decent options is definitely important. There are people for whom Mussomeli matter will be fine, but there would also be looking for other things.

George: Well, I think that’s the beauty of, of Sicily. You know, there’s not many places left in the world you can buy a property for sort of 20 or 30,000 and you know, if you sold your property elsewhere for a couple hundred grand, you can have two, three properties all around Sicily. Jump between each of them, vent them out.

Luca: I think people don’t understand just how much of Italy is undervalued. We just bought a [00:09:00] house around the corner from here and we paid 50 K, and it’s big, like 3000 square feet.

George: Wow.

Luca: But the beauty of it is that it’s actually very thriving town. It’s near Venice. It’s near Padova, it’s near Verona. You can find cheap stuff everywhere. You just have to look.

George: Yeah. The thing that I’ve seen change about Mussomeli most recently is now all the one year houses and the house under 10 K is starting to go.

The house under 20 K is starting to go, but the biggest change has been the nightly wait per stay. So last time I was there, my cameraman from Channel four who came to stay with me, he went to the standard two bedroom apartment in Mussomeli

He was paying a hundred euros per night on Airbnb. He paid 700 euros for the week. I couldn’t believe it.

Luca: I was shocked.

Gill: And that’s a fraction of the house you just bought, you know,

Luca: the room we stayed. Ride, but it was also, it also had quite a few problems and 90 Euro night

Anna: Yeah. That’s crazy. It’s even more, more expensive than bigger cities like Milan, Rome….

Gill: there was also a lot of like quite good people that were doing things for, you know, [00:10:00] social calls, ESG, things like the community kitchens.

I met someone from Armenia who was like trying to set up something with wool that had indirectly met you. So there’s a lot of social good going on. On the sidelines of all the things you’ve introduced. ’cause you’ve got people who want to do good in an area where they can afford, you know, to set up premises.

Luca: And that’s what you can do when you’re in a place where you can actually play with property, where you can buy stuff and have a bit of fun with it. There’s no way someone can say, I’m gonna throw €100k something in London and make a coworking space out it. Because you’re not even gonna buy a garage.

George: There’s one guy in Mussomeli who I like a lot. He started with one house, bought it for 20,000. He now owns. All six adjoining houses in the first house, the top floor. He’s turned it into a hairdresser studio where he gets a couple young guys and girls is doing hairs. He’s turned the bottom floor into a cafe and he is got a license from the mayor to have tables and chairs outside and they’ve made a communal garden and he’s just turned his corner property now into like half the street, which he owns. And it costs him [00:11:00] like 150 grand in total.

Luca: He’s got empire

George: and he is got his own little empire, you know, and he gets people on WeWork who come and work for him for free, for sort of work experience. And um, you know, he’s living like a king.

Gill: Yeah. But then people supporting each other and that kind of lifestyle people miss.

And the thing is, if you relocate to a big city or you relocate somewhere, there’s no foreigners. You feel very lonely. Whereas that’s what Mussomeli has. You have like-minded people and you pull them all together to a place so that that dissipates the loneliness. So I can see how it really works.

Luca: It makes a huge difference.

George: Yeah. And you know, when you live in a place where you are restrained financially and you’ve got so many bills coming out, it’s almost a luxury to be able to have all these sort of ideas and go through with them, you know? But because you’re not constrained financially or by the mayor, you know, there’s a lot of freedom to sort of, I say to anyone, if you’ve got 50 grand, you can come buy a house and start a business and have a good life.

Which is, you know. In London. That’s like a year’s rent, so

Luca: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

George: No, I mean there’s, [00:12:00] people ask, why’d you choose Miss Me? I didn’t really choose Miss Somme. It was just they had a one year house scheme going on and I wanted a cheap house. And then because I was there, I started promoting it.

You know, miss, so me’s beautiful, but you know, there’s another 10,000 towns which look pretty identical to Miss Milli around sissy. But you know, it really depends who’s there and who’s promoting it.

Luca: So they come over because it is like, I’m not gonna be the only foreigner in a town.

George: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my, my problem is I don’t really tend to think things through too much. I just sort of go with the flow and, um, hope for the best. And, uh, that’s planned out pretty well so far.

Also, I try and show, you know, a positive side of this. You know, a lot of it people who document this process, it’s quite negative. They’re talking about all this sort of things that have gone wrong.

I just try and show, doing on a shoestring budget, with not speaking the language, not knowing anyone, you know, it’s still possible.

Luca: Yeah.

George: I see the people who end up in the biggest trouble are the ones who are just trying to throw money at problems all the time when that doesn’t really solve the problem.

A lot of the time, just constantly throwing money at the issue. But you learn from your mistakes and fortunately I’ve not made the [00:13:00] costly ones.

Gill: Or say, if you do nothing, you don’t make any mistakes. So the only you know, that’s how you learn, that’s how you progress.

Luca: It was really a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much, George.

Anna: That was such a great conversation.

Luca: Yeah. He is always full of insight.

Anna: I love how honest George is about what he did. I mean,

Luca: absolutely. We cut out some of the more, more honest, honest, honest parts, but he’s still very honest on record. Um. Anyway, it was a pleasure to talk to him. Uh, and, uh, we’re always following what he’s doing.

And, it would be interesting to see how the region of Sicily develops, given that, the one euro homes scheme is, uh, kind of maxing out and people are starting look a little bit more further afield for other locations. So I am bullish Sicily over the long term, we shall see.

Anna: Yeah, I mean, it’s not just about cheap property. It’s about community. It’s about [00:14:00] building something bigger and yeah finding the right one isn’t that easy.

Luca: Absolutely. It’s mostly about community. I’d say if there’s something we learned, it’s that. Thank you listeners for being here thus far and for listening to us every week.

We really appreciate you and feel free to send us your comments. The last thing I want to mention before going on to enjoy my Saturday branch is that this week we have launched, on Magic Towns Italy two new indicators, which are very, very important. We’re gonna be talking about this in next week’s podcast in a little bit more detail, but we now cover demographic fragility as an indicator on our Town Explorer.

It has, become clear that a large amount of towns in Italy. Almost two thirds of them are shrinking at a pretty rapid pace, and that, of course, is a dangerous signal for anyone. They may find themselves in a [00:15:00] community that will shrink over the next 20 years. So we have crunched the data and simplified it in a way that everyone can understand.

Anyone that has access to the Town Explorer on Magic Towns Italy that they can now filter by whether a town is solid from a demographic standpoint, meaning likely to do well over the next few years mixed, or if it is in a position of fragility in those cases, you may want to be thinking twice about what your own needs will be in 10 or 20 years.

I hope you’re going to enjoy using this. I hope you enjoyed our podcast and I hope you enjoy your weekend.

Anna: Thank you guys. See you next time.

Luca: Thank you, Anna. Thank you everyone.

Anna: and Anna. Today we are heading back to one of the regions that often gets overlooked in conversations about moving to Italy, but really shouldn’t.

Luca: People go to Italy, they imagine I’m gonna go to Tuscany, Rome. Milan maybe Puglia, but Le Marche is off the radar for most people. And one of the things we like to do at Magic Towns is look a little bit further.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, Le Marche have the sea, the mountains, beautiful towns, strong food culture. It’s a beautiful area. This area also feels more structured than most of Central Italy, and there are lots of towns that qualify for the [00:01:00] 7% tax scheme

Luca: of which you have spoken time and time and time again. You are the expert.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: So today we’re going to discuss the process of settling down in the Marche through the voice of our guest, Sara.

Sarah is originally from Australia and she moved to Italy after what she , described as a bit of a midlife crisis. She came to Italy to study Gastronomic Sciences. I didn’t even know it was a thing before hearing it from her. And then she made the decision to stay in Italy and to build something of our own.

Anna: Yeah. You know what I liked about Sara’s story is that it isn’t random at all. Like she didn’t fall in love with a postcard and jump, she approached the move very thoughtfully. She had a spreadsheet criteria, a town size in mind, access to airports, access to trains, and then eventually she found herself in Fabriano.

Luca: I thoroughly [00:02:00] approve of that approach as you can imagine. And the property angle in talking to Sarah is interesting too. It’s not like she came, she bought a small apartment and settled down, or she took on a big renovation project and added to, into her background in food, hospitality and walking internationally, and she imagined a creative and community-based future for the property she was fixing up.

Anna: Yeah. So in this episode you’ll hear about why she choose the town of Fabriano, what surprised her about moving inland rather than to the coast, how she found the buying and renovation process in Italy, and also what she sees in Le Marche as a place for food tourism reason and as lower, more intentional travel.

Luca: So without further ado, here is Anna with Sara on living in the Marche.

Sara: I am from Australia and i’ve been living in Melbourne for most of my life, but I’m from a [00:03:00] small country town about the same size as Fabriano. And I’ve worked in the food industry all of my life. I suppose the kind of reason that I came to Italy was a bit of a midlife crisis because I’m 50 and I applied for the University of Gastronomic Science.

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Sara: Um, which is located in Bra in Piemonte, and it’s a university that was started by Carlo Petrini from the Slow Food movement. I was accepted. So I’ve done a Master’s of Food Communication and Marketing, and I decided to stay.

Anna: And then from Bra you moved to Le Marche.

Sara: Yeah, so I really enjoyed that year in Bra. The trains were amazing. I could get to Milan really easily and just as a right size town I think as well. So when I did start my kind of like, oh, maybe I’ll just move somewhere in Italy, look around, I had quite a detailed spreadsheet and some of the things on that list were [00:04:00] being quite close to a major capital.

So within two to three hours, was really important for me. Just in case I need to get home in a hurry, then that’s more possible. A 15 meter swimming pool was also on my list, but that wasn’t available, which is the shame.

The size of the town, I think 30, 40,000 people is a really nice size town.

Anna: So you made a sheet and how did it happen that you found Fabriano just looking around? Or did you know someone or

Sara: I know, the region a little bit, obviously because of the wine and food. I think because I studied food, I was already a little bit aware that I’ve spent a bit of time in Senigallia and Abruzzo so I kind of knew this coastline.

But not inland so much. But I thought not being on the coast was a good idea. I just wanted to be a little bit off the coast and I was with me in and Matelica and Fabriano, and in the end it was actually the property that made me decide on that. But also the town is really cute. [00:05:00] It’s not on top of a hill, like a traditional Italian town.

It’s a little bit in more of a valley, and there’s a beautiful river that runs through the town and my property backs onto the river, which is really amazing.

It was a really wealthy town, so there’s a lot of really beautiful old buildings and million churches as you would expect, and a really gorgeous theater.

Anna: And how was the process of finding the property? Did you speak Italian first?

Like finding professionals? Most of the time, the most difficult part.

Sara: How did I find the property? Chatting with different real estate agents online. And I just so happened to find a really great agent in Fabriano and they had a really fantastic team that are very organized.

Anna: Can you talk a bit more about this project, how the idea started, and what is your vision for the future?

So the property you’re talking about is Fritto Misto Comune, right?

Sara: I would’ve just bought an apartment for myself. But I’ve renovated some properties in Australia before, so I do enjoy that challenge. So when I was looking at houses [00:06:00] and this one came about, it was a bit of a project.

It’s actually a very big project. I suppose came about because when I was studying, some friends that I made in my class, one of them is Finnish and one of them is Canadian.

We were in the back of a taxi one night and the taxi driver said, wow, you are all speaking English, but they’re all different accents. Where are you from? And we told him, and then he said, oh, you’re like a fritto misto. And it just kind of stuck. I thought it was a great little name. Nothing to do with the fried food. Sorry.

Anna: Yeah. But also it’s connected with your passion for food.

Sara: Yeah. So i’ve done lots of little projects together and lots of my other friends from around the world have also had some input into the projects and I would like to continue.

It’s a bit of a community creative space, a really nice community of people.

Anna: How did you find the Italian market, the pros, the cons, the difficulties

Sara: I think I’ve been really lucky in the fact that I’ve made such [00:07:00] a fantastic team. Tradesmen were also really great. I really was in the really lucky position to have time on my hands. So I really wanted to get in, get dirty and work on the project with the team.

I think that really helped them maybe respect what I wanted, and I appreciated their opinions on everything.

Anna: It’s difficult to find a trustworthy person that you can feel like reassured that everything that they are doing is fine.

Sara: I mean, they’re all men and as a single 50-year-old woman, I think it did take them a minute to maybe understand that I did have a vision and some processes that I wanted to kind of follow.

But, after that, everything was really great.

Anna: You said that you were also involved in local food initiatives.

Sara: And I like doing events as well.

Anna: And, how is your relationship with the language?

Sara: It’s embarrassingly bad. I’m not sure what you know about Australia, but we grew up with, a second language not being something that was particularly taught at schools.

Anna: Le Marche is a pretty modern region.

Sara: Yeah. I mean, there’s not a lot of English spoken.

And I really am gonna live here. I’m not just passing or living three months and then going somewhere else and going back to Australia. I do need to learn Italian.

Anna: No, there’s time. I lived for a while in France and it was the same. I went there without knowing the language. And I ended up, just going to grocery shopping, those things. So it, it’s happening without you realizing it.

Sara: Totally.

Anna: , So, is there something that you miss about Australia, being here? Something that you appreciate more being here?

Sara: I think it’s, I’m gonna sound really ridiculous even though I’m living in such an amazing country for food. Multicultural food is something that is a little bit harder to come by in Italy, especially in regional areas. I think as a country like [00:09:00] Australia, but there’s only been really white Australia has been around for about 250 years. We are very multicultural, so I didn’t realize how much my own taste buds are really, maybe more Asian influenced and, spice and British as well obviously. So buying things like coriander don’t exist.

Anna: Yeah, apart from the bigger cities, yeah, it’s a bit difficult.

And if you could give just a piece of advice to anyone, moving to Italy or something that you would’ve done, differently

Sara: You can’t expect it to be like your own country. And I think the more the people don’t say, well, it’s not how I would do this, or that’s not how we do it back in Australia. I think those things do not help.

Anna: It’s about, maintaining a broader view.

Thank you so much, Sara.

What I liked about that conversation is that Sara’s story feels very real.

Luca: Yes, definitely. There’s a lot of conversations about Italy that stay at the fantasy level, [00:10:00] the views, the food, the piazzas, and a ton of stereotypes. And what stood out for me in chatting with Sara is the decision making process behind the mood. She thought carefully about where to live, what kind of town she wanted, how connected it had to be, and then what kind of project she could take on. It was almost scientific.

Anna: Yeah. And I also really liked that she chose a place like Fabriano. Like Fabriano is a beautiful corner of Italy, but there aren’t that many, you know, tourists or international buyers. The town has a real identity.

Luca: Yes, it’s an interesting town because it used to be very popular and powerful in the middle Ages and until not so long ago, and it has kind of declined, but as you know, it takes little for it to go back into the map and become popular again.

This is one of the big themes for us. It has always been, Italy’s got places that are not [00:11:00] famous in the global imagination, but are absolutely viable, sometimes more viable than the more famous destinations.

Anna: And there was also something quite encouraging the way she described building relationships locally. Like not expecting Italy to become Australia, not demanding that everything works the same way, but gradually learning how to operate within a different place.

Luca: Indeed. So if today’s episode made you curious about Le Marche, this beautiful area of Central Italy or the town of Fabriano itself or other smaller towns in Italy more generally, go to Magic Towns Italy, you can use the Town Explorer to look into Fabriano and thousand 500 towns. Creating a free account you can compare data points and access the guides we have prepared for you.

Anna: And if you enjoyed this episode, do share it with someone who’s thinking seriously about a move to Italy.

Luca: Thank you so much for listening. Thank you, Anna, for being back here, and [00:12:00] we’ll be back next Saturday.

Anna: Ciao, see you next week.

Anna: Hi Luca. Where are you right now?

Luca: I’m actually at Catania Airport.

Anna: Why?

Luca: I’ve just come back from a little tour of Sicily. I spent a week going around. Visiting places. Meeting up with expats.

It was, it was very enjoyable. My only problem with Sicily is that every time I go to Sicily, I put on three or four kgs.

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Luca: So it’s a bad place for me to be.

The, the food is amazing, but there’s a lot of it that’s fried. So it’s good, but it’s dangerous.

Anna: Oh, and where have you been?

Luca: There was a bit of a wide tour, started off in Caltagirone. Licata Sciacca and then went off to Mussomeli. No. Of which, you know, yes. You know a lot about Mussomeli, so,

And then ended up back in, Catania.

Anna: But sorry. Are [00:01:00] the one euro houses real there, or is just.

Luca: Yes, yes. Oh, I can attest to the fact that they exist.

There’s not many of them. In fact, I don’t think there’s any of them left. That’s actually a funny, a funny thing that all the expats I met, none of them bought a one euro home. They heard about the place from, of course from George Laing, and we know him. From the one euro home system, but none of them bought a one euro home, but they’re still affordable homes, you know, so.

Anna: Yeah. So did you get to see any of these properties? Like what condition are they actually in?

Luca: Yeah, so the, you have to understand this. Mussomeli like many Sicilian towns h as an old historical center that was not made for cars.

Tiny homes, very often in a very bad state, surrounded by newer buildings, mostly erected in the sixties and the seventies. I actually had a chat with an architect a Sicilian architect yesterday who does [00:02:00] not want to be named. He told me that this is almost inevitable in Sicily, that he cannot think of a single town in Sicily that does not have this layer of frankly, a bit ugly buildings from the sixties and the seventies around it.

