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For those who don’t follow Canadian news, Summerland, the town next to mine, is burning and its 12,000 residents were evacuated overnight.

Where I live, just 20 minutes south, we’ve had PM2.5 readings (fine-particle pollution) over 300 µg/m³ today. For reference, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends an annual mean PM2.5 of no more than 5 µg/m³.

My eyes are burning, my throat stings, and I have headaches. With two air purifiers running 24/7, the house still only manages to keep PM2.5 to a miserable 50 to 70 µg/m³.

This is a case of acute, absurdly high levels of PM2.5, in a place that has low levels when wildfires aren’t around.

Sporadic surges might not give you lung cancer, but they still greatly increase the chance of cardiovascular events, especially for cardiac patients like me.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in a hotel room by the ocean in Nanaimo, breathing fresh air for the first time in 5 days. Acute exposure can at least be escaped.

Italy has a few places where wildfires are a concern (inland Sardinia in particular), but the air quality problem takes a different shape. It’s chronic.

That’s the kind of air quality problem that shaves off years even if you’re healthy. Berkeley Earth equates roughly 22 µg/m³ of PM2.5 over a day to smoking a cigarette. In Milano, non-smokers essentially smoke a cigarette a day.

You can’t temporarily escape it if the baseline is constantly unhealthy.

Like the climate piece before it, this one is essentially a careful collection of region-by-region data. This time, I’ll show you the air quality of the regions’ capitals.

The table

92 Italian cities are on the EEA list. The map below immediately paints a clear picture.

What follows are specific details for the regional capitals, ranked cleanest to worst. Rank 1 of 761 is the best air in Europe (Finland and Sweden dominate the top positions).

Aosta is missing from the list because, at roughly 34,000 people, it is too small to be part of the EEA database, which targets cities of 50,000+ residents.

A few thoughts

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from this, but I’d like to point out a few of my thoughts about it.

Every regional capital in the table sits above the WHO health guideline of 5. The same is true of the other two pollutants: 10 µg/m³ for nitrogen dioxide and 60 µg/m³ for peak-season ozone. The cleanest capitals in Italy manage 11 and 79, respectively. All 19 fail all three targets.

The current EU limit for PM2.5, 25 µg/m³, five times the health guideline, is not breached by any Italian city on the list. That changes in December 2026, when the PM2.5 limit drops from 25 to 10, and the nitrogen dioxide one goes from 40 to 20.

13 of the 19 capitals don’t clear both bars. Only Cagliari, Catanzaro, Potenza, L’Aquila, Genova, and Trieste do.

Many journalists treat the EU limit as a health standard, but it was never one. But at least, in December, it becomes a serious one.

Nine out of 12 cities at the bottom of the list are Italian. Every one of them is in the north, specifically the Po basin.

In fact, Milano is the second-worst of all 761 cities in Europe tracked by EEA. The only city with worse air is Slavonski Brod in Croatia.

The highest ozone readings in Italy are Saronno at 114, Bergamo at 111, and Milano at 110, all in the north, all in Lombardia. The north-south gap is striking.

Cagliari, at 4 meters above sea level, ranks 125th. Potenza, at 819 meters, ranks 287th. So altitude is no guarantee either.

What really matters is whether a city sits inside a basin that traps air. Trento is on the floor of an Alpine valley and still manages to have bad air, placing 696th out of 761 (worse than Roma and even Bologna).

Mountain air is clean. The towns where most people live are in the valley at the bottom of it, which doesn’t help them.

Finally, treat these capoluoghi (region capitals) as a ceiling. They generally have the worst air in the area. Comuni (municipalities) nearby will go down from this ceiling the higher up you go in altitude, and the farther you go from the plain, the motorways, and industry.

The short version

If you are moving to Italy, you should consider air quality as a relatively important factor. The data votes for the south, the islands, and the coasts. It argues against the entire Po basin, and even the Alpine valley floors.

Even Sassari, at 6 µg/m³ (30th in Europe, with the cleanest air of any Italian city), is slightly above the WHO guideline.

No Italian city big enough to be on the list is under it.