So what you can play with is the size of the historical center. Some have a very large historical center like Catania, Catania, five kilometers wide historical center. Some of them have a very small historical center and, in the case of Mussomeli, you have the outskirts, which are like I don’t wanna say modern, you know, semi modern sixties and seventies buildings. Not super pretty, although the nature around it is very pretty. Then you have the historical center, which has all these very cute, lanes, alleys, stairs, going up and down, winding, absolutely not made to be driven with a wide car. I am thankful that I had a, a Cinquecento, Fiat Cinquecento with me [00:03:00] so it will fit and the one euro homes are in this section.

They’re mostly very old buildings, they need a lot of love.

Anna: Does it feel like a place you could live year round or more like a slow rural escape?

Luca: It is surprising when George says that there’s a lot of expats. He is not kidding. I personally met quite a few of them and I’m just gonna say hi to Charlotte and Tim, I know you’re listening, so I’m saying hi to you.

There’s maybe four restaurants. Mm-hmm. But they are quite busy with expats and you find people from everywhere. Family from Colorado, there was a German couple, there was a girl from Milan, so we may have internal expats. A person from Australia, a gentleman from the UK.

It’s a bit of a varied group. It’s an interesting kind of setup.

Anna: Yeah. Is English widely spoken like bars, you know? Or would someone need to speak Italian to manage daily life?

Luca: I wouldn’t say [00:04:00] that English is commonly spoken, younger people get by a little bit easier, but if you remember, George himself told us that he uses Google Translate to survive.

Anna: So what’s around Mussomeli?

Like, are there interesting towns, beaches, or cities nearby? Is it,

Luca: Now this is the tough point with the place because, to be completely honest with you, Mussomeli is not near anything. It is set atop a, well, it depends. If you’re British, you call it a mountain, and if you’re not, you call it a hill, but a high hill. And, it’s a couple of hours away by, from Catania and maybe 40 minutes from Caltanissetta. It feels remote, uh, to be sure there are shops and the supermarket, et cetera, and the nature around is very nice, but it is a little bit isolated, so one has to be ready for that. But then again, [00:05:00] most 7% towns are like this, trust me, I have seen places like, to mention one Palazzo Adriano, where they shot, Cinema Paradiso, you know, the Italian movie that won the Oscar for best foreign film in what is it, 89? Yeah. It was shot in that town and that, for instance, is even more remote. Beautiful, but extremely remote, maybe three hours from Catania. So, you have to keep in mind that, while there is a, an expat community, that you’re gonna have to be traveling from far afield to get there.

Anna: So who would you recommend Mussomeli to? Like retirees, remote workers, families?

Luca: I’ll tell you who I saw that is the happiest there. I met a mm-hmm English gentleman that found that the combination of property affordability and his desire to help people and to have a social business, so to say, allowed him to invest his capital. And like now he wants to set up a [00:06:00] coworking space. There is one expat that set up a sort of like community kitchen. The fact the property is cheap allows you to do things. Mm-hmm. And you know, you couldn’t just start a coworking space in the central of Milan for a hundred thousand euro.

You have to keep that in mind that if you wanna do a fair bit with, uh, a limited amount of money, I think it’s a good place if you, don’t need to be in a big town. It’s a good place. And I think some people are attracted to the fact that it has a growing expat community. I would not recommend this to someone that feels like they have to be in the center of the world or even remotely in the center of the world.

Does what I just said gel with what George said, does it match what you had understood from talking to him?

Anna: Yeah. It’s definitely what George said that, I mean there’s a growing expat community that, you need a car outside of Mussomeli, [00:07:00] but like the city center is walkable and we are doing lots of projects and stuff, so that’s great.

Luca: Yeah. We’re gonna be keeping an eye on this one. I think I’ll be back in the next, month or maybe two. Mm-hmm. And then, uh, I should probably say the other, the place that really stole my heart and, you know, that I’m a picky person i I really liked it. It’s on the sea, not too far from Agrigento. And, it is incredibly beautiful. All the town perched atop the sea property, affordable.

I would be lying to you if I told you that I haven’t spent a bit of time thinking about and then looking at a few properties and, excellent food. You know, it, it has a port. So fish is the, fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner almost. The only bad thing it has going for itself is transportation links to some degree [00:08:00] because you only have buses to other major cities. But it is also too big to be a 7% town, it has 40,000 inhabitants. And, unfortunately that will preclude it from becoming too much of a expat magnet in my view, but absolutely stunning, stunning.

Anna: Yeah, I would say the pictures actually, it really seems like the, you know, one of those post postcards that you see of the Amalfi Coast, like this town by the sea with the boats, it’s beautiful.

Luca: Yes, absolutely. So there you go. These are, these are my very brief, and live from the airport takeaways.

Anna: Okay, so today we have another special guest, Eliseo, our data man.

Luca: Our data man, okay. Do you like to be called a data man? Would you rather prefer no data analyst, data scientist,

Eliseo: Maybe something more professional?

Luca: Right. I think so. Welcome Eliseo. It’s a [00:09:00] pleasure to have you. Eliseo has been our data analyst since the beginnings of of Magic Towns. Is it your first time on a podcast?

Eliseo: Yes. Thanks for having me. It’s my first time and it’s a pleasure

Luca: So we invited Eliseo because he is working on a brand new feature for Magic Towns, subscribers. Do you wanna talk about it very briefly?

Eliseo: Sure. So, uh, we’ve been working on a property evaluator application. So our main goal is to make the decision of buying property easy for our subscribers. Either if they want to make a, a simple investment or for people that want to relocate from different countries. So it’s a data driven insight that, we provide them before they commit to investments. It’s easy to use. So users simply, provide a property URL that they have [00:10:00] liked or they have found and they provide that to the application.

So the system, leverages enrich data for cities across all Italy, covering data points like demographic trends, economic performance, geographic characteristics, social dynamics, infrastructure quality. it gives comprehensive, insights and recommendations. And maybe, it’s more insight, and fact driven than emotional.

Luca: But how does the system know if the property is suitable for that specific person who is asking the question.

Eliseo: Before the user makes the request for the property evaluation, we ask them what kind of investment they want to do. And then we remember that , and then we provide the recommendation back.

Luca: So if I had to summarize this in very non-technical terms, it’s a sort of chat bot that remembers what kind of property you like and you’re looking for, and it tells you whether the property you’re [00:11:00] considering is a good match for you. If it’s a good investment, what the town is like, et cetera, would that be right?

Eliseo: Yes, exactly. We enrich the evaluation with our data and we provide the recommendation.

Luca: Lovely. I’m looking forward to using it. When do you think this might be ready?

Eliseo: We plan to release this, to the general public in April, and it’ll be live then and, every user can, evaluate their property there.

Luca: Lovely. Well, thank you Eliseo. This is only one of the many things that you help us with. It’s great to have you on the call.

Eliseo: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Luca: Anna fell asleep during this, you know she’s allergic to data. The two of you are yin and yang. Data and emotion.

Anna: Exactly.

Eliseo: Different poles of the magnet.

Luca: Well said. So I think we can wrap this up for today.

Anna: Yeah, that was really interesting guys.

Thank you so much.

Luca: We’ll be back next week with a more normal podcast, not recorded at Catania Airport. And so all our listeners for the background noise [00:12:00] if you heard any.

Anna: Bye. Thank you.

Luca: Bye. Have a good weekend.

It’s chaotic or outdated. Others, imagine something like idyllic and community driven, but the truth as usual sits somewhere in between.

Luca: That’s right. Hi Anna. So if you zoom out and look at the data, Italy’s broadly in line with the average of developed countries. In the latest PISA rankings, the PISA rankings are these international rankings of various types of education, Italian 15 year olds score around the average in maths. A little bit above average in reading and a little bit below in science, Roughly three quarters of the students [00:01:00] reach solid of baseline across subjects, and where it is weaker is at the very top end.

There are fewer academic high flyers than in some Northern European and Asian systems. So it’s a system that works and works fairly well, but it is not especially elite. But we don’t want to talk about the data. You’ll be happy to hear that, Anna. We actually want to talk about what it feels like and, um, talking about that you actually grew up in that, inside the Italian system. Talking about the big picture, what did it feel like to grow up in a small Italian town?

Anna: I actually feel very lucky, because, you know, there is this kind of freedom that just comes with it naturally. So you know, your village, you can basically walk the whole thing and that makes you feel independent, even if you’re like just a kid. So, you know, I just grab my bike, I go buy bread or text my friends to figure out when to meet up.

I’m going to cinema. It seems like I’m [00:02:00] still doing these things, but

Luca: I know the cinema in your town, uh, it’s like, uh, tiny, but you know, still kids going to the center by themselves. It’s not taken for granted these days.

Anna: So yeah. You know, little things, but they made me feel independent. And because there’s less stuff to do, you end up being more creative about it. So, you know, you’re playing the hills behind the house.

You make things up, you, you figure things out on your own. And I think that shapes you in a good way. And I think that it, at least back then it felt really safe.

Luca: Maybe we’ll talk in the future about whether it feels less safe now, but anyway. Yeah, that sense of embeddedness in a place is something the expat families often underestimate. It isn’t just about test scores, it is more about the feeling of being a child in Italy.

But since we’re talking about schools, most Italian children attend public schools run by the state, and the [00:03:00] state system is what carries the country. There are private schools, but historically have not, they have not been seen as premium. There are income gaps, of course. Immigrant students have increased now, right now in the makeup, about 11% of the students. And that’s double what it was 15 years ago. But once you adjust for the socioeconomic factors of the families of origin, basically, once you cancel out the differences in, family economics immigrant children, Italian children perform the same in the Italian system. So that’s good news.

And how did you feel school was like at these different stages, Anna?

Anna: It depends. Kindergarten was wonderful. We had English classes, art, and this thing where the older kids would help the younger ones. So it really felt community driven. Primary school was, it was [00:04:00] good. Apart from the grembiule, I hated it.

Luca: Have to tell, you’re gonna have to tell our listeners what the grembiule

Anna: That’s awful. It’s, like uniform. So we all had to wear it and I hated it.

Luca: You go to a religious school?

Anna: No,

Luca: Okay. We didn’t have a uniform in my state school. Maybe it was just your school that

Anna: really?

Luca: Yes. Most schools don’t have a uniform.

Anna: Oh, no, no. We were for.

Luca: to break it to you.

Anna: No, no. We were forced to to put that uniform, but

Luca: That’s the point of a uniform. You’re forced to wear it

Anna: yeah. Well that was so bad. Like younger me was very much, why can’t I just express myself and wear what I want? But. Now I understand that the idea is to reduce differences, visible differences between families.

So yeah, high school, depending a lot on which class you ended up in. That matters more than people realize. But there was definitely room for creativity. So [00:05:00] around Halloween or Carnival the old school dress up and they pick the best costume, sometimes there were workshop days where you could, there was so.

Luca: sweet.

Anna: Sometimes there were workshop days where you could sign up for things like skateboarding, graffiti, uh, photography, art classes. It was amazing. But probably was just an exception. Probably was just my school.

Luca: think so.

Anna: No. Oh, okay.

Luca: No, no, no. I think most schools do this. In fact, they do it more now than back in the day, in my opinion.

Anna: Yeah, the only thing that I’ve more mixed feelings about is how specific Italian school gets. So it’s very focused on, exact definitions. Sometimes it pushes you into memorization mode, so you do learn a lot, but you also forget a lot. I like it, but I wasn’t that good. Exactly because of this reason

Luca: because you couldn’t remember dates.

Anna: Yes.

Luca: Yeah, I know it [00:06:00] is annoying. And that is one, that is one thing about the Italian system, that it is very facts driven.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: dates, remember the names, remember the poems. And, uh, it feels heavy

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: It suits some people more than others, right? You know how there are some people in your class that remember everything?

Anyway, I’m a bit like you, meaning that I did everything in the, in the Italian public system, kindergarten, primary high school, university. And I personally think the Italian school system is one of Italy’s great institutions, possibly the greatest one, I wanna say kindergarten’s excellent.

Whether it is officially Montessori or not, it is heavily influenced always by the kind of learn by do world philosophy. It is free of charge from age three. And you get full daycare with flexible classrooms, structured activities, even when my friends from Northern Europe come and see where my youngest kid goes to school, they are genuinely impressed [00:07:00] by the kindergarten.

What I think is tricky is the jump between kindergarten and primary school. So you spend three years playing in the garden, playing with your friends, and then suddenly you’re sitting at the desk for hours. And understandably, children struggle with that transition. Personally I thought that things really turned out for the best in high school. Because you move away from that kind of standardized curriculum and you start doing what you actually want to do, whether it is languages or ancient Greek or STEM or whatever it might be.

But the tricky thing about the Italian system is that you still tested on everything. my friends from the US and the UK. The, the minds are blown by this, that in our finals we are tested on every single subject and they all count the same. So it doesn’t matter if you went to a language high school, still have to get passing marks in chemistry, physics, [00:08:00] religion, uh, so on and so forth.

So it can feel pretty heavy, frankly.

Anna: Is it different in the other countries?

Luca: Yeah. In some other countries, you pick some subjects that you want to take to your finals. So you say, I’m gonna do this, this, and this.

Anna: Oh, wow. Amazing.

Luca: That be easy?

Anna: Yeah, I would’ve skipped like math or something like that.

Luca: Yeah. And history.

Anna: Well,

Luca: you have found three subjects to do

Anna: no, no languages. Literature. Uh, no, history is important. Like really, it’s really

Luca: Sure.

Anna: It’s just,

Luca: will study it.

Anna: Yeah, but it does make you well-rounded though, you know?

Luca: Yeah. Yeah, it does do that. It kind of goes back to the, survival of the fittest. One thing that is truly

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Luca: Opinion, I don’t know if you disagree, is oral examinations. Maybe 80% of my tests in high school and 90% of my tests at university were oral. So you, you know how it works.

You stand up by the blackboard or the whiteboard and [00:09:00] then, uh, your teacher professor questions you and you have to defend yourself from the attack. I think it works wonders for your presentation skills. For your intellectual resilience and that’s something that you carry with you throughout, life.

Anna: Yeah,

Luca: if you have the same opinion.

Anna: absolutely 100%. I was way better in oral exams.

Luca: Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too. Where I think that Italy really needs to improve is teaching foreign languages, especially English. We don’t have enough native, English speakers. And this is a political third rail, so you never hear a politician say this. My middle high school English teacher was from Sicily and she was a lovely woman, but, you know, uh, her accent was just not understandable to any native speakers. Uh, why would you have someone that can’t speak English, teach you English? Doesn’t make much sense. Things have improved, but [00:10:00] not that much. And I think people, when they come and visit, they can see that when they go to a bar or restaurant and they like, why can’t people speak English?

Uh, this is why they can’t speak English.

Anna: How was she like?

Luca: Uh, she was, she was lovely. I won’t say her name because she might sue me. You remember that article you wrote this week about suing people in Italy, how easy it is defamation. So I’m not gonna say her name. Uh, she was a lovely woman, but she couldn’t speak English. This is irrelevant to our listeners because thankfully they and their kids can already speak English. So that’s our problem to fix.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. But that’s true. Like a lot of people learn grammar very well. But speaking confidently, it’s, it’s another matter.

Luca: That’s right. And then there’s a matter of the private schools that we touched on before. In Italy, Historically, private schools are not seen as elite. They were often religious institutions. I’m sure you had a couple of friends that ended up in Montagnana to study with the nuns. Did you? Did you Anna?

Anna: There was the [00:11:00] school. Oh my God. My mom wanted, that’s another topic, however. Yeah. Lots.

Luca: podcast.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: So you’d be sent to private school if there something wrong with you and things are changing a little bit, but it’s actually nice that, everyone in Italy, from the senator’s son to the chimney sweeper’s daughter, we all go to the same schools because then we have a vested interest in the system working well. Um, now for expats, the matter is a bit different because often they choose international schools because of language continuity. For Italian families, public school is absolutely normal. And I can say myself, I moved back to Italy where my kids, uh, um, mature of them were pretty old, you know, between inverted commas. They were like eight and nine. We actually never spoke Italian at home and they took to Italian like a fish to water. Within six months they spoke perfectly. So I can attest to the fact that kids have an amazing ability to learn [00:12:00] foreign languages without, any help. But still, I can see why expats are looking for, international schools for that reason..

Anna: Nowadays, there are lots of international schools that are really, really good. I spoke with Charlotte, last week and she said that in Sardinia, near Cagliari, there’s this international school, that has like a pool, yoga classes, like, I don’t know, lots of different things, but she said that the costs were are like, I mean are okay.

Like compared to the

Luca: reasonable.

Anna: Yeah, they’re reasonable.

Luca: No, that is absolutely true. I have friends in the, actually I have a funny story. I had a friend in Denmark. We worked at the same place. He had worked for Morgan Stanley in London, and he moved back to denmark on half the salary sending his three kids to private school or public school, as they call it in the UK, was so expensive that he was eating half his salary.

Anna: My God,[00:13:00]

Luca: oh yeah. I know people that pay 40, 50,000 pounds a year to send their children primary and secondary school. So

Anna: that’s.

Luca: Italy, the costs, yeah, it’s, it’s crazy. In Italy, the costs for a private school, uh, between five, 10,000 euro a year at the very top, it is rare for things to be more expensive than that. So yeah, it’s an attractive country for, for that reason too.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: Anyway, to sum it up. I think the takeaway from what we said is that if people are considering moving to a smaller Italian town that only has Italian state schools with children, the system is not perfect. It is not designed to mass produce prodigies, but is solid community-based a broadly. It works for everyone. I also wanna say that from March we are going to be updating all our town profiles on Magic Towns Italy, with the new [00:14:00] school performance metrics for standardized tests so people can actually look at which towns perform better and turn out better students for the future when choosing where to live.