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Only two things are certain in life: death and taxes. In Italy, the certainty of paying taxes gets replaced by the certainty of complaining.

You were sold the dream of la dolce vita (the sweet life) in Italy and the afternoon siesta, but every Italian you meet seems to be complaining about life.

What’s actually going on and how does this affect your potential move to Italy?

What Italians complain about

Let’s start by pinning down what Italians complain about.

Each Italian is different, but there are broad categories of complaints that apply to most.

Italians complain about taxes being too high. Objectively, they are. A few exceptions ease fiscal pressure for some, but overall, taxes are some of the highest in Europe.

This is in part because so many evade taxes. The taxi driver with a constantly “malfunctioning” card reader, the bar not issuing a scontrino (fiscal receipt), and the host offering to cancel your Expedia booking for a discount if you pay cash are all examples of furbi (cunning people) trying to dodge taxes.

This, in turn, becomes a vicious cycle in which tax rates must be high enough to offset the shortfall in revenue. You might think that going after tax evaders is the right strategy, but it’s often political suicide.

I’ll give you one example before we move on to other reasons for complaining. In Italy, people who own a TV (virtually every household) have to pay “il canone RAI,” a tax of 90 euros a year. Millions of Italians did not pay it, and enforcing it wasn’t easy.

So then Prime Minister Matteo Renzi rolled the canone into the electricity bill every Italian has to pay (10 installments of 9 euros each, per year). Suddenly, over 5.5 million Italian households started paying the canone. Also, suddenly 5.5 million households stopped voting for Renzi, and he went from being a popular moderate leftist politician to sitting on the sidelines. (There were other factors, but this didn’t make him any friends.)

On that note, and not unique to Italians, we do love to complain about politicians regardless of who is in charge. “È tutto un magna magna” (it’s all one big feeding frenzy) is a common expression to vent about politicians being greedy and only looking out for themselves.

Another common complaint, perhaps even more popular than taxes, is the lack of jobs and low wages for the jobs that do exist. Only 67.6% of working-age Italians have jobs, compared with 81.1% in Germany. Italy and Romania are the only two countries in the EU below 70%. A third of the working-age population isn’t even looking for work, the highest inactivity rate in Europe. The south is worse still: Calabria and Campania are the only regions in the entire EU where fewer than half of working-age people have a job.

And the average country-wide salary, bumped by the prosperous north, is about 1,700 euros a month, net. On average annual wages, Italy sits second to last in the G7, ahead of only Japan. Above all, it’s the only country in the EU to have had its wages go down over the past 30 years, instead of going up or at least keeping up with inflation.

Healthcare, and services in general, are another source of frustration. The truth, at least as far as healthcare goes, is that Italians are a bit spoiled and don’t fully realize how good they have it.

Virtually everybody has a GP without being on a years-long wait list as we do in Canada. In many places, doctors will come visit you at home. There is even a medical night service at home, and 24/7 access to at least one pharmacy in the area. Finally, the standard of care is genuinely high.

All of it is virtually “free,” even most medicines. The catch is slow access to specialists, but private access is fast (days or a couple of weeks) and relatively inexpensive. Still, if you do go the public route, you might have to wait for months for specialists.

Italians then complain about the heat. Rightfully so in summer, even though modern technology such as air conditioning exists to make everyone more comfortable. That comes at a cost, however, and we already discussed that finances are tight for most.

Finally, a major complaint by almost half the population is immigration. A significant percentage of the country sees immigrants as problematic and wants them gone, which puts Prime Minister Meloni in the awkward position of being Schrödinger’s fascist; some critics see her as a fascist while others see her as not fascist enough to enact ICE-style remigrations.

This is helping Futuro Nazionale, Roberto Vannacci’s very right-wing party, to advance quickly in the polls off the frustration of Italians who see immigrants, particularly North African ones, as a source of crime rather than a resource for the country. Founded six months ago, it is polling around 7% in the summer of 2026, fifth (soon fourth) nationally and ahead of Salvini’s Lega.

Italians’ complaints easily explain why their default stance when you tell them that you’re considering moving is “ma sei matto?” (Are you crazy?) Even though your circumstances would be wildly different than theirs and moving might be the best thing you’ll ever do.