Anna: Because at the end of the day, it’s, it’s not just about moving house, it’s about choosing the environment your children will grow up in.

Luca: That’s right. And many Italian towns may surprise you in a good way. Thank you, listeners for listening to us again, and we’ll talk to you next week.

Today we’re heading to Sardinia, not as tourists, but through the eyes of someone who chose to build a life there from scratch.

Luca: You might have seen her on Instagram as @americanmominthemed, Charlotte Fortier-Mutzl. Charlotte, don’t kill me if I didn’t pronounce that perfectly, is originally from Quebec. She grew up in the US and eventually left everything behind to travel through Europe. In the next few years, there was a harrowing succession of moving to Rome on a working holiday visa, starting businesses, surviving COVID, and then relocating to Sardinia without ever having seen it.

Anna: So in this conversation we talk about risk, starting a business in Italy, learning the language from zero, raising children on the island, and what slow living [00:01:00] actually feels like when you’re living in every day.

Luca: If you’ve ever wondered about Sardinia’s slower pace of life, this episode offers a honest perspective from Charlotte.

Anna: Let’s get into it.

Hi, Charlotte, how are you? You’re in Cagliari right now, right?

Charlotte: Yes, that’s correct.

Anna: Nice to meet you finally. And two things, draw me to you, your story. The first one is the sweetness and sincerity in the way you share what happens to you every day. Like you really do so much while being a mom and and entrepreneur. And now I still, you even learning Sardinian. Second that you move exactly to Sardinia, which is absolutely, I think one of my favorite places all over the world.

Can you tell me a bit more about your story?

Charlotte: I’m from Quebec, from Canada, the French part. And, uh, at 12 years old I moved with my family to the United States, to Florida. And then eventually, I moved to San Diego in California where I lived for a few years and I loved it [00:02:00] there. But yeah, I went through a bad breakup. I kind of felt for a long time that I was kind of out of place, you know, and I kind of grew up feeling like the United States, Canada is like the center of the world, and I knew that there was more out there, and so I, I had this, this need to go experience something else. And so I sold my car and I sold everything I had basically.

And I took a plane ticket to Europe and traveled by myself. And did seven countries in two months and fell in love with Italy. I went to Barcelona and got a yoga teaching certification. And then I decided to start in Italy. I had like a working holiday visa and, I was teaching yoga in the park, working at a bar in the evening.

And then I met my husband, in Rome. We lived there for a few years, I think three years. [00:03:00] But we lived there through COVID and having our first son. Afterwards everything just became a bit too chaotic. And we lived in an agriturismo in Umbria for like six months. And we loved it there. We were actually looking for houses there ’cause we knew we didn’t wanna waste money on rent anymore. ‘Cause we had moved, I think, to 12 different apartments since my son had been born.

So we just wanted some stability. And then one day we were walking and we were freezing. We were in our boots and I’m looking at my husband, I’m like, what are we doing? Are we really gonna live here? It’s too cold for me. And I think having grown up, you know, in Florida, in California, I was really missing the beach.

And so I got online and started researching, some of the warmest places in Italy, scuba diving, snorkeling, all this stuff. And then I came across Sardinia. And in reality, I didn’t even know Sardinia existed. That’s how ignorant I [00:04:00] was. And my husband said, well, you’re crazy.

We can’t go live on an island. Like that’s way too nuts. And then within like a week I convinced him, I was like, look, it’s less than an hour flight from Rome. We can go back to our business all the time because we have a cocktail bar in Rome. And yeah, I found our house online before even, you know, ever having been to the island.

We packed up our car with all of our suitcases and got on the ferry with our son and our two cats at the time, and our dog. And we came over here. Neither of us had ever seen Sardinia, so we really took a big risk. And I have been so pleasantly surprised ever since we arrived. The location that we chose like near Cagliari turned out being perfect ’cause we’re right by all the beautiful beaches, but also near the city. And we found this amazing school where our kids go and that’s bilingual, so they’ve [00:05:00] been learning Italian very well. And, uh, our daughter was born here. Now we have two kids.

Now we plan on staying here, you know, long term.

Anna: You mentioned the cocktail bar. What was your experience even starting a business in Italy? You know, we, we know that Italian bureaucracy has quite a reputation, so what was it really like?

Charlotte: So the cocktail bar, actually my husband already owned when I met him, and that’s actually how we met. I went for an interview to work at his bar and I was the first employee ever. And then we ended up, getting together and then I hired everyone after me, I’ve added maybe a woman’s perspective and touch with the decor and, uh, some of the menus and things.

He is from New York actually, moved to Italy when he was 18, so he has a very interesting story as well. He was a real estate agent and saved up and then opened this bar. Our first business adventure together was in Rome. We [00:06:00] opened a Mexican restaurant, together and it took so much work.

I was pregnant with our son at the time and it was right near our bar, near the Vatican. And, we were so proud. We got all of our menus. We got the food providers, everything. We were open for less than two months and we were almost during a profit already, actually and then COVID happened.

We are part of those people that experienced that in Rome. Our landlord didn’t give us any breaks or anything. We. Uh, had to stay shut for a whole year, paying the rent every month. And so we really struggled during that year. And we eventually had to sell because it was just such a big loss.

Fortunately the bar, we were able to survive a year paying the rent and being closed, but it’s my understanding that like 30% of [00:07:00] businesses in Rome went under during that time.

Anna: Yeah.

Charlotte: So yeah, that was rough. Business wise, yeah. Here in Sardinia is, when we really started, I mean, when we moved here, we didn’t know what we were gonna do on the island.

And we quickly understood that working in tourism would make the most sense for us. Since, you know, combined we speak four languages and we have a lot of experience in customer service. Our first project here actually, we bought, our house and it was already a kind of predisposed for being two houses, like a bifamiliare so we closed up like the door with a wall downstairs, and we’ve been renting the other half of our house on Airbnb.

Almost as long as we’ve been here. I mean, a bit over three years now.

And that gave us a lot of knowledge and experience in the hospitality sector, especially with, people sleeping in your structures. So bureaucracy for that one wasn’t too [00:08:00] complicated.

We have like a commercialista here that helps us a lot. And a geometra. When we bought our house, we didn’t use a lawyer. I know a lot of expats don’t trust like the local people, so they’ll get often like a lawyer that speaks English and stuff.

In my opinion, that can be, you know, helpful. It can also be a waste of money depending on the case, like we speak Italian. And then afterwards, we, our next project was this big abandoned house that was right on the waterfront, on the sea. And we would walk by it all the time, and it was so abandoned and we saw that it was for sale and we would always kind of daydream, like, oh, maybe we could turn this into A, B and B.

It would be so nice, and one day we finally decided, okay, let’s make an offer. And we got it for, you know, a great price. We spent two years with [00:09:00] the construction crew renovating. I did all the architecture. I had no experience in architecture, but I made all the, the plans for the inner walls and where, and it quickly turned into being so much more work than we had anticipated.

Because when you’re building a, what turned out to be a boutique hotel, so much goes into the plumbing and the electrical and where the outlets go and which way the doors open. Decisions never end.

I was more on the design side of things.

Anna: The best thing.

Charlotte: Exactly, yeah. The most creative and, then we have another bed and breakfast in the area. So we stay, we stay busy.

Anna: And at some point you started, um, posting videos about your experience and now you see thousands of comments, from people that are deciding to move to Italy or are already there.

Was it something you planned or, did it develop organically? Like

Charlotte: Yeah, I didn’t expect it to, to gain so much popularity. I [00:10:00] started officially a year ago with, Instagram. At first, I was just kind of sharing, our experience living here in Sardinia and over time it evolved into this major tool that I’ve been using to learn more about the culture and the history of the island and even the language now with learning Sardo. I’ve really, really been enjoying being this bridge between Sardinians and foreigners. It has been very rewarding and I even have. Like, hundreds if not thousands of sardinians every week that are recommending me, like different places to go and different, cultural events.

And so it’s really been a huge help in making me feel more immersed in the island and like we belong, because our daughter’s born here and we’d like to stay, and I clearly don’t look Sardinian, [00:11:00] but you know, I would like to feel more and more like this is home.

Anna: You speak an excellent Italian. I saw some videos and definitely that helps even more. Did you already speak the language or was it something that you’ve learned along the way?

Charlotte: It is something I learned along the way. So me, myself, I have no ties to Italy whatsoever. I was just random chance that I met my husband here and decided to stay. But yeah, when I was living in Rome, I started, through hanging out with my husband and his friends that all spoke Italian, I kind of started absorbing like a sponge, but I wouldn’t speak ’cause I didn’t have the courage. I didn’t wanna make any mistakes.

Honestly watching Netflix is probably what helped me the most. I would watch, you know, like Italian movies on Netflix. In English. And then once I had ’em memorized, then I would watch them in Italian.

And then when we moved to Sardinia, I had to start speaking it because in [00:12:00] Rome you can get by, you know, you’re in Rome, right? So, you know, you can get by with English easily. Here it’s not the case. And with my kids in school and with the workers and with everything, I had to learn and kind of jump into the deep waters and go for it.

Anna: That’s probably the best, the best thing ever. Like when you’re just learning and you’re not practicing in daily life, it’s just it’s more difficult. Yeah. And what’s the biggest difference you’ve noticed in daily rhythm of life compared to the United States?

Charlotte: I would say the slower pace of living here, people say slow living and everything, but it’s true. It is noticeable in so many different ways.

When I was living in the States it is very much more work oriented and earning money and buying, materialistic things. And so often it feels like it’s just a never ending chase, you know, [00:13:00] for happiness.

In Sardinia specifically, I have noticed that people can be so happy with so little and there’s not so much this sense of competition, and it’s a lot more based on spending time with family and kind of things that money can’t buy and those very much line up with my values.

Now living here, like I’ve attained, happiness of course, like I, there’s things that I want or we have goals or I could these planned and stuff, but it feels like I’m not waiting to achieve something, be happy. Like, I look at my husband all the time and tell him like i’m so happy, like I couldn’t be happier,. And so I feel very lucky to have found that here.

Anna: That’s the best feeling ever. Um, but yeah, I completely understand what you’re saying. I think that Sardinia is, I mean even Rome is absolutely beautiful, but Sardinia is something different, compared to all the other [00:14:00] places in Italy.

The area is different. People are different. Like if you love the sea, if you love you, you mentioned scuba diving. You are a yoga teacher. You really feel connected to nature because that’s what matters the most there.

Charlotte: Oh yeah, absolutely.

I’m not someone that’s super like it, energies and stuff like that, but I, I do feel like here, like there’s just something about whenever I arrive on the island that I just, I feel good and I feel at home and I can tell that like people, ’cause we host a lot of travelers and they all tell me like, wow, like Sardinia had such a positive impact, on our experience.

The nature here is incredible, unlike anywhere I’ve ever seen because you get a little bit of everything in such a, relatively small space, from the incredible beaches that, actually I’ve, I’ve been learning a lot about why the beaches here are so nice, and for a long time, Sardinians were kind of held into the center of the island and they didn’t inhabit the coast, for [00:15:00] fear of being overtaken and things like that. So that’s also just fascinating to learn why the beaches have remained so pristine. But there’s also the mountains and there’s these beautiful caves. There are numerous caves here.

And so yeah, there, there’s mountain, like rock climbing and so there’s nature activities.

Anna: Probably the south where you live is the best part.

Charlotte: I haven’t been to the north that much, but I have heard people tell me like the very north, where it’s like all these luxury hotels and everything is like super overpriced. Like a lot of people say, well, that’s not Sardinia anymore. It’s not like the real soul of Sardinia, let’s say.

But here in the south, yeah. It’s very much so like just driving to take my kids to school. Like very often there will be a whole pasture of sheep in the middle of the road. God, to like wait for them to get out. Yeah. Like we can go every single weekend, we go into a different nature spot with the kids and have a picnic, and go for a hike and we never run out of new places to [00:16:00] try, you know, so I feel like it’s a very nice place to grow children and very safe also.

Anna: If that’s something that I wanted to ask you, like how has been your experience so far, raising your children in Italy?

Charlotte: I mean, our children go to a private school here. I know for public schools that it very much depends on which school and which teachers you get ’cause there’s some that are excellent and there’s some maybe that are more mediocre. We, we have been only in the private system and we felt like that was the safest bet since we didn’t really know what to expect.

We really want our children to learn like English grammar as well and all these things in case they ever want to go live, in Canada or the states or, to give them, more opportunities. But the school that we have chosen, for example, has like an indoor pool. They have yoga class. They have musical therapy. They [00:17:00] have, and this is preschool. And they have a chef that cooks everything on the spot, like with fresh ingredients. And they do, like in elementary school next year, they start like philosophy class. And so they do all these things that in Canada, for example, or in the US would be like four times as expensive. So relatively, we find like that we’re getting a great educational system here for such an affordable price compared to what something like that would cost in the States. And safety wise also, like we feel very safe here. It’s never really a worry, especially going from somewhere like when I lived in Florida where everyone is kind of carrying guns and there’s a lot of incidents in schools and all these things.

That’s not something that ever crosses my mind here.

Anna: If you could give just one piece of advice to experts considering to move to Italy, what would it be? Or something that you would’ve recommended to yourself [00:18:00] at a time?

Charlotte: That’s a good question.

Definitely to come visit before moving because I think a lot of people they maybe plan a trip, but they’ll go and they’ll try to do too much in a short amount of time. Like they’ll do like Rome, Milan, Sorrento or whatever, all within a few days. So I would say to like maybe take a few months to come try it out first.

Because it’s not for everyone, it was for me, but it is quite an adjustment going from, having all these, materialistic things, very convenient. And here generally, unless you’re like in the north it’s very much, like the banks are closed at lunchtime and, there’s no Walmart where you can go buy everything.

You’ve gotta go to like different shops for every little thing. So I think it’s, , it’s something that you’ve gotta experience for yourself and really see if this likes slower pace of living is for you. I think, advice, I [00:19:00] would say to just do it, you know?

Because a lot of people, I think, plan and they wanna do it, and they never kind of, it’s never the right timing or it’s never feels like the right moment. It’s important to put yourself out there because if you want a change in your life, it’s not gonna happen for you.

You have to make it happen.

Luca: That was interesting. And what stands out to me is Charlotte’s story which is not about optimization. She didn’t choose the best region based on data or incentives which, as you know, is my favorite approach. So she tried it by doing and she found the right mix of climate values, family rhythm, and pace of life.

Anna: Yeah, I think it’s also a story about resilience. You know, behind the beaches and the hotel, there were tough times struggling during COVID, renovation, stress, and lots of trial and error. So I really admire her.

Luca: She’s very [00:20:00] impressive. And, as a couple, she and her husband have really made it in Italy, as I like to say, and Sardinia clearly works for her. It really sounds like she found the right place for herself. But as she says, it is not for everyone. There’s the slower place of life. The services which are a bit fragmented and the seasonality, those are real trade offs.

Anna: So yeah, if you’re considering a move to Italy, take her advice seriously, spend real time here. Not just a long weekend in three cities, but enough time to experience daily life.

Luca: Absolutely. And, you know, I have to say it, in the meantime, if you do want structured tools to help you evaluate where in Italy you might, enjoy life the most, you can use our town guides, feel free to listen to all our other podcasts. We have now, this is our 43rd podcast.

Anna: Yeah, thanks for listening guys. We’ll see you in the next episode.

Luca: Yes, thank you. Everyone. Have a great weekend.

Anna: Oh my God.

Luca: Yeah, it’s, it’s not true. So that’s how the idea for this podcast came about.

Let’s start with this complex, uh, and scary subject, in, under 15 minutes.

Anna: However, and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast. I am Anna here with my co-host Luca, and today we’re talking about a topic that causes a lot of confusion and worry for internationals in Italy, which is the so-called wealth tax on money held abroad.

Luca: [00:01:00] Yes. This is a topic that a lot of people ask about and there is a lot of misinformation about. So we have to tackle this. People are scared by a term like wealth tax and we’re here to clear the air with facts and um, try to make it interesting in under 15 minutes.

Anna: We’ll break down what Italy’s, foreign wealth tax, really is, uh, talk about, you know, the common myths and give you a few examples so you can understand everything better.

Luca: By the end of today’s show, you will know that the idea of a huge Italian wealth tax is a myth. What the actual numbers are and what kind of assets are exempt from this tax. And we’ll also give a few examples I like this one how having 5 million euro or dollars in a foreign bank account could result in a tax that’s cheaper than than dinner for two.

Anna: Okay, so, uh, one thing I’ve heard over and over is [00:02:00] that if you keep money abroad or transfer money into Italy, the government will whack it with a 10% or 20% tax. Is there any truth to this?

Luca: The quick answer is no. There is no generic 10 or 20% remittance tax on money that is sent to Italy. There is no automatic haircut on incoming funds. In 2014, there was a shortlived, government proposal. This was like three governments ago, of course.

But the proposal was basically dead as as soon as it was discussed. This came up in the, uh, years after the great financial crisis when Italy had a, uh, like many other European countries of a huge debt problem, and they were trying to shore up their finances. Anyway, for people listening to this in 2026, it is absolutely untrue that Italy will tax, or the Italy will intercept even a single euro of money coming from abroad.

Anna: Okay, so if I move, [00:03:00] say, 50,000 euros of my saving from my home country to my Italian bank, I won’t wake up to find 10,000 missing. Right?

Luca: That’s exactly right. You’re going to wake up and find 50 K in the bank account. What is more, if those 50k are your savings that are already taxed, uh, Italy doesn’t tax the fact that you moved them or the fact that you have it. There’s no tax on savings per se.

Anna: Okay. That is a huge relief for a lot of listeners, I’m sure. People in expat forums always panic about some mysterious wealth tax.

Luca: Absolutely. As a myth, it is a remarkably sturdy one. So let’s clarify this. Italy levies a wealth tax on foreign assets, so on cash and financial instruments held abroad. The taxes name is IVAFE. You don’t need to remember the acronym, but it translates to tax on the value of foreign financial [00:04:00] assets.

And this is what people are actually talking about when they mention a wealth tax on money kept abroad.

Anna: Okay, so let’s talk like more deeply about that. Like what is it, how much is it, why Italy has it, like how much is this tax actually?

Luca: Let’s start with that. So the wealth tax covers financial assets held abroad by Italian tax residents, think bank accounts, stocks, bonds, crypto, mutual funds. Basically financial instruments held outside Italy. If you’re an Italian tax resident. Italy wants to know about what you have, and there’s a very small tax that you have to pay each year.

The headline rate for this tax is 0.2% of the value of those assets per year. That’s two tenths of 1%. And let me put this in even clearer terms. If you have 10,000 euro in foreign investments, [00:05:00] 0.2% is 20 euro per year. If you have a hundred thousand Euro held abroad, that’s 200 euro a year. Even if you had a million euro of financial assets and these were not exempt for the tax. I’m gonna look at a whole bunch of exemptions. Then the tax you have to pay is 2000, right? 2000, over a million. So these are pretty small numbers.

Anna: Yeah, honestly, hearing wealth tax, I thought it would be much higher

Luca: yeah, Italy isn’t really trying to bankrupt anyone with the tax. It’s more about, uh, monitoring what people have. And the thing is that Italy already has this kind of tax on financial investments kept in Italy. It’s not trying to punish foreigners that come live in Italy.

It is just leveling the playing field between assets held in Italy, assets held abroad with, as I say, pretty small tax.

Anna: Okay, so what about like real estate abroad? Is that part of, this tax [00:06:00] or is it separate?

Luca: Yeah, real estate is not part of this tax. It has its own tax, which is called IVIE, um, which is roughly 1% of the property’s value. We should probably do an episode on that. Further on it is also not scary, but because it has a million exemptions of its own, we’re not gonna dive deep into it. Our focus today is on the so-called wealth tax that hits financial products only.

Anna: So IVAFE is just money stuff at 0.2% and a 0.2, not 20%. You think that something so small wouldn’t cause so much confusion, but it does. However, there’s even smaller tax scenario we need to talk about, and that’s for bank accounts. So, I’ve heard something about a flat fee on bank accounts, not a percentage.

Luca: That’s what I was referring to earlier when I mentioned that someone could have 5 million euro in a bank account and pay a dinner’s worth of tax for holding that cash.

Basically foreign bank [00:07:00] accounts. Savings accounts are treated differently from other financial assets under this wealth tax. You’re not even charged. 0.2%. You have to pay 34 euro and 20 cents per account per year. That’s about 40 US dollars. If you as an Italian tax resident have a checking or savings account abroad, it is not going to tax zero for 2% on it.

This is a very common misconception. You could have a 10 million Euro, a hundred million euro in a bank account. You’re still only get going to get charged 34 euro and 20 cents per year.

One more thing. There is a threshold. If the account has less than 5,000 euros balance over the course of a year on average, then you don’t even have to pay the 34 Euro 20 cents. It is completely exempt.

Anna: Let’s have another example. So suppose someone has a foreign bank account where they keep a rain day fund. So one [00:08:00] person has, 6,000 euros in it. Another one has, 600,000 and another one extremely cautious person has six millions. How does this tax apply to each?

Luca: Um, it applies in the same way. They all pay 34 euro or $40 roughly per year.

Anna: So someone with 5 million in a bank abroad pays the same wealth tax as someone with, 5,000, uh, euro?

Luca: Yes.

Anna: I can

Luca: It’s not, it’s not that scary, right?

Anna: No, I mean, 34 euros won’t even buy two pieces and drinks in many places these days.

Luca: Now the 34 euro is per account. So if you have, several accounts, that total over 5,000 euro each, then each one has to be charged 34 euro, but still tiny.

Anna: This is so good to know.

Luca: Okay.

Anna: a lot of listeners are shocked that the wealth tax on, say, a decent chunk of savings [00:09:00] is so low. It really flips the narrative.

Luca: Now let’s close this off by mentioning a few exceptions, uh, and, uh, special cases because, uh, not everything gets taxed, and even the small zero point percent tax doesn’t get applied to everything.

Anna: Yeah, I’m sure some listeners are wondering like, okay, they will tax my bank account or portfolio, but what about my foreign pension? Or what if I own part of a, I don’t know, a company abroad, are those taxed too?

Luca: These are two very good questions and those are two, important exemptions. Let’s start with foreign pensions. Very relevant to anyone that has a 401k an IRA a UK Pension Fund. A SIPP. These pension schemes are exempt from the wealth tax. The talent tax authority specifically exclude them.

So if you have, uh. Million pounds on your UK SIPP. Or if you have $3 million in your [00:10:00] US 401k, you don’t have to fork over a single penny for having them. You still have to declare that you have them, but you don’t have to pay any tax on them.

Anna: That’s fantastic to hear. So for example, if I moved to Italy with a UK private pension fund value, let’s say 200,000, I wouldn’t be paying, 0.2% on that each year.

Right.

Luca: Oh, you’d be paying nothing, uh, on each year on that pension pot. Of course, when you draw income eventually from that pension. It is likely that that income would be taxed unless you under one of the special regimes. But there is no wealth tax on it. And while we’re talking about that, the 7% tax regime as well as the 300,000 euro flat tax regime for wealthy individuals both exempt you from the wealth tax on assets. So you don’t even have to pay the 0.2% tax even when it is [00:11:00] due.

You also asked about owning a private company abroad. Let’s say that you are a business owner, right? You have a, you know, company in Germany, a chain of lauderettes worth several million euro. How much wealth tax are you going to pay on those holdings?

The answer is nothing because the wealth tax applies to only, only to financial investments like shares, but only publicly traded shares are taxed then.

So if Mark Zuckerberg were to move to Italy and he had, as he does, billions of dollars worth of Facebook shares held in his own name. Then, he would probably have to pay 0.2% of those because Meta, the Facebook holding company is a publicly traded company.

Uh, although to be fair, Zuckerberg will probably move on the 300k flat tax scheme, so he don’t have to even pay that, but that aside. If instead you own shares of a [00:12:00] private company, then you have to pay anything at all. You just have to declare the fact that you are, uh, the owner or part owner, of such company.

Anna: Really. So if I have, for example, like 50% ownership in a private company back in the States, I do have to declare it on my tax form. But I wouldn’t pay the 0.2% annual wealth tax on the value of that stake.

Luca: You don’t have to pay the tax, so you have to report it. But when you have to calculate the wealth tax, then you would mark that is not subject to the tax. And that is because this quote unquote wealth tax only applies to financial products that are held in your name only.

So if you have shares in a private company, those are not, taxable.

Anna: That’s a great exemption, especially for entrepreneurs or people with family businesses abroad.

So what about other odd assets, for instance, crypto as being a hot topic.

Luca: Yes, [00:13:00] Italy has clarified recently that crypto holdings are foreign financial assets too, so they do fall under the wealth tax at 0.2%.

Anna: So let’s recap the exemptions in plain English. So, foreign pensions, no wealth tax. Private foreign companies, no wealth, tax assets held via Italian institutions, no wealth tax, special tax regime, folks, like the 7% flat tax, no wealth tax. And normal bank accounts under 5K, no wealth tax, right?

Luca: Well done Anna honestly, you are becoming an accountant almost.

Anna: Thank you. So what if someone didn’t know any of this? Let’s say an expat moves to Italy, doesn’t realize they have to be clear their foreign bank account and they don’t pay IVAFE for a few years. What are the consequences if the tax authorities find out?

Luca: Italy’s tax authorities do check about this. I [00:14:00] do know of people that have been caught not because they meant anything bad just because they forgot. With international data sharing these days, the countries where you have parked your cash and assets are going to report to Italian government once a year, if not more often.

And if you fail to declare there are penalties, there are two penalties. For not declaring the asset each year, the fine can be up to 3% of the asset value per year of omission. So if you forgot to declare that million dollars held abroad, then you could be potentially charged $30,000. I. I think it’s best if that doesn’t happen and for not paying the tax, they can also levy a penalty.

So let’s say you declare it, uh, or you don’t pay the tax or you don’t do all things, the penalty can be 30 to a hundred percent of the unpaid tax. That said, I don’t want people to feel scared about [00:15:00] this. Italy’s taxman allows you to, uh, do a voluntary disclosure whenever you want about any tax you may have forgotten to, uh, pay, or any assets you may have not declared.

So if you have not been served a notice yet you can talk to your, accountant about the fact that you have not disclosed it, then you can normally, disclose at a later date by paying a small penalty.

Anna: Yeah, so the moral is don’t ignore it just because it’s small. In fact, the smallness of the tax is exactly why you just pay it. It’s

Luca: Exactly.

Anna: those big fines. Yeah.

Luca: Don’t lose your sleep over a few tens or hundreds of euros a year. Enjoy your life you need to do and avoid headaches. And the last thing I wanna say is that certain blacklisted tax havens are charged at a higher rate. So for instance, if you hold assets in a Panama Bank, uh, or in the British [00:16:00] Virgin Islands or other tax havens, then it Italy charges you to just 0.4% on those assets, not 0.2.

Anna: So hearing all of this, I really feel the term wealth tax is almost misleading. Like it’s more like a symbolic tax or alignment tax

Luca: I think that’s fair. A lot of Italians don’t know that this tax even exists. In fact, when you say a small source of revenue, you’re absolutely right. The Italian taxman does not disclose how much the wealth tax. It generates for them, but I managed to get my hands on some internal documents from 2021 that showed that it generated about 0.002% of the total tax intake for that year. And don’t forget that this includes money, not just paid by foreigners who live in Italy, Italy, but also Italians that have financial products that are located abroad who are probably a lot more people. You could ask yourself, is it worth scaring off, uh, thousands of potential Italian residents to make so little [00:17:00] money?

Probably not. It’s always like, like this with Italy. But until the Italian government realizes that, um, it is such a bad publicity for the country, then we’re gonna have to deal with the wealth tax by declaring our assets abroad and paying it.

Anna: So we hope this chat was useful. And for those who want to learn more, we’ll put some links in the show notes.

Luca: Yes. And if this was useful to you and if you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, share with your friends and it would be very nice if you left us a review. If you’re on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, just tap the review button. It takes 20 seconds and make us very happy to know what you think about the podcast, especially if you like it.

Anna: Yeah, thank you guys..

Luca: Thank you everyone. We’ll talk next week. Bye.

Anna: Hi everyone. Hi Luca.

Luca: This week we are talking about a question we get often, which is why are so many wonderful, gorgeous looking Italian villages and castles abandoned, or for sale for what looks like pocket change? I, myself have renovated several properties and I’m always looking for properties.

It’s, uh, as people know, it’s a bit of an addiction for everyone that has it. The area around Venice alone is home to more than 5,000 historical villas. Hundreds of these are in disrepair and sell or sometimes are auctioned for prices as low as 100 or 200,000 euro. And when foreigners see this, they think, oh, Italy’s property market must be broken.

How can it be [00:01:00] so cheap?

Anna: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it sounds too good to be true and usually it is. So today we want to correct that view. The low price is often an illusion and it’s caused by real costs like taxes, you know, renovation works.

So people and especially foreigners are often unaware of.

Luca: That’s right. These properties are not cheap because Italians don’t think the castles or villas aren’t beautiful. They’re cheap because the system makes them very costly to buy and restore. And in the next minutes, we’re going to talk about, uh, Italy’s tax code, the property register system, and the heritage laws that structurally punish historical buildings.

In other words, which part of the bureaucracy makes it so hard to use and maintain these villas?

Anna: Yeah. By the end of this episode, you will understand the reason why these villas and castles languish unsold so we’ll break down the tax traps, the luxury [00:02:00] labels, the heritage protections.

So all the unsexy realities.

Luca: Unsexy realities. Let’s start with tax.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: 30 second primer on the cadastral category. Please don’t tune out. This is important and most people don’t know what it is. In Italy, there is something called the cadastral category, and it is a code that, indicates what kind of property each property is. Castles, villas are in three of the A categories, A1, A8, or A9. It basically means that, anything that has that label given by the tax man is deemed to be a luxury property from fancy apartments to villas to castles or palazzi.

Anna: But luxury sounds like a good thing. Like why do you say it’s a problem?

Luca: Because in Italy, luxury is basically a tax warning label.

Anna: A warning label,

Luca: yes. There’s a whole set of tax benefits that disappear and more taxes kick in.

Anna: Even [00:03:00] if the place is falling apart.

Luca: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. There can be mushrooms growing through the floorboards, but if the property is tagged as A8 or A9, the tax system treats it like it’s a billionaire’s villa.

Anna: What actually changes?

Luca: The first thing is that you don’t get any first home tax breaks. Normally when you buy a property, you pay 2% purchase tax if you’re gonna go and live in it. In this case, you’re gonna pay 9% whether you live in it or not.

Anna: That’s a big difference.

Luca: Huge. Luxury homes are excluded from the benefit. So for the same house price, you could be looking at paying 70,000 euro tax instead of 15,000.

Anna: Ah, okay.

Luca: Second thing, renovations, uh, normal homes, when you renovated property, you pay 10% VAT rate or sometimes even 4% on all the works. VAT for our US friends is basically our equivalent of sales tax. On luxury homes you pay 22%. So on a big restoration, you can [00:04:00] easily be charged an extra six figures just in tax.

Anna: Just for the label?

Luca: Exactly. Just for the luxury label.

Anna: And that’s not the end of it, is it?

Luca: No. You wish. There’s also IMU, the annual property tax. If you live in a property, you normally don’t have to pay property tax. But,

Anna: but,

Luca: but of course this does not apply if they are luxury. So in that case, if you, even if you live in it, you pay it even if it’s your only home.

Anna: Okay. So higher renovation tax and yearly property tax. That’s brutal.

Luca: Yeah, it is. It discourages normal buyers completely. And it is absolutely possible that a family might afford to buy the house, but not the taxes that come with it.

Anna: So people actively try to avoid the luxury classification?

Luca: Absolutely. Italians would jump through fire to downgrade the property on paper. That label is financial kryptonite.

Anna: And just to clarify, this luxury label [00:05:00] isn’t about actual condition or features.

Luca: Not really. Luxury is just a bureaucratic status. The villa can be missing half of its roof, be rotten through and it still be castle palace because historically it was prestigious. It was labeled as a luxury property and therefore it’s gonna stay like that, for its life.

Historically, the law defines luxury homes based on criteria. Like if it has large parks, if it has certain fine finishes, if it has a very large pool. But recently the Court of Cassation, the equivalent of the Supreme Court said that any property that has more than 240 square meters of livable, usable space is automatically luxury. And I’m not gonna comment on that because it is, I think any one can see that it defies common sense.

It is a blunt instrument. And to answer your question, a derelict villa can be taxed, a hundred percent like it’s a fully functional luxury [00:06:00] estate with solid gold toilets.

Anna: No wonder many owners either try to reclassify the property or just give up and sell. But reclassification must be hard, I imagine.

Luca: Yes. You can’t just wish it and it becomes true. The tax man, actively refuses to reclassify a property. And according to every architect I ever spoke to, it is pratically impossible to do. What some owners do is that they let the property degrade on paper, which leads to a weird trick, that people try to use to avoid paying taxes.

But we’ll talk about that later. The takeaway is, the tax code that treats historic villas as luxuries for the ultra rich pile on the costs, and that drives away normal buyers.

Anna: Okay, so taxes are huge but let’s talk about heritage laws. So many of these grand villas are protected by Italy’s culture, heritage authorities. So in theory, that’s [00:07:00] wonderful because it preserves, you know, the historical integrity

Luca: in practice this heritage protection is a double-edged sword. If the property is officially under the purview of the Superintendents of Fine Arts, the owner is not just the owner, but becomes the custodian of that piece of national heritage. The law says that you must, as the owner, maintain and conserve a protected property, it’s an obligation. The state can even force you to do repairs or in extreme cases, step in, do the works, and then send you the bill.

Anna: So you’re forced to restore it, but at the same time, the state puts strict rules on how you restore, right?

Luca: That’s exactly right. The superintendents, the local arm of the cultural ministry. Has to approve any change you want to make to a protected building. You can’t repaint the ceiling, you can’t change the window frame, you can’t redo the roof without, the green light.

Long [00:08:00] term listeners know that thankfully in Italy, most planning is done at the town level. You can just walk in to town hall and have a discussion with the local architect. And normally this is a good system, but the Superintendence is in large historical cities. For instance, for the Veneto, the superintendents in Verona and in Venice.

And you are sending away your planning application not just to town hall, but to these uh, sometimes obscure entities and they’re not going to rubber stamp your plans. They’re going to impose a specific restoration methods, materials that are in line with historical authenticity and they’re basically co-managing the project with you.

Anna: I imagine that can mean delays and higher costs.

Luca: Superintendence is normally, it takes 60 days to review your plans. If they insist on using certain materials, you must follow their instructions. Maybe you want to put in PVC windows cheap, pretty. Energy efficient and it may cost you [00:09:00] 500 euro each, but they may say you have to add the custom made replicas of 1800s windows made out of solid wood, which would cost you five times more.

They may tell you that you can’t install solar panels. They might tell you that you can’t install the pool because it is not, and I’ve seen it before compatible with the historical background of the building. Their priority is to preserve the heritage, not making your life easy, and certainly not to make you make money.