Complaining is the national language

Here’s something you need to understand about Italians: complaining is the national language. The default mode. It’s akin to small talk. Canadians complain about the weather. Italians about their country.

The expression “piangersi addosso,” literally to cry on yourself, and the noun “la lamentela” (the complaint) are practically national genres.

Neapolitans have an even more colorful expression for the attitude many Italians have: “chiagni e fotti” (you cry and you f**k), meaning that things are actually going pretty well but you still complain about it.

Because the grievances above, for the most part, are legitimate. But life for many Italians is still very good.

What Italians do besides complaining

Italians complain, but do they do anything about their condition? Many do not, in part because they drown in learned helplessness. They don’t think that things are going to get better, regardless of what they do. Walk into the self-help section of an Italian bookstore, and most of what you’ll find is translated from English.

Others do something, but it takes the shape of what I did 23 years ago: they leave the country to seek better opportunities. Italy is in fact bleeding young, highly educated people. Between 2011 and 2024, roughly 630,000 Italians aged 18 to 34 moved abroad. Counting all ages, 156,000 citizens left in 2024 alone, a record (though part of that spike is people abroad finally registering after new penalties kicked in).

Make no mistake, the people who complain the loudest are the ones more likely to stay. Their complaining is the valvola di sfogo (release valve) to vent their frustration so that the moka pot that is their nervous system doesn’t blow up.

It’s like dogs: you don’t have to worry about the yapping Chihuahua. You have to worry about the silent Cane Corso.

So are Italians miserable?

Back in 2008, Pew ran a piece under the title “Italy’s Malaise: La Vita Non É Cosí Dolce.” (By the way, they got both accents wrong.) Only about one Italian in ten believed the next generation would have a better life than the current one, the lowest percentage among the Western countries surveyed.

Plenty of Europeans are gloomy about money. When Il Sole 24 Ore commissioned a survey of young adults across Europe, Italians shared the same economic anxieties as the French, Germans, Spanish, and British but stood out for being the only ones to conclude that there’s no way out. Others see a tough situation. Young Italians see a hopeless one.

The World Happiness Report asks people: “Where does your life stand today, zero to ten?” Italians answer 6.57. That’s well above the global average, and 38th out of 147 countries. It’s the self-report of a country that is, day to day, doing pretty well.

Take this at face value, and Italians are not miserable. They didn’t say 4.

But that question only asks how life feels right now. It never asks the question Italians would respond to most harshly: whether there is a future in Italy.

So here is the interesting paradox: Italians complain a lot and are not hopeful about the future. Yet, they are not miserable.

My theory is that, as much as they take Italy for granted, they do realize that Italy still offers a life worth living. They eat well, they live long, the afternoon still slows down the way the tourist guides suggest. It’s not full-on dolce vita, that’s a myth, but it’s not so bad either.

So a bit defeatist? Yes. Doth the lady protest too much? Absolutely. Miserable? Not really.

What this means if you’re moving to Italy

The decision that will shape your Italian life the most is not which region, though that’s important. It’s whether your income depends on the Italian economy or is insulated from it.

Live off a remote salary, a foreign pension, or savings, and the stagnant wages and lack of hope are, put bluntly, not your problem. You get the amazing food, the light, the cheaper cost of living, the slower afternoon, and the passeggiata: pretty much the postcard Italy you were promised.

In fact, the engine of the lamentela in Italy is stagnant wages. Remove that variable, as an expat, and your own assessment will be much higher than the already respectable 6.57.

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Many of my readers dream of retiring in Italy. In fact, some already have.

In my region-by-region series on where to move, the topic of the 7% flat tax for retirees comes up often.

So let’s take the bull by the horns and address how it works, the areas where it applies, and what it means in practice.

The 7% tax regime in Italy is amazing

The short, if imprecise, definition is that the 7% tax regime is an extremely generous fiscal program for foreign people retiring in Italy. If you qualify, you’ll genuinely pay very little tax.

The point of the program is to attract foreign retirees and their money to small comuni (municipalities) in the south and selected towns affected by recent earthquakes in the center of Italy.