Anna: Right. They don’t care if you have a comfortable home at the end, they care that the character and integrity of the villa is intact. I recall you saying once that of official would rather see a building crumble than allowing appropriate changes.

Luca: I looked at a 16th century villa, not far away from where I live. One of many examples. It sold for only 60,000 euro and it was so cheap because it was doubly cursed. It was classed as a luxury property with all the tax stigma we, the site we discussed before, and it is heavily [00:10:00] protected by the Superintendence.

A town official told me, basically he admitted that there was nothing that a buyer could do with it that will make it economically viable. The heritage rules were prevented from being turned into apartments. And no one is willing to pour money in just to make, uh, the government happy. So effectively what they said is it is better to let it rot than to allow it to be turned into modern apartments.

Anna: Yeah. That is sad and frustrating. But are there any upsides to property being protected, like any grants or tax deductions to offset this?

Luca: There are some perks, but to be honest, they’re not that great. You can get some tax deductions if you renovate, it’s, you know, pretty small fry. Sometimes, and trust me, this is very rare that are grants that cover a portion of the conservation works. The bottom line is that none of these advantages cover [00:11:00] anywhere near the full cost of, uh, restoring anything, these properties.

Anna: Yeah. So you might save a bit on taxes by doing restoration, but you’ll spend far more complying with the heritage requirements. I recall another catch. So if a building is protected, the owner has to offer this data, right? Offers refusal when selling right.

Luca: If any of these properties are sold, the state effectively has 60 days to buy the property from you at the same price. But to be fair, this is rarely exercised that as the Italian state has a hundred of thousands of historical buildings and no money to buy them or fix them.

Anna: I can imagine a foreign buyer thinking maybe the government or, uh, the EU will give me a big grant to save this villa. But in reality, beyond small tax breaks, you are on your own, basically.

Luca: That’s right. So in practice, this means that often heritage protection discourages individual buyers. And, this [00:12:00] is another factor that is reflected in the low stacker price. The luxury or protection status of a property is rarely advertised by real estate agents because it scares people away. But eventually you’re going to find out, and I mean, you better know what it means before you buy.

Anna: Yeah. Before you talked about industrial trick. So declaring a, building a ruin or not. Let’s get into that.

Luca: The bottom line is that, uh, if you have a building that’s still viable or working on paper, that you pay property tax on it. And if it is classed as a ruin, officially, you don’t pay property taxes on it.

Anna: So if I inherit grandpa’s crumbling villa, I’d want to declare it a ruin to avoid paying property tax every year on a house that I, I can’t even live in.

Luca: Yes, and a lot of people do this, but there’s a huge catch and mostly they come to regret it. Once you declare a property a ruin, if you decide in the future, or if another buyer decides to renovate and make it habitable [00:13:00] again, the law says that it has to meet current standards for habitability.

So let’s say that it was, uh, a house only 1800s. If it was on the books as a US usable house, you can’t bring it back and say, oh, it’s the 18 hundreds all over again. It must now meet all the requirements of 2026 structure systems, energy efficiency, et cetera. As of today’s regulations.

Anna: What would that entail?

Luca: That obviously changes the scope and the cost of the renovation. You will have to add modern insulation, reinforce against earthquakes, install compliant utilities. You have to do this. It’s not optional, and you won’t be able to go back and live in the place again or sell it like a livable place until it’s done.

So in a nutshell, some owners prefer to keep a decaying villa listed as habitable and pay the taxes as come with it, rather than the declare to ruin, because it’s going to make it [00:14:00] unsellable as a ruin, as the buyer would have to go through hell to make it habitable again.

Anna: So either pay taxes on a husk of a building or save on tax now, but pay more in construction later.

Luca: Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

Anna: One final thought before we go enjoy our Saturday. We hear that a lot like foreigners dreaming of transforming a palace into a, a beautiful hotel.

Luca: And I’m glad you mentioned this, the entrepreneurial spirit is very welcome. Italy needs, uh, but you have to be careful. Converting a historic villa or castle into a hotel requires the, you guess that the Superintendence to say yes again, because you’re gonna have to make some physical changes and, uh, you’re going to have to convince the town that is fine to turn it in to a commercial building.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, don’t buy the place, unless you, agree with the seller that you’re going to get permits before you actually fork over the money.

Anna: If you want to take on such a project, good for you. These communities are often [00:15:00] very welcoming of someone rescuing a local landmark. Despite all the hurdles that we mentioned, some people do succeed and create something wonderful.

Luca: Yeah, exactly. We are supporting you from the sidelines. Just, uh, do your maths and be careful and most of all, talk to an architect before signing any papers.

Anna: Exactly.

Luca: We hope this was interesting and, we’ll talk next week.

Anna: Thank you. Bye.

Luca: Thank you.

Anna: Yeah, I’m super excited also because we are talking about a really interesting topic, right?

Luca: We always do. What’s this topic?

Anna: So we were gonna keep talking about the most search towns in 2026, but we are pushing that to next week because that’s some really, really important tax news if you’re thinking about buying or fixing up a home in Italy.

Luca: That is right. We are going to talk about Italy’s home renovation tax breaks for 2026.

2026 is actually a bit of a special year. We’ve even called it the last really good year to renovate with meaningful tax breaks. We’re going to talk about what incentives that are there now, especially compared to the crazy, [00:01:00] Superbonus 110% from a few years before.

Anna: Oh yeah, that bonus, the government basically paid you more than what you spent.

Crazy, right?

Luca: Yes. I would say that Superbonus, born in 2020 let homeowners claim 110% of the renovation costs as a tax credit and in practice that meant that you could renovate your house and make a 10% profit in tax credits. It was the government paying for your renovation effectively.

Anna: Yeah.

Suddenly everyone was changing windows. Installing solar panels. But that, that couldn’t last forever, right?

Luca: Yeah. The bill was astronomical. The super bonus blew a hole in Italy ‘s finances. The economy minister said that these incentives had a devastating impact on public Between one and the other these bonuses have cost 219 billion [00:02:00] euro.

Anna: Oh my God, that’s insane. Like Italy basically threw hundreds of billions at home makeovers.

Luca: The initial plan was for the scheme to cost maybe 35 billion Euro that is short up to a hundred around the 160 billion euro in just four years.

And the worst thing is that because the government was effectively paying for people to renovate their home, the construction costs also went up by a lot. Uh, people weren’t even negotiating prices. I mean, uh, and why would they care if the state was paying for it? And did lead to some abuse.

Anna: Yeah, I heard about the scams.

People were definitely taking advantage.

Luca: Yeah, taking advantage of the system. Um, so far, about 12 billion in fraudulent claims had been found out. Prime Minister Meloni called it the biggest scandal that the state has ever suffered. So there has been a lot of backlash on this tax scheme. And we could do an entire podcast about what went wrong with 110% super bonus.[00:03:00]

So it shouldn’t be surprising that these incentives have been dialed back.

Anna: So the Superbonus is basically done now, right?

Luca: As of right now, January, 2026, the Superbonus, 105% is completely scrapped , for any of our listeners, this scheme is effectively over.

Anna: Oh, okay. So no more free renovation for us. I mean, it was good while it lasted, but um, what about now? Like, if 2026 is the last good year, what can we actually get this year?

Luca: That’s a good question. The government has not completely abandoned helping renovators, and in fact, uh, three of the key programs, the Bonus Casa, which is the oldest of them, has existed for maybe 20 years, the Ecobonus and Sismabonus have all been extended, but at lower rates and with simpler rules.

Anna: Wait, but what’s the difference between them?

Luca: So in a [00:04:00] nutshell, Bonus Casa is the general renovation bonus, um, in Italian’s called the Bonus Ristrutturazioni. And it covers most, uh, typical home renovations, like putting that in new floor, fixing the bathroom, improving the electricals. Uh, the Ecobonus is make specifically for energy efficiency upgrades, like improving the insulation, installing a heat pump, or improving the windows, installing solar panels, that kind of stuff. The Sismabonus is for seismic upgrades. Effectively, anything that makes a building more earthquake resistant.

Anna: But these are tax deduction, not actual money you get upfront, right?

Luca: Correct. Uh, these bonuses work as tax deductions that you claim on your return and tax returns, and typically you can use this over 10 years. And that’s a big difference from the older Superbonus days. One of the reasons why that scheme was so popular is that you could sell your tax credit to businesses or a bank and effectively you [00:05:00] never pay anything out of pocket. You could monetize your tax grant, which is unheard of now. First you have to pay for the works, and then you get money back through lower taxes.

Anna: Yeah, that’s super important for people to know. So these are deductions, not checks. So you need to actually pay taxes in Italy to benefit. If you don’t pay much tax here, you won’t get much back.

Luca: That’s correct. So if you spend, let’s say 20,000 euro on a renovation and you’re entitled to a 50% deduction, you get 10,000 Euro tax credits and usually there’s a split over 10 years.

Generally speaking, if you don’t use the deduction in one given year, you can carry it over to the next year, but you must have Italian taxable income, either because you have a job or because you’re self-employed, et cetera.

Anna: Yeah, this is tricky for some, but with some, with those special tax deals, Italy has like the flat tax programs for foreigners or the 7% flight tax for retirees in certain [00:06:00] areas. So can they use these deductions

Luca: Generally? No. And that’s a surprise to many people. If you’re on a substitute flat tax, like the 7% tax regimes for pensions in the southor the 200k a year for wealthy individuals deal. Although, to be honest, if you’re that wealthy, you might not care too much about, uh, getting some money back from your home renovation.

Basically, if you’re not paying the standard Italian tax, then these renovation bonuses cannot be used, because there’s nothing to deduct from. The flat taxes. The flat tax. So many retirees as you know, Anna, uh, you know it better than anyone else. Probably many retirees pick the 7% flat tax, uh, for the foreign pension, which is great for low taxes, but they cannot use these deductions.

Anna: Okay, so if a retired expat moves to Sicily, pays just 7% tax on their pension, but then if they fix up their [00:07:00] house, they can’t use the 50% tax credit, right?

Luca: Basically. That’s the general rule. And at the same time, if you own a rental property and you’re using it, Italy’s flat tax for rental income, which is the so-called cedolare secca at 21%.

On a 21% tax on rentals, then those tax, the rental earnings cannot benefit from these deductions.

Anna: Okay. But a lot of people listening probably do pay normal taxes here. They work here or haven’t done those special tax things. So let’s talk about numbers. How good are these bonuses in 2026?

Luca: In this new system, the government basically sets two levels of deduction, 50% for the home you live in, and then a lower rate for properties that you may own and rent out or for any other reasons, as long as you don’t live in it.

Specifically, if the property is your main home where [00:08:00] you official reside, you can deduct 50% of the renovation costs. And if it’s a second home vacation home, an investment property, then you deduct 36% of the costs.

Anna: Oh, I mean, 50% is pretty good and 36% for a second home isn’t bad either like a third back.

Luca: It’s definitely helpful and um, these rates are just for 2026 and that’s why we say that this is the last good year because in, from 2027 onwards, the plan is to shrink the deductions further. From 2027 the tax break on your primary residence will drop to 36%, second homes to 30%, and by 2028, they want to drop everything to 30%, for everyone regardless of whether you live in it or not.

So, 2026 is kind of the final year for the 50% rate. Is this likely to change? Well, as you know with Italian law, there’s always last minute [00:09:00] surprises, uh, and indecision. But the government has made it very clear they are going to rein in the era of large renovation tax credits.

Anna: Yeah, that’s important. So if you’ve been thinking about renovating, do it this year because next year won’t, probably won’t be as good.

Maybe we should give an example so people can really see the difference.

Luca: A very simple example. So imagine an expat couple that lives in it, Italy full time. They bought a home in Tuscany. It’s a primary residence. If they renovated and paid 50,000 euro in various costs with the 2026 rates because it’s their primary home and they get 50% back as tax deduction. So that’s 25,000 euro that they get back in tax savings.

Anna: Okay, so over 10 years you are getting 25k back on, uh, 50 K renovation. So half the cost basically.

Luca: Covered by the government. If the same capital waits until 2027 to do the work, so then they can only write off 36% [00:10:00] of the cost as tax credits. So on the 50,000, 36% is uh, 18,000 euro. And effectively, by waiting one year, they would miss out on 7,000 euro of tax savings, which is quite a lot.

Anna: And what if it’s a vacation home, for example, like you only use it part of a year or maybe rent it out sometimes?

Luca: Yeah. So in 2026 they would qualify for a 36% deduction.

Uh, the 18,000 euro, which we mentioned before. If they waited until next year, 2027, then they will drop to 30%, which on 50,000 Euro is 15,000. So if you do the maths, they’ll be missing out on 3000 euro of tax credits. It’s a difference. Not as big, but still significant.

Anna: So now you mentioned those three different bonuses, the Bonus Casa, the Ecobonus, and the Sismabonus. Are the [00:11:00] percentages the same for all of them or different?

Luca: The government has started to harmonize the rates across all these different programs, which are confusing, confusing to everyone and to us.

So for 2026, all these bonuses follow the 50% and 36% pattern for primary and secondary homes.

Anna: Okay. So I won’t get like different percentages for different types of work. It’s basically the same depending on whether it’s my main home or not.

Luca: Correct. In the past it was more confusing, like the Ecobonus had various rates, 65, 70, 75. The Sismabonus is quite interesting. for improving your home’s resistance to earthquakes, uh, you can get, again, 50% or 36%, um, tax reduction, there’s a 96,000 euro cap on the amount of money you can claim back. In the past, you could get a 70, 80, or even 85% deductions in some cases.

Anna: Wow, up to [00:12:00] 85% for major earthquake stuff. That’s really good.

Luca: They have simplified the scheme now, but the enhanced rates are still possible. Essentially, if you measure lower your building’s vulnerability, then you can claim a higher deduction up to 75, 85%. It’s a bit technical and you want to consult with a professional to see if you can claim this.

Anna: Those caps you mentioned 96 K per unit. That’s the max you can claim, right?

Luca: Yes. So the schemes have separate caps, so both the general renovation bonuses and the Sismabonus, the cap is 96,000 euro of expenses per property unit per year. This, by the way, is a whole different discussion. You can have more properties, you could split your properties. People have started to do all sorts of games around this, maximum amounts, but those are the general limits. So the maximum tax deduction for one project in 2026 would be 50% of 96,000, and that [00:13:00] works out to 48,000 euro max in credits, or 36% for a second home.

And if you spend more than that, then the excess amount is not subsidized by tax credits.

Anna: This is making sense now. So basically, uh, 50% tax break for your main home in 20 26. 36% for your second home. You get it back over 10 years. And after this year, those numbers drop. So 2026, it’s the time to do it.

Luca: That’s right. And getting half of your renovation costs back in tax credits is nothing to sneeze at. As long as you can use the deduction, as we discussed before.

Anna: Okay, but let’s be real. So Italy and bureaucracy go hand in hand. So what do people need to know if they actually want to do this in 2026?

Luca: Very good question, Anna. So first of all, you can’t just renovate it then assume you’ll get the, the deduction you are going to have to follow the procedures. And, uh, the most important is that you have to pay [00:14:00] everything by a traceable bank transfer.

Anna: So no paying your contractor in cash. You need that bank paper trail to prove you spend the money on the right stuff.

Luca: That’s right. And usually you’re going to work with an architect to help you file the proper documentation, which I strongly recommend. In that case, it’s their responsibility.

If they mess it up, Italy’s tax agency doesn’t just take your word for it. If you, um, get audited, you’re gonna have to show documents. But you know, this is not going to be a surprise to anyone, especially our American listeners who have claimed deductions against work done on their homes. Um, that said that all reputable contractors and surveyors are very familiar with the bonus process now as they’ve been doing it for years.

Anna: So my advice, hire professionals who know the ropes and let them guide you on the compliance part. And what about businesses? Say I buy a building for a company, or I’m renovating a small [00:15:00] BNB, uh, I run as a business. Do these bonuses apply?

Luca: Generally speaking, these bonuses are not for businesses. They’re primarily devised for private individuals. So in some cases, let’s say that you want to run the BNB, you’re better off buying it in your own name and then leasing it to the business so they can run it.

Anna: Perfect. I think that we covered the key points, the end of the Superbonus era, what 2026 offers, how it’s simpler and still substantial, the primary versus second home differences and all the practical tips.

Luca: To sum it up, 2026 is a golden opportunity. Maybe the last to plan to fix up a property in Italy. And the government is still picking up a nice chunk of the bill. It is not a 110% anymore, but 50% is pretty good.

Anna: And with that in mind, if you’re considering buying a home in Italy or starting a renovation, remember to do your homework.

So talk to a commercialista. So an accountant basically, [00:16:00] or a geometra, and make sure you qualify and follow the rules. We’ve seen laws change a lot, so staying updated is really, really important.

Luca: Yeah, we hope that this episode helped you, the listener, understand the, the lay of the land a little bit. If you want to dive deeper, go to magictowns.it where we have released the Ultimate Property Buying Guide, which com, which covers several pages about tax breaks.

Anna: And don’t forget to try our Town Explorer. It’s a fun way to, you know, to discover Italian towns that match your preferences.

Luca: Absolutely. How would we live without the Town Explorer? Couldn’t, as we always, if you have, we couldn’t. Um, as always, if you have any questions, we’d like to hear from you. Send us a comment, write to us on the website, drop us line on Facebook or Instagram.

You know what to find us.

Anna: Yes. So this was Anna and Luca for Magic Towns Italy. Uh, yeah. [00:17:00] See you next time

Luca: and happy renovating. Take advantage of those bonuses where you can. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Anna: Bye

Luca: Hi Anna. Happy New Year.

Anna: Happy New Year.

Luca: Did you have a nice, uh, end of year break?

Anna: Yeah, it was nice. I was in Rome and it was really, really nice.

Luca: I have been, uh, home actually doing a little bit of gardening.

I know it’s minus seven outside now, but it wasn’t quite so bad before New Year’s Eve

Anna: you’re brave.

Luca: Well, I have to. Today we’re going to talk about, uh, a, um, topic that I’m very excited [00:01:00] about, that we’ve been working on for some time. We have combined search engine data with usage of Magic Towns Italy own Town Explorer to see where expats are looking to move to in Italy.

You’re not gonna hear from anyone else because they don’t have the data, but we do. And, um, we have quite a few surprises. So on the one hand, we looked at how often people abroad search for moving to specific cities or living in specific cities. And then we looked at, uh, which one of our town profiles are getting the most attention from international visitors.

So this covers both the aspiration stage, kind of Googling what to do with your life, and then the serious research stage of the expat journey. Then we have blended this data together to provide the ranking of the top 20 towns that expats [00:02:00] had their eyes on in 2025.

Anna: We’re not gonna just read you a boring list of towns, we’re gonna chat about the, you know, the surprising stuff, beyond the data and there’s a bunch.

Luca: So we have big cities versus small town dynamics. There’s some regional trends that are interesting, uh, that are frankly unexpected and there are quite a few under the radar towns that are punching way above their weight. Uh, some of them you may have never heard about, but they’re still in the top 20.

We are going to cover most of the ranking, but if you want to read the entire list and get to the top three , then you have to go to Magic Towns Italy and read the article that Anna published today. So let’s get on with it.

Anna: The first thing is this when people first think about moving to Italy, it’s usually the big cities that pop into their heads.

So, you know, Milan, Florence, Rome, but, what we found is once people go from just [00:03:00] dreaming to actually planning, a lot of them start looking at Italy, smaller towns and countryside instead.

Luca: To confirm what Anna just said, the single most viewed town on Magic Towns Italy last year was not Milan or Rome.

It was Scalea, a coastal town in Calabria that barely has 11,000 residents. And that must be a big surprise to everyone. On its full ranking basis scalea came in at number six. Although very few people frankly are Googling move to Scalea, it’s an area they discover once they get into the weeds. It is one of those towns that expats discover while browsing and using our filters and, to be fair, the place has a lot going for it. It’s where the sea, it’s very, very affordable and it is one of Italy’s special 7% tax towns, meaning that eligible retirees there, only get taxed 7% for an number of years. A topic that we have discussed time and [00:04:00] time and time and time again. So the tax break is huge for foreign retirees and no doubt adds to this town’s appeal.

Anna: Yeah, but Scalea isn’t the only one actually. That’s the same thing with places like Tricase, which is in Puglia, Belluno, Chieti in Abruzzo.

Why? Because these towns have a lot of what expats say, they’re looking for: affordable homes, real local life, or even really high quality of life scores. Uh, something that you can check on our website, by the way. While the glossy big cities grab attention at first, these small towns often end up winning people, or once they dig deeper.

Luca: That’s exactly right. So it is a big city dreams versus small town realities phenomenon. The regional capitals a grab attention. People think Milan, Florence, Rome, but when they actually sit down and compare, um, towns that they actually want to live [00:05:00] in a lot of them realize that a smaller city or even a large provincial town might take their boxes better. Come to think of it, you mentioned Belluno. Belluno is a beautiful city in the Alps and, uh, very few people outside of Italy know of it. But, it, ranks on Magic Towns as one of the highest scoring towns. So people appreciate that and they search for it.

Anna: One big thing is definitely money, property prices and cost of living. In a lot of Italy, small towns can be way, way cheaper than in Milan or Rome.

No wonder we are seeing expat communities starting to form in places like Scalia or towns like Tropea or Pizzo.

Luca: And the other factor is lifestyle. Puglia is, uh, the number one region for international interest on our website in 2025. Thanks in large part, towns like [00:06:00] Bari, which was our overall number five town. Puglia is pretty appealing for a number of reasons. It offers seaside lifestyle, and value for money. It has good infrastructure. Historic towns, lovely food, and a reasonable budget.

Anna: It’s not just for Puglia, same story in other regions. Um, Veneto, for example, had a bunch of towns in the top 20, like Verona, which is beautiful, Vicenza, Belluno, Treviso. Same for Sicily with Cefalù and Palermo, these places are beautiful, affordable and the quality of life is high.

I was really surprised, because Lazio where Rome’s wasn’t there. Lots of people dream about the eternal, yeah, yeah. You’d expect,

Luca: you’d expect Rome would be there, but Rome isn’t even in the top 20 list.

Anna: Yeah. That’s crazy. I mean, lots of people usually go there and think, I would love to move there. When it’s time to get practical and [00:07:00] compare options other places, you know, steal the show.

Luca: It’s surprising how many famous cities are not in the list. Rome isn’t there. Naples is not in the top 20. Pisa, the world famous, neighbor of Florence is also not there.

These are all cities that everyone has heard about, but the data suggests that expats branch out and consider a massive, wider palette of destinations.

So the bottom line is that Italy offers a wide variety of places to live, and experts respond to that variety. There’s, a little bit of everything in the top 20 from Milan to tiny Scalea, and that confirms that Italy is, Italy’s appeal isn’t confined to one type of town, and maybe that’s the secret source there.

Anna: So, talking about the trends and towns in more detail, we already talked about Puglia being like [00:08:00] a big winner. Other regions like Lombardy, where Milan is and Tuscany, Florence, Lucca, Siena, still dominated the search.

Luca: So we mentioned two or three regions and it’s not like, um, people are not interested in Tuscany or Lombardy. For instance, Lucca ranks very, very high on our list. Although interest in Lucca dwindled materially year on year, it feels like it’s one of those places is peaking off.

What’s notable is that interest is really spread across the country. You certainly have Tuscany and Lombardy representatives, but you also have, towns in Abruzzo, Calabria, Sardinia. We have a town from the interior of Sardinia, that made the top 20, and that surprised us a lot because we think of Sardinia mostly in terms of, seaside life.

Then we had Trieste in the, very far corner of Italy bordering Slovenia, coming in at number 13 and Trento number 19. So literally every corner of [00:09:00] Italy had, one town in the top 20. And that makes us very happy because our goal is to highlight all of Italy.

Anna: Yeah, we were really surprised about Calabria.

Luca: We’re talking about one of the poorest regions in Italy and in Europe. Just so people understand it isn’t really an expat magnet traditionally.

Anna: This might be changing actually.

Luca: I think people may do well to start looking into Calabria now before it’s, too late. And I say as someone who doesn’t live anywhere near Calabria. So just looking at the data. The flip side is, what didn’t happen at the regional level? No, we said no Rome. And the Campania also, that’s the region where Naples is, uh, doesn’t have anything represented in the top 20. This may surprise some people, but many expats, and I say this, having talked to a, a bunch of them are a bit wary of large chaotic cities and in the case of [00:10:00] Naples, perhaps, quality of life, infrastructure, concerns that they may have played into, why it is not more popular and Tuscany is also quite interesting, right, Anna?

Anna: Yeah. It’s super popular with expats and has always been actually. But guess which famous Tuscan city didn’t rank as high as you’d expect?

Luca: I would say Florence.

Anna: Yeah, exactly. Like Florence only came in at like eight, something like that. And we saw about 25% fewer moving to Florence searches in 2025 compared to the year before.

Luca: That is a incredible drop. 25% drop in interest year over year is just massive.

But honestly, are you surprised? All those headlines about, over tourism, about, the town of Florence, restricting users of Airbnbs? All those pictures about the place being just swamped the tourists and the cost. I [00:11:00] was not that surprised. In fact, uh, I would be surprised if Florence is still in number eight next year.

I think it’s gonna go even lower.

Anna: I mean, if you can pay less, and the quality of life, it’s higher. Obviously you’re gonna choose other places. But it wasn’t the only one. A couple of mid-size towns that had some hype before seemed to cool off to like Loreto in Marche and Lodi in Lombardy, for example. Both saw their search interest drop a lot in 2025.

Luca: To be fair, not from huge levels. So what we learned from this is that trends can change very fast. This is one of the things we’ve been saying for months. Some of our readers might be tired of us saying it, but expat cycles are fast and furious.

Places that are not on the map have become extremely popular overnight, prices go to the roof. Uh, and then, a couple of years later, interest goes down, I think, Florence and Lucca are two prime examples of this. And, actually I’m mostly [00:12:00] interested in who is going to rise and grow over the next couple of years.

Anna: So, which towns saw the biggest jump in interest in 2025 compared to 2024?

Luca: A few names jump out. Bologna was a major riser., Relocation-related searches for Bologna, about 16% higher year over year. That’s the biggest jump of any large city. Bologna ended up in number four on our list and it seems to be getting more attention than ever.

The airport is getting more efficient and bigger and the town has got some major headlines on the Financial Times, the Guardian, so people are waking up to it. A couple of articles on the newspaper came, put a town on the map. It is also more affordable and less chaotic than Milan or Rome. There’s a high speed, train line to Milan. I know people that live in Bologna, but commute to Milan on a daily [00:13:00] basis, so that’s not surprising.

Anna: Yeah. Usually people that live in Bologna are really proud to live in Bologna, but it’s, it’s beautiful. I personally, I absolutely love it and I, and the

Speaker 4: food.

Anna: The food is amazing. The food is amazing. People are amazing. They’re really, really welcoming. I love Bologna. I’ve been hearing Bologna called the Digital Nomad friendly city lately. But what else was climbing fast?

Luca: Yeah. Rome itself, although it is not in the top 20, is growing. We saw a 15% increase in interest year over year.

Another one is Trento. Maybe that ties into with those programs, getting the 100,000 grant if you go move to Trentino and renovate a property. And mind you, not if you move to Trento, but if you move to some remote villages in the mountains, but still, you know, it is getting more attention to the region.

Anna: Yeah, Trento must be a really, you know, organized city.

Luca: It’s not my favorite. I spent some time there, it’s pretty, just not, [00:14:00] not very culturally stimulating. Sorry. People from Trento don’t shoot me. That’s just my opinion.

Anna: What about Verona? I think that that one climbed too, right?

Luca: Yeah, Verona, saw a 7% uptick in interest in the year. Verona’s a gorgeous town. It is getting a, larger expat population, we can see that in our own Facebook groups. So people are definitely more interested in it and it is well connected. It is quite urban, but it is not huge. It is a little bit less expensive than Venice or Milan. And it is stuck between the two cities. So maybe some of the Milano Venice crowd has cast its eye on Verona instead. Siena and Pisa also had notable growth, perhaps for the same reason, adjacent to, um, major spots, but not quite so expensive. And Bolzano, Trento’s northerly neighbour, also had a little bumper, four, 5%. There’s [00:15:00] a lot of smaller cities that, that are getting on the radar.

Anna: We already talked about some fallers, um, Florence Loreto, Lodi, but also, I saw Vicenza dropped and even Lucca, which was really surprising despite rankings super high on the list. Uh, I mean, nothing too crazy. They obviously still made the top rankings, but it shows how trends go up and down.

Luca: And it doesn’t really mean that a place is not popular anymore, but a spike may have normalized.

Anna: I’ve also heard about, this little coastal town, which is called in Liguria. Yeah. Bordighera, right?

Luca: Yeah. Bordighera. I would bet there only one in a hundred of our listeners has heard of it. It’s a small town on the Ligurian Riviera near the French border. Picture pretty palm lined.

Famous in the 19th century, actually had an expat community in the 19th century. Especially with British expats, it hasn’t been on the radar for [00:16:00] modern expats until this year. So it went from effectively zero such interest to a meaningful blip.

It did not make the top 20 list. Next week we’ll talk about some of these, uh, spots that are becoming interesting that haven’t quite made the, highest tier of the rankings. I would bet that this will be a town that’s going to show up on expats’ radars in the future, and all it takes is a single viral article or a post on Instagram, and suddenly they catch fire. So we shall keep a close eye on.

So to wrap it up,

Anna: Our 2025 data, shows a two path journey for experts looking for the sweet life. On one path you’ve got the big dreams where cities like Milan or Florence capture people’s imagination. On the other path, you’ve got the practical research phase where people often end up drawn to Italy’s smaller, more livable [00:17:00] and cheaper towns, as they get serious about moving.

Both parts lead to something good though. Italy’s incredible diversity, means there is really something for everyone.

Luca: That’s right. Italy has more than 7,000 municipalities. We own Magic Towns track almost 2000 of them with our expat profiles and the top 20 list, uh, really reflects, uh, that mix you are referring to Anna, that mix of everything, the large metropolis, the little long hamlets, uh, and the up and coming regions.

Anna: To find out, who got the top spots and to see the full list of the top 20 towns for expats in Italy you can visit our website and read the full 2026 edition record.

Luca: And if you are planning to move to Italy, you want to get ahead of us doing next year’s list of top towns, so you can use the Town Explorer, use dozens of filters to find out which town suits you. All the [00:18:00] way from quality of healthcare to how far you are from the beach to the quality of the beach waters, you’re gonna be bathing in and a lot more, and, uh, that way you won’t be following the herd. It will be the herd following you. Did you like that Anna?

Anna: We’ll see you over at Magic Towns.

Luca: Yes. And we will be live on our podcast next week again to talk about the secret surprises in our list of most searched towns by expats in 2026. Bye everyone.

Anna: Bye.

Anna: I’m good. What about you?

Luca: I am doing great. It’s really good to see you for the last episode before Christmas. We’re gonna take a couple of weeks of well-deserved break.

Anna: And today we’re diving into one of the most interesting topics for remote workers and expats, which is Italy’s new digital nomad visa.

Luca: Yes. I’m so excited about that. And I know you’re excited about it too because you’ve been covering it assiduously for a couple of months now, haven’t you?

Anna: And I’m sure lots of people are interested as well.

Luca: The Digital Nomads Visa has been in the works for a while, and finally it’s live. The Italian government started talking about a couple of years ago, but as it happens in Italy, it only took off in, uh, May or June.

Can we talk a little bit about what it really takes to get [00:01:00] it?

Anna: The good thing is that it’s absolutely doable. Let’s break down what the visa is, uh, who it’s for and what the real world requirements look like.

Luca: The digital nomad visa, like other digital nomad visas in Europe, like the Portuguese one is probably the best known one, is aimed at non- European citizens who work remotely as the, as freelancers or the business owners or the employees of foreign companies.

It is valid for one year. It is renewable and it lets you live legally in Italy while earning more money from companies and customers based abroad.

Anna: Exactly. So, there are two broad tracks. The remote worker visa, if you are employed by a company, and then digital nomad visa, if you are employed or if you’re self-employed or freelance. The paperwork changes slightly depending on which route you’re taking, but the general [00:02:00] principles, let’s say, are the same.

Luca: Talking about what you need to qualify for the DNV, as we call it, income, you need to show earnings of at least 28,000 euro per year, which is the legal minimum.

Anna: But realistically, successful applicants tend to earn quite a bit more so based on real cases. Most approval came in the 43,000, 80,000 range.

Luca: And income alone is not enough for you to get the visa. You need to prove that you have financial stability historically.

With things like tax returns, bank statements, client contracts.

Anna: And a pro tip is to create an explanatory note in Italian. So this is like a financial cover letter.

Luca: Now, paperwork wise, as we said, you need two to five years of tax returns. Six to 12 months worth of bank statements, a lease or registered housing [00:03:00] contract. And we’re gonna get back on that point because it’s a bit of a sticky point in a second. A private health insurance policy, a degree or proof of professional experience for the sector you’re applying in. And, don’t be discouraged sworn translations in Italian for a lot of these documents.

Anna: So you need to prove you’ve got a place lined up before you even apply. So, 12 month lease registered with the Agenzia delle Entrate is the safest bet.

Luca: You are an expert in this topic. You also wrote an article this week, Anna, about, how tricky it is to get these 12 month leases so listeners can go to Magic Towns directly and read it.

It is, very, very interesting. It is true that the, for this particular type of visa some consulates accept Airbnb medium term rentals. So when in doubt go for a 12 month registered [00:04:00] lease.

Anna: And people often ask like, how much is this going to cost me? So let’s be honest. Mm-hmm. It’s not cheap, but. It’s not outrageous either.

Luca: The Visa itself only costs 116 euro, let’s say 130 US dollars. But, the paperwork, that goes with it and the translations, notarizations, accommodation deposits, insurance, and lawyers fees can add up.

So figure out between 3000 to 6,000 euro between one thing and the other. And of course, if you want professional help, you should add another 1000 to 3000 euro for a consultant. All that being said we have a relationship with a consultant that works at the lower end of that, uh, range. So feel free to get in touch if you’d like an introduction.

Assuming that you got your visa, what happens after [00:05:00] you arrive? You land in Italy and uh, you must within eight working days apply for permesso di soggiorno. Your residency permit.

Anna: Which means a trip to your local questura. So they might ask for additional translations or documentation, so don’t throw anything away.

Luca: No. Bring that stack of paperwork with you . You also must watch out for tax residency rules. if you become a tax resident you have to pay tax in Italy, like most countries, to be fair. The general rule is that 183 days in a calendar year will trigger tax residency.

So if you arrive in say July, you probably won’t be a tax resident for that year, but from the following January, Italy will want to tax a slice of your income.

Anna: So definitely speak to a commercialista, which is a tax consultant who understands international [00:06:00] taxation. It’s not always straightforward.