In other words, Italy wants to revive areas that are somewhat underdeveloped and would otherwise bleed people, and do so with an influx of money from the outside. It’s an odd choice to aim for retirees rather than young workers, but hey, we are not here to judge. We are here to maximize our resources.

It hasn’t been marketed properly outside of Italy, so the success of the program has been modest at best. A report shows that in 2025, covering the 2024 tax year, only 933 people took advantage of the program.

If you’re curious, Abruzzo has consistently led the program, followed by Puglia and Sicilia. The last breakdown from the ministry was published in 2021, but it shows that Ceglie Messapica in Puglia and Penne in Abruzzo were popular hits (with 7 retirees each, in that year).

The program has mostly attracted British and German pensioners, with the Americans being in a distant third position.

Make no mistake, though: this is an incredible deal in areas where the cost of living is low in the first place. You can legitimately stretch your retirement dollars without the North American (or Oceanic) worries of a skyrocketing cost of living. And doing so in beautiful places, while enjoying nice (if hot) weather and fantastic food.

If it still exists by the time I retire twenty years from now, I’m 100% going for it myself.

Before you get too excited, however, let’s get very specific about everything so that you get the full picture of how the tax regime actually works.

Who qualifies for the 7% tax regime

To qualify for the 7% tax regime, you need to:

• Receive a pension from your home country

• Not have lived in Italy in the past 5 years

Regarding the pension, you don’t have to be 65. Article 24-ter of the Italian tax code, regulating this program, doesn’t say anything about your age. But it does care that you are receiving a legitimate retirement pension from your country.

For example, if you are Canadian and you saved a bunch of money in an RRSP retirement account that allows you to withdraw funds at will, you’re not a retiree as far as Italy is concerned.

If you’re drawing CPP, or an employer pension that pays on a schedule somebody else controls, you qualify. The test is not public vs private; it comes down to whether you or somebody else controls when the money is withdrawn.

Qualifying for the 7% tax regime also doesn’t automatically give you Italian citizenship or even a permesso di soggiorno (a permit to stay in Italy). The visa is a separate application with its own process.

Thankfully, if you’re planning to retire in Italy off your pension, the elective residency visa requirements are not too onerous. Still, plan for 31-35K euro worth of yearly income to meet the financial expectations imposed somewhat arbitrarily by your local consulate.

What the 7% tax regime covers

If you qualify, Italy will tax your pension and other categories of foreign income at 7% for the first 10 years of your residence in Italy.

So the 7% tax regime covers:

• Your foreign pension

• Withdrawals from your foreign retirement accounts (from Italy)

• Your foreign rental income

• Your foreign dividends, interest and capital gains

Again, the foreign pension is the must-have to qualify. Once you have that, everything else is cargo.

You’re also exempt from IVIE and IVAFE, which are Italy’s wealth taxes on foreign properties and financial assets, and won’t have to file a quadro RW to declare said foreign assets.

After 10 years, these revert to ordinary Italian taxation. Think something like 32% on a 60,000 euro pension and 36% on an 80,000 one, less on smaller pensions.

Ten years at 7% is still strikingly generous.

What does it not cover? Anything produced in Italy. If you buy investment properties in Italy and rent them out, that’s allowed, but the rent is Italian-source and taxed at ordinary Italian rates, either 21% under cedolare secca or your full IRPEF bracket. Much higher than 7% either way.

Where the 7% tax regime applies

The following towns are eligible for the program:

1. Towns with no more than 30,000 people in the following 8 regions: Abruzzo, Molise, Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Calabria, Sicilia, and Sardegna.

2. Towns with no more than 30,000 people affected by the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, defined by Commissario delegato decree n. 3 of 16 April 2009 (49 comuni) and extended by decree n. 11 of 17 July 2009 (8 more). Since these are all in Abruzzo, I won’t include the list, since it’s redundant and already covered by the previous point.

3. Towns with no more than 30,000 people listed in annexes 1, 2 and 2-bis, which were affected by the 2016 earthquakes that devastated central Italy. The regions with comuni on these lists are Lazio, Umbria, Marche, and Abruzzo. Again, this doesn’t help anything in Abruzzo since the whole region is already eligible for the program (provided the town is at or below 30,000 residents).

So the non-south additions provided by the annexes are the following:

Lazio (14 eligible)

Accumoli (Rieti, 493), Amatrice (Rieti, 2,146), Antrodoco (Rieti, 2,238), Borbona (Rieti, 573), Borgo Velino (Rieti, 901), Cantalice (Rieti, 2,386), Castel Sant’Angelo (Rieti, 1,156), Cittaducale (Rieti, 6,400), Cittareale (Rieti, 374), Leonessa (Rieti, 2,019), Micigliano (Rieti, 119), Poggio Bustone (Rieti, 1,957), Posta (Rieti, 518), Rivodutri (Rieti, 1,121).

Too big: Rieti (44,866).

Umbria (14 eligible)

Arrone (Terni, 2,504), Cascia (Perugia, 2,930), Cerreto di Spoleto (Perugia, 961), Ferentillo (Terni, 1,767), Montefranco (Terni, 1,243), Monteleone di Spoleto (Perugia, 535), Norcia (Perugia, 4,399), Poggiodomo (Perugia, 81), Polino (Terni, 233), Preci (Perugia, 678), Sant’Anatolia di Narco (Perugia, 490), Scheggino (Perugia, 422), Sellano (Perugia, 918), Vallo di Nera (Perugia, 317).

Too big: Spoleto (Perugia, 35,875).

Marche (83 eligible)

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Every year on the second of November, people in Italy head to the cemetery to pay their homage to the dead.

My father used to take me to visit my nonno. November 2nd is a memento mori for the whole country, but it was especially true for me. ANTONIO CANGIANO was staring right at me on a tombstone. (I was named after my grandpa, as it’s tradition in Italy.)

The large Roman cemetery where he was buried was surrounded by endless cypress trees. Further, fellow Romans around me would often use the expression, “andare agli alberi pizzuti,” referring to the cypresses as a euphemism for dying.

So I came to associate that particular tree with death very early in life.

Around six or so, I saw a picture of Val d’Orcia in Tuscany and asked my dad why it had so many cypress trees around regular houses, not cemeteries.

My dad never completed third grade but was a man of great culture. He opened a successful bookstore in Ostia and would essentially read nonstop. So the answer I got was, in hindsight, detailed and historically accurate.

In this article, I’ll tell you the short, grown-up version.

Cypresses as markers

When you see those tidy rows climbing a ridge, all the way to a house, those trees act as fences.

As you drive up to the area, it’s all picturesque, and you might mistakenly assume they are there for decoration. Narrow, tall, and easy to grow, cypresses were more of a marker of territory, as they could easily be seen from two hills away. A tool that has kept neighboring farmers on friendly terms for centuries.

Two of them a few feet apart? Good chance that’s a gate. A double file running up a road, that’s the driveway to a property somebody owns. If you interpret the land this way, you’ll quickly see that they are not placed randomly. They are a surveying instrument with the added benefit of breaking the wind along the edges of grain fields.

The tree, by the way, is not native to the area, but Cupressus sempervirens has likely been growing in Tuscany since Etruscan times, seven centuries before Jesus was born. Today they feel intrinsically Tuscan, but they actually came by boat from Greece and Phoenicia.

The death came before the cemeteries

The Greeks and the Romans called the cypress the mourning tree long before modern cemeteries existed.

Ovid gave the association its most famous telling in the Metamorphoses, where Cyparissus felt grief for killing a tame stag, and turned into the tree. Roman funerals used the branches and made wreaths for Pluto.

Symbolically, it made sense that an evergreen tree was a stand-in for a soul that never ends.

What really made it the widespread cemetery marker that it is today is Napoleon’s Edict of Saint-Cloud, dated June 12, 1804, which made it illegal to bury bodies in churches or within city walls.

Two years later, the edict reached the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and all of a sudden, thousands of towns needed a walled area past the last houses.

The cypress was the obvious answer because the tree didn’t require much land, was cheap, fast to grow, narrow, and evergreen. Plus, it was already the standard boundary tree, and