Luca: Yeah. Is it ever straightforward? No. I’m joking. This is one of the easier things if a professional looks after you.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: We have talked to a whole bunch of, digital nomads, and in fact, we have a little interview lined up, as a segment of this podcast.

From talking to all these digital nomads Anna, what did you find the main hurdles they have faced to be so?

Anna: Language is a big one. A lot of official documents must be translated into Italian, as we said before, and communication with consulates. It’s nearly always in Italian.

Luca: And what about accommodation? We touched on it briefly.

Anna: The problem is that landlords want to see your visa, but you need the lease to get the visa, so it helps to work with relocation services or Airbnb hosts to understand the process.

Luca: There is this, um, saying doing the rounds in expat circles that, Italians are legally not allowed to [00:07:00] rent to you unless you have a visa. But this is absolutely not true. You just need to explain your situation a little bit clearly to your prospective landlord or landlady. So all things considered, is it worth it?

Anna: Yeah, if you’re ready to put in the work this digital nomad visa gives you a real legal foothold in Italy with a path to renewal and maybe even permanent residency later.

Luca: Yeah, and people on a digital nomad visa can bring in dependants once they move in.

So if you wanna bring in your spouse or your children, you, it will allow you to do that too. So that’s a piece of good news. Just, make sure you’re prepared, be patient and get comfortable with it. Italian bureaucracy, it’s like a starter of the Italian bureaucracy you get after you move in.

Anna: But guys, it’s absolutely worth it if your dream is to live in a small town in Umbria, Abruzzo, or you know, a beach side town in Puglia.

Luca: And you can still keep your career [00:08:00] going.

Anna: Exactly.

Luca: So it would be remiss of me to not mention at this point that if you’re not sure where to settle in Italy, you can check out our Town Explorer of Magic Towns, it, which covers more than 1500 towns in Italy and has, hundreds of data points for each one of these.

No one else has anything like this. I sometimes struggle to explain to people what it is, but then when they use it, they go like, wow. So end of promotional break.

I think Anna, it would be really good and timely if we brought in a few soundbites now of the conversation we had, with one of our favorite digital nomads so far, shall we?

Anna: Absolutely.

Luca: So without further ado, here are, our top 10 minutes of conversation with, Riaan Fourie, who had a lot of interesting stuff to tell us about his experience at the Digital Nomad Village in Tursi, Basilicata, a beautiful, quaint little town [00:09:00] where he found a lot more than he expected.

Luca: How long has your career as a digital nomad been?

Riaan: This is an interesting question. What do you define as a digital nomad? I started my travels in country, so in South Africa, and that was probably 2019.

The path was not as walked for the digital nomads, not that much going on . Um, so it was quite scary, but I’d say outside of South Africa, traveling different country every month, about three and a half, four years now.

Luca: Had you been to Italy before going to Tursi?

Riaan: Mm, yep. It was actually my second time in Italy

Luca: What was your experience like?

Riaan: Incredible. I mean, the first experience we were in, the northwest of Sicily, a little island called Ustica.

We started on a boat there and then traveled all the islands, the Ionian Islands. And then made our way all the way around, to Mount Etna then across to Greece. Uh, incredible experience. I really love Sicily. And it was interesting to see the contrast [00:10:00] between, let’s say, Sicily and like Tursi, very different.

Luca: It wasn’t really an Italian crowd, was a mostly international crowd, I imagine?

Riaan: Mostly, yeah, mostly international. Not too many Italians.

Luca: How did you feel about Sicily?

Riaan: It’s absolutely beautiful. Food is incredible. The beaches were very beautiful.

I really enjoyed the marina life that you can have there. So you’re just hopping from one marina to another? It is very well, well set up for that. Definitely would go back. We didn’t, never ventured too far inland, like we visited all the tiny coastal towns.

I see why Italians are always so fit and healthy. ’cause you have to walk up hills every single day.

Luca: It depends where you are on in Italy, Tursi fits that bill.

Riaan: Right.

I think I got 15,000 steps on a slow day in Tursi.

Anna: And how did you end up in Tursi for the co living week?

Riaan: I had three months to plan in Europe And I saw this Facebook post this post about Tursi, and I was like, ah, co-living. I’m not so sure if I’m really keen for this.

And I just remember seeing [00:11:00] Salva and Maria and I was like, this whole idea that they’re selling. It’s really cute. They’ve got this little village, very authentic living, and that’s what hooked me. It was that like authentic small village experience in Italy.

And I was like, okay, let’s try this. Do not give me a recommendation to go to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower. I wanna see things in Paris that are off the beaten track. Like I’ve seen so many monuments. You’ve seen so many museums. At some point it becomes all the same. So you wanna see something different. And that’s what was, for me, it was different. It was authentic. And yeah, when I, after speaking to them, I was like, wow, let’s do this.

Luca: One of the big selling points is the fact that they try to build a little bit of a link between the nomads who are sometimes a bit aloof and, uh, and the locals. Did you, do you have that experience? Did you feel that?

Riaan: Absolutely. I think the fact that they made effort to take us to all these, to all the local [00:12:00] restaurants, to speak to a lot of people, to have workshops where they would include some of the local kids

Luca: Do you normally choose to go to structured s or structured experiences or do you like to go solo as well?

Riaan: It depends on my mindset. Um, I’d say both. So right now I’m in a co-living space, which has got 27 rooms. You’ve got a co-working space inside the co-living laundry sorted for you. There’s a gym, they constantly have little events happening. I love that when I want to focus and work.

When I’m on holiday, so not really holiday, but just not working that hard, I way prefer to do my own thing, to go off the path, to go, I will rent a motorbike, put my laptop on the back and just go, and every day is a new experience.

Like for me, that’s the real experience where you just really go with the flow and every day is a new experience.

Luca: So when you were in Southern Italy, were you in holiday mode or semi [00:13:00] holiday mode, or 12 hours a day?

Riaan: I was very much in holiday mode. I could really immerse myself in the, in the nomad scene, like in the Village. Doing ketogenic diets, so no carbs.

Eggs and steak. Luckily Southern Italy has good meat. I would wake up, go for my first training station of the day, have a good breakfast, head up to the coworking station where I’m sure you guys know it was up in the cathedral, which is really beautiful. Spent some time working. Stay up there for like a sunset and I love to fly my fly drones. So got some really beautiful videos of Tursi, especially like when the sun is setting, you’ve got that golden hour. I would then go for a second training session and join the evening activities. So whatever was happening on the evening, um, be it the pasta workshops or pizza making workshops, I’ll join those.

Luca: You mentioned keto, sometimes keto is jokingly referred to as the princess diet because of the cost of getting all the, the protein. How did you find the cost of [00:14:00] living compared to your expectation?

Riaan: Honestly much lower than I expected. Yeah, no, I mean the butchers were incredibly good. Um, it was very, very affordable, I would say, especially compared to the rest of Europe. In Paris, or let’s say Berlin or you know, wherever you’re gonna be traveling, um, things are gonna be expensive ’cause you’re in the tourist hub, but Tursi is not a tourist hub. People are there to live a day-to-day life, but I found it quite affordable.

Luca: Did you find yourself welcomed by the local community?

Riaan: Oh, absolutely. So many convers, broken English, broken Italian conversations. We, we can barely communicate, but they are just so welcoming and so you can do a lot with your hands.

Right. Exactly. Luckily you don’t need to speak. I remember just walking up the mountain there once and, uh, there was this old man with this very, very cute dog and he would just try and invite us into his house for drinks and offer us [00:15:00] beer and, he was just so happy that someone else also wanted to play with his dog.

So small little interactions like that

Luca: You felt like people were genuinely appreciating the fact that, that you guys would bringing in something or at least liking where they live, I imagine.

Riaan: From my understanding. Um, they were very happy to have us there, and they showed it.

Anna: I think that that’s the beauty of being a digital nomad, that you can choose between the, the flexibility of traveling around and working, but at the same time choosing to, settle and live, let’s say, a different life for a while. You can say that you’ve lived in, in Italy, it’s as if you were living different lives. That’s beautiful.

Riaan: I read a post the other day, which kind of spoke about this, where a lot of people travel to a location and they just travel there for their own enjoyment.

Just to consume and take in what’s there. And then they leave. But they never integrate. They never immerse themselves into the local population. [00:16:00] They never speak to the people. And that, that for me is the way I prefer to travel, is to try and actually speak to the people and, you know, see what it’s about.

Like you can say you’ve been to Italy, but have you, you ever eaten in an Italian’s home?

That’s the beauty of this project, like, I must say, the, the place where I’m staying in now, it’s, it’s very nice, but I

Anna: mean.

Riaan: Nobody’s, everybody here speaks perfect English. Um, we’re not really doing much effort to be integrated into the Thai community or, you know, speak to the Thai people.

Luca: Are you planning to go back to Italy at some point.

Riaan: Absolutely. Even if it’s just to see Salva and Maria. I made a few friends, maybe two, three friends that I still keep contact with, but top of that list of those two.

Luca: It’s a great endorsement.

Riaan: I, I grew up in Cape Town, which is considered a big city in South Africa, but not, not that big by international standards. But I’ve always been a small town guy. I like connecting with people. I [00:17:00] prefer to. Take life a little bit slower. Um, and big cities, there’s just not much for me in a big city.

So, yeah, for me, definitely prefer smaller towns or like close to nature is really more the requirement. And the people you meet in small towns are also all different, complete, completely different to, to people you meet in cities.

Anna: Yeah. They are surprised by your presence and more likely to engage.

Riaan: And they’re always super friendly.

The interactions you get in these villages, like you just go to buy a sandwich and the guy invites you to his wedding, you know?

Anna: And what are for you, the pros and cons of living a digital nomad life.

Riaan: Oh, big question. I mean, the pros are, you know, the, the lifestyle is amazing. Um, you can go anywhere. You can do anything. That amount of agency you have of your, over your life.

So if you have high agency, you have a lot of choices in life. [00:18:00] So what I mean like is you are able to choose the country you wanna live in. If I don’t like this place, I’ll just go. So having like high agency, being able to just make a choice and act on it, that is really, very cool for me. The cons are interesting. You get very lonely. I would say if you don’t really put effort into friendships and co-living help a lot. Like especially this Tursi project, you know, it helped a lot because you were with the same friends for five, six weeks, that makes a big difference.

Anna: You are working, but at the same time, you are living because you’re seeing lots of places that many people are waiting to see just once or twice.

Riaan: South Africa means we have to do the Schengen visa. Which is really annoying. And it’s only like three months per six months. So you can stay in Europe for half a year, but you have to leave the whole time. So you can come in and then you have to leave.

That’s why this digital nomad visa is super [00:19:00] interesting because now you can, you actually have the opportunity to stay in a European country. And initially it wasn’t. It wasn’t all the cool countries. Like I would love to stay in Italy. And then, I mean, another thing is that. For me, it’s, it’s really nice because it gives you some form of a residency. It helps you with taxes, basically.

So it helps you to prove to your home country that, hey, I’m actually in this country, you know, I’m actually paying tax. Where’s your financial residency? So these digital nomad visas are really, really useful for that as well.

Anna: Yeah, because how, how does it work? Like in Thailand for example, if you’re staying for three months, how does it work for the taxes?

Riaan: If you stay three months, it’s not a problem. But if you stay longer it can become a problem.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s quicker, compared to other routes, just to find a job in the country that it’s absolutely difficult and all these things, it’s. It’s beautiful that the [00:20:00] government like decided to do this thing.

Riaan: It shows that they’re actually like progressive and thinking forward to say, Hey, there’s, there’s this big demand. Are we gonna stay a bureaucracy and not adapt? Or are we actually gonna adapt and move towards these? Because initially it was just like some of the lower income countries that offered this as like, mm-hmm we want to get people in. This is another way to get people in. But now everybody’s seeing the opportunity and, okay, well we can actually like, have more nomads, have more people.

I’m very much strongly considering, um, uh, going to Italy on this visa.

Anna: If you need support, we are here. Thank you so much. thank you for, for sharing your story and your thoughts.

Riaan: Anna, thanks. Thanks so much. I really appreciate the time as well.

Luca: So Anna, that was interesting.

Anna: It definitely was.

Luca: And to find, such an amazing experience, in a tiny little town is something you, you might not expect. So I hope that some of our listeners will consider looking up the, Tursi digital nomad [00:21:00] village and, perhaps they can be there for the next, uh, popup event, which I believe is going to be in the spring of 2026.

Anna: A great time to breathe some authentic Italian energy.

Luca: Talking about authentic Italian energy, I think it’s time for us to go and, uh, enjoy our last weekend before Christmas. I assume we both have a lot of cooking to do, right, Anna?

Anna: That’s what I was thinking about.

Luca: What’s gonna be on your Christmas lunch table

Anna: I’ll definitely do the antipasti guys.

Luca: Do we know what they’re gonna be or are you gonna keep us on ten You’re still thinking about it.

Anna: Yeah. Yeah. Something with gorgonzola, by the way.

Okay.

Luca: Okay. I see that there’s a trip to the supermarket coming up for you.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: As for myself, I shall see what my mom is going to cook for me. You know it Christmas, I gonna let her do all the cooking. In which case, I am going to wish you the best of Christmases. And, uh, we are going to be back with our podcast in the first week [00:22:00] of 2026.

Anna: Happy holidays guys.

Luca: Thank you everyone. Take care. Thank you

Anna: Hi everyone. Happy to be here again.

Luca: Anna, it’s a pleasure to have you here again after our little Thanksgiving break.

What did you do last week for Thanksgiving?

Anna: Yeah, actually nothing special. What about you?

Luca: I ate some chicken, not turkey really, but that’s a Okay. Yeah. But let’s not talk about this. I wouldn’t want to upset the vegans who are listening to the show.

So today we are having a chat about a topic that is very important to a lot of our listeners, the new work visa for Italian descendants.

Anna: Yeah, we finally got some good news for people with Italian roots. This is something the Italian diaspora has been waiting for forever.

Luca: Italy has a enormous diaspora. Countries like Argentina and Brazil have tens of millions of people with [00:01:00] Italian heritage. In the US there’s about 20 million Italian Americans. These communities we know because most of our audience is Italian American, actually. Have a strong interest in reconnecting with Italy. And one of the main interests for many has been to obtain Italian citizenship through the ancestry, but in May things got much harder.

Anna: Yeah, exactly. Back in May, 2025, Italy changed its citizenship law and putting this strict two generational limit for reclaiming citizenship by descent. So now only people with Italian parent or grandparent can automatically get recognized as Italian citizens through blood. Um, before that, there was no limit at all. So you could go back to great grandparents, or even farther you could prove the family line never broke.

Luca: I helped a lady get her citizenship, as early as two years [00:02:00] ago through her great, uh, great, great grandfather who was born in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. So that’s even before Italy even existed. And the reform from May caused a bit of a stir. Uh, we ourselves at Magic Towns ran a petition and over 600 people, um, who were cut out by the reform. Mostly Italian Americans committed to a minimum two year residency period.

In order to get Italian citizenship, but the government did not listen. A lot of Italian descendants lost their straightforward route to Italian citizenship.

Anna: Yeah, it really upset a lot of people and for a good reason. Literally overnight, thousands of people were in the middle of applying or planning to apply, just had the doors slammed in their face. It was pretty brutal for the diaspora communities.

Luca: Someone wrote to us, they had already put down a hundred [00:03:00] thousand euro on renovating a property thinking that we’ll get citizenship and then suddenly, woo, they were cut out and they didn’t have a legal way to move through it.

Anyway. That’s crazy. Talking about, yeah. Yeah. It is crazy. They’re talking about positive news. There is this new law we’re talking about. Mm-hmm. And the good news is there’s a new quota free work visa for descendants of Italian citizens from certain countries. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit what happened, Anna?

Anna: Basically on November 24, the Italian government put out this decree that creates a special work permit for people who are descendants of Italian citizens. And these permits don’t count against their normal immigration quotas.

Usually Italy caps how many work visa they give you each year the decreto flussi, which is the early immigration quota. Those fill up super, super fast. And so, this new rule says that if you’ve got Italian ancestry and you’re from one of the [00:04:00] listed country, you can get a work visa

Luca: US listeners are most often used to to the H1b visa. They mm-hmm. Hear about it on the news. And just like the H1b Visa is routinely oversubscribed in the US so the immigration portals in Italy are oversubscribed by a factor of two or three.

Basically, there was no way for you to get in, um, until now. So this is basically a fast track for work permits for people of Italian heritage, which yeah, countries are included in this program, Anna?

Anna: The decree is seven countries right now, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Australia, Canada, Venezuela, and Uruguay. So if you’re a citizen of one of those countries and you can prove you’re a descendant from an Italian citizen, you can apply for this work visa.

Luca: These are all countries that have, a significant Italian immigrant communities historically. Yeah. Argentina and Brazil, we mentioned the [00:05:00] US, Canada, and Australia.

What about the other countries that have countries like South Africa or Mexico that also have a large amount of Italian descendants?

Anna: So actually when they were drafting these, there were proposals to include South Africa, Mexico, as you said, Peru, Chile, but those didn’t make this time, so the government hinted they might add more countries down the road, so it’s possible the list could grow, but for now it’s just those seven.

Basically, they prioritize the countries with the biggest Italian communities first.

Luca: And I would say that that covers 90% of our listeners uh, uh, between. The US, Australia and Canada, the UK is left out, but it is not a country that had a, um, large, uh, um, Italian, diaspora until a couple of decades ago.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: To clarify, what does this visa actually, let you do? You mentioned that it’s a work [00:06:00] permit outside the quota system, but you can’t just pack up your bags and do it without a job. Can you?

Anna: No, no, the visa is for, the visa is for subordinate work, which means you need an Italian employer who’s willing to hire you for a job in Italy. So the employer has to go through the whole standard process of getting a work authorization, then will for you through the immigration office.

Luca: Okay. So it is not a job seeker visa. It is not a digital normal visa. No. And it’s not an entrepreneur visa. You just can’t arrive and then look for work. You have to have a contract.

Anna: Absolutely.

So you need that contract lined up already before. Before coming. It’s not that easy.

Luca: So it is an incentive that people still have to go through the process and have something to offer to the Italian job market. The Italian job market is not as used to hiring from abroad as other countries.

So unless you have specialized skills or [00:07:00] personal connections, a Italian company may prefer to hire someone who’s already here or is a EU citizen. But all that being said that the shortage of workers in several categories, uh, is massive. And with the right qualifications found, workers definitely achievable.

In fact, the news came out yesterday that Italy has hit its lowest unemployment rate ever. Whether that is good news or not is another catch of fish. We’ll discuss that in another episode of the podcast because the truth is that the worker population is shrinking very, very fast as people retire.

So that is a problem. But for people looking for jobs in Italy, the reality is that, uh, there are far more jobs than job seekers at the moment.

Anna: Yeah, so the opportunity is definitely there, but people need to be realistic about the job search and maybe play up any special skills they have. Like the world [00:08:00] situation with Italian businesses closing because, um, they can’t find work is honestly really concerning.

Luca: It’s pretty scary.

Anna: Yeah, this week I heard about this big excavation company, that’s stuck because they can’t find excavator operators and two restaurants in a pastry shop shutting down because they can’t find chefs. So the jobs are out there for people who want them.

Luca: It actually makes me very sad because the pastry shop you’re talking about was my first, uh, pastry shop when I was a child. So it hits me what it hurts.

Anna: Yeah. What you can’t do is to try to game the system with some part-time or fake job. We know from people who handle all these cases all the time, that the questura won’t give you a residency permit if you’re applying through some brand new company or got barely any hours.

Luca: So you can’t do this on a part-time basis. We wrote an article about this last week, so people that want to go to Magic Towns Italy and read about the fine details [00:09:00] of the, um, the new work permit rules, they, they can do that. Going back to the job requirements, um, yeah, we can probably tell our listeners that speaking Italian will go a long way towards finding a job in Italy, wouldn’t it?

Anna: Absolutely language skills and networking will take you really, really far. So you’ll need to prove your Italian ancestry as part of application. And the government is still figuring out exactly what documents they’ll need and how you’ll submit that proof. You’ll still have to go through the entire hiring and work, permit process just like any other non you worker would just without the quota restriction.

Luca: Let’s talk about the really enticing part of this, which is the short term citizenship granting timelines for people that qualify for this scheme. How does this work? Is this like a fast track to Italian citizenship? [00:10:00]

Anna: This is probably the biggest draw, honestly. Under Italian law, if you’ve got an Italian parent or a grandparent, you can apply for citizenship by naturalization after just two years of legal residence in Italy. And that’s way shorter than the standard. 10 year residency requirement for foreigners without Italian ancestry. So, um, here’s how it works.

So you come to Italy on this special work visa. You live and work here, and if you qualify after two years, you can apply for citizenship.

Luca: That’s not bad. Two years is incredibly fast in citizenship terms. Normally, non EU citizens had to wait, for 10 years to even apply and then even longer to get it.

So this is a huge incentive.

Anna: Yeah. But, I need to clarify something really important. That two year fast track only works if your Italian ancestor was a parent or grandparent. So a lot of people in communities like Italian [00:11:00] Americans might be third or fourth generation descendants. And for those folks, the low doesn’t give you that special reduction yet.

Luca: W we are hearing noises that, uh, the government may relax this requirement in the future so that even people that have a, great grandparent or great great grandparent tie to Italy that it might qualify for reduced pathway to citizenship.

Um, we still have to see that getting onto paper. So just to make a concrete example, if my grandfather was born in Italy, but I can’t claim citizenship by descent because he had renounced his Italian citizenship or some other technical reason, I can move to Italy on the new work visa and and after two years I can apply to become an Italian citizen.

Mm-hmm. But if my connection is through a great grandparent right now. I can still use the visa to live and work in Italy outside the quota system, but I might have to stay in Italy for as long as 10 years before I can [00:12:00] apply for citizenship. As for the standard law, I should add to this, that anyone living legally in Italy for five years, can apply for a permanent resident status. Imagine the equivalent of a green card status, which allows you to live Italy and effectively have the right to live there and in the EU indefinitely. It’s just one little step below being a citizen, but not white being a citizen. So five years become a permanent resident. 10 years, you become a citizen. If you fall within the remit of this reform you can also, become a citizen as early as two years after you land.

Anna: Yeah, this visa is basically saying if you really want to reconnect with Italy, enough that you will actually move here and contribute for a couple years. We’ll give you a shot.

And in the best case, you’re only waiting two [00:13:00] years to be eligible for citizenship.

Luca: That is a very good development.

We shall see how it goes. And how have people reacted so far in the Italian descendant communities? Do we know?

Anna: People are obviously happy about that. Uh, but of course, immigration lawyers and relocation experts like us are telling people to approach it with a solid plan because like we talk about, you still need that job lined up and you’ve got to be ready to move pretty quickly once you get the work permit. But overall, I’d say the reaction has been really positive.

Luca: And talking about, timelines. Do we know how soon this new visa is going to be operational?

Anna: So the decree is published, so the framework is officially in effect, but they are still working out the practical details. This is pretty typical in Italy.

They make the laws and then the come, come out months later to [00:14:00] explain how everything actually works.

Luca: Months later or years later, sometimes it happens. Yeah. So what’s the procedure gonna be like?

Anna: So, uh, they will say, when the online portal will start accepting application, uh, the documents you will need. But my guess is by early 2026, if not sooner, people will be able to apply.

Now it’s the time to get your documents together, and both your family documents to show your Italian lineage, and obviously to start or keep going with your job hunt in Italy.

Luca: Lovely. So go get your Italian birth certificates, get your marriage certificates in order, and, perhaps you can start reaching out to potential employers or use your own networks in Italy to secure a job offer. Keep in mind that if you’re bringing in any foreign documents, in terms of, birth certificates or marriage certificates that come outside the EU, you’re going to have to, officially translate them and get them [00:15:00] apostilled.

So that’s an extra step. You might as well do it now. Um, anything else we should, talk about Anna?

Anna: One more thing about the citizenship timeline. So, applying after two years of residency doesn’t mean you recently become a citizen like at two years. It means you are eligible to apply. The application itself can take a couple years and you will need to meet requirements like, passing an Italian language test, showing integration income and stuff like that. But compared to waiting 10 years, this is way

Luca: faster. Absolutely. So don’t imagine showing up and becoming Italian in 2027.

It might be 2028 or 2029 by the time the paperwork goes through, but still it’s better than 2035 as it would’ve been under the old timeline.

Anna: Exactly. Maybe by then Italy might tweak this policies even more, or expand the eligible countries. I mean, it’s still evolving.

Luca: And I think it’s quite likely because, uh, and we’re gonna talk [00:16:00] about it in our next podcast, about our 2026 predictions. The demographic bomb is about to become very apparent and, potentially blow up in everyone’s face. So the government may actually wake up and make it much easier for people to move into Italy.

So to summarize for our listeners. Good news. If you have Italian ancestry, you come from US, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, or Venezuela, you now have a special pathway to move to Italy and work. You need a job offer by the way. You can come as a tourist, find a job, and then go through the system. Nothing prevents you from, going to a few interviews, but you’re not going to be limited by the quota numbers. Once you’re in Italy, if you are Italian ancestor is a parent or a grandparent, you can apply full citizenship after just two years instead of 10.

So that’s a brilliant, brilliant development for you guys.

Anna: Exactly. A lot of people now have another chance. And beyond [00:17:00] citizenship, it’s the experience, you know, of actually living in Italy, working here, becoming part of a local community for at least a couple years.

Luca: Enjoy living in Italy, stay in Italy, and that’s what many of our listeners want to do.

And, uh, get the passport eventually as a final recognition of your efforts, you might say.

Anna: I’m really looking forward to seeing the first success stories come out of this in the next year or two.

Luca: So this adds to the new arsenal of options for people moving to Italy.

So we have the Elective Residency Visa for retirees. We have the digital normal visa, which is actually working, better than, than we expected. Quick approval times. It’s, um, it’s been a very positive surprise. We’re gonna talk more about, digital nomads in the very near future. And, and now we have this work visa, so things are looking up.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: For anyone listening who thinks that this might apply to them or [00:18:00] interested in, legal relocation pathways to Italy, go to Magic Towns Italy, we cover them all visa and legal migration routes news. And, uh, you can find the most recent updates on our site. Thank you so much, Anna, for spending the time to break this down for us.

Anna: Thank you, Luca. It was my pleasure. I really hope this helps some of you out

Luca: there. I’m sure they will. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others. If you want more information about moving to Italy including 1500 towns that we cover in our Town Explorer with all. Some data points about healthcare, crime, income levels, quality of life, uh, you name it. We have more than 200 per town. Please visit Magic Towns Italy, and thank you for listening to us. Talk to you next week.

Anna: Ciao

It’s about life satisfaction in Italy.

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Luca: It’s a little bit more complicated than that. It covers satisfaction with living. It covers particular parts of people’s lives, how happy they are with their relationship, with friends and with family and local healthcare.

And then it starts to get into topics that are more interesting to us as the purveyors of information to expats and retirees looking at Italy. For instance, how satisfied people are with pollution with crime. And then there’s some, there’s a couple of funny things, like how much people trust others.

There’s a little experiment about what percentage of people expect to get the wallet back if it was, uh, taken from there in the. Yes.

Anna: Okay. I saw a video about that. There are some people going in different cities. [00:01:00] I saw, so this girl went to Oristano. Sole 24 Ore said that it’s the safest. So she went there and she, she started running the wallet fell like three times and always sat there like, here’s your wallet. She did the same in Milan and there was like a disaster. So like that.

Luca: Okay, so in Sardinia people give you back your wallet, but in Milan they don’t.

Anna: Yeah, the crime is like, it’s the worst city all over Italy.

Luca: So this is very interesting data we got. It answers questions like, who’s got the biggest issue with pollution? Who complains the most about traffic? As it often happens, the most interesting part is that, uh, the real data destroys the stereotypes we have about Italy.

So I actually played a little game with the community of the Expats in Italy group on Facebook, and I asked them, in which part of Italy people complain the most about struggling to find parking? Apparently some people were upset because I [00:02:00] did not put Rome as one of the options.

Anna: That’s the answer that I gave you when you asked me what’s the worst city for parking. And I said, Rome, it’s not, you also

Luca: think it’s Rome?

Anna: I thought, yeah.

Luca: Okay. It isn’t. Actually, I’m not gonna tell you now, I’ll tell you at the end of the podcast, a reward for you to stay tuned. Why don’t we start with life satisfaction. Where do you think people are the happiest in Italy?

Anna: In Sardinia, I’d say, because I love Sardinia.

Luca: Some people said Tuscany, some people said Sicily. Yeah, but you are very wrong. The region where most people are highly satisfied with their lives is Trentino Alto Adige. With an average score of 7.1 out of 10. You know, it kind makes sense. It’s efficient, clean, wages are high. Apparently people don’t care too much about the sun and the beach when it comes to life satisfaction.

Anna: Yeah, they are organized. It’s beautiful. You [00:03:00] have nature, beautiful mountains.

Luca: What about the lowest life satisfaction related?

Anna: I would say in the south, but not the islands. Campania

Luca: Yes. You got this right in Campania, the region whose capital is Naples. Life satisfaction is at its lowest. Only about half of the people are happy with their lives. So that’s a bit sad, but still, 50% is not nothing. 55%. Let’s actually look at that experiment that you mentioned before.

Anna: Okay. The

Luca: I shopped my wallet scenario. The region where people trust the least their neighbors to return their wallet is again, Campania, the region of Naples. Only 30% of people believe that the neighbor would return their wallet.

Highest trust. In which region do you think people believe that the wallet will be returned?

Anna: I would say Veneto

Luca: Not quite, although trust is pretty high in the Veneto. Okay. [00:04:00]

Anna: The

Luca: highest trust in neighbors is again in Trentino Alto Adige

Anna: Okay. It’s not surprising. Yeah. I don’t know why it’s

Luca: Almost 60% of people trust their neighbors were return their wallets. What about trust in complete strangers? If they think a complete stranger would return their wallet

Anna: I would say 20.

Luca: 20%. No. Yeah. Italians don’t trust strangers. Nationally, it is less than 3%. Oh my, less than 3% of people think that a stranger would return their wallet.

Anna: Basically nothing. Yes.

Luca: That’s not what people think about Italy. Right?

Anna: No.

Luca: I friendly, trusting people. Nope.

Anna: Absolutely.

Luca: Let’s look at another one . ISTAT asked couples if they split housework evenly?

Anna: Mm.

Luca: Between men and women?

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: In which region would you say that they are the most equal with housework?

Anna: Lombardy,

Luca: You are [00:05:00] right.

Anna: Or in general, the North? I would say you

Luca: are absolutely correct. In the north there is a lot less asymmetry in gender disparity when splitting housework, where Milan is the best with a 66 out of a hundred score. Can you guess in which region it is the most unequal between men and women?

Anna: The South, so Sicily, Puglia…

Luca: Puglia is at, uh, 78.9 out of a hundred is the region where the workload between men and women is the most asymmetrical in the household.

This one is an easy one I’m gonna ask you next. Friendships, which region? Do people meet their friends at least once a week?

Anna: Sicily,

Luca: No. Campania again, Naples. The place where people don’t trust their neighbor, but the place where people hang out with their friends the most.

Anna: Okay.

Luca: You wanna go for another one?

Anna: Yes.

Luca: In which region do people complain the most about [00:06:00] air pollution?

Anna: Of course, in the north, so I would say Lombardy, I would say

Luca: no. No, you are wrong Again. The region in which people complain the most about pollution is Lazio, the region of Rome, followed by Naples again, and Lombardy. Milan is in third place.

So about 19% of people that live in the region of Rome find pollution problem followed by 18.5 Naples.

Anna: Because there’s always traffic.

Luca: There is pollution, but you know, that’s the people don’t complain about it. Where do people complain the least about pollution?

Anna: The happiest region?

Luca: Near the South

. The South

Anna: . Okay.

Basilicata

Luca: Almost that second best. It’s Molise and Basilicata, where only about 4% of people complain about pollution. Yeah, because there’re almost there.

Anna: I was thinking of Sicily, but then I thought [00:07:00] of Catania and Siracusa are those places. So I, I said no, it’s not the, like, the right answer.

Luca: Where do people complain the most about noise? Like noise in their daily lives? It’s very noisy.

Anna: Ah,

Luca: no.

Anna: Ah.

Luca: Although almost Lazio second.

Anna: Okay. First

Luca: is, first is you guess the companion.

Anna: Campania

Luca: Yeah. Naples. So Naples people don’t trust each other.

People, friends, people complain a lot about noise. It can be noisy.

Anna: Traffic noise or in general? Like in general,

Luca: The, the question, the question is, uh, that are you concerned about noise

Yeah. Anyway, so Rome and Naples, people complain the most about that and obviously.

The quietest regions are the ones near the Alps, right? Trentino actually. Valle d’Aosta, yeah. Well, Valle d’Aosta, [00:08:00] very few people complain about noise in the Veneto. So again, north versus south, the answer to every question. And here’s another one, if we look at life satisfaction. On an age basis.

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Luca: Who is the least happy with their lives by age?

Anna: I would say in the middle. So between 35 and 45.

Luca: You’ve got a almost to a T. It is people aged 35 to 44, only 59.6% are happy. And why is this? Well, actually ISTAT that looked into this. They are the so-called sandwich generation. They’re working, raising kids. Some of them have to look after elderly parents. All at once. They have the least amount of economic stability. So yeah, carefree. Italian life ends at 35 apparently. [00:09:00]

Anna: That’s pretty sad.

Luca: Yeah, it is sad. What do we always end up podcasts on a sad note, right?

So to round it up with the answer to the question we had from the beginning.

What is the hardest to park your car? The answer was,

Anna: hmm.

Luca: The region of Genoa. Yeah, well it may not be immediately understandable, but actually Liguria is a small sliver of land, very hilly by the sea, narrow roads, old cities. So actually I can see how they may be the people that have the hardest time to find parking, but finding parking in any Italian city can be a challenge.

Anna: I think all over the world, it’s not just Italy.

Speaker 4: If people would like more information about the quality of life metrics and all the other metrics that we have about 1500 cities in Italy, they can go to magictowns.it and [00:10:00] use the town explorer or read some of the wonderful articles that Anna wrote about these topics and many others. Finally we have a little service announcement.

We are coming close to Black Friday like everyone else. And we actually cannot really offer any discounts because we’ve actually realized that we need to keep the lights on and therefore we can’t really afford to do that. But this is the last week during which if you sign up for an annual subscription, you are also going to get a one hour personal consultation, which I am told can be quite useful.

People have found them to be a good way to bounce ideas, get information, tax, legal location information about places to go to. So if you’d like to chat to us about your relocation, go to Magic Town [00:11:00] directly, get an annual subscription, and then you’ll be able to book one hour with us in addition to all the other wonderful perks you get as a subscriber.

Anna: Thank you guys. Thank you

Luca: everyone. Talk you next week.

Luca: Bye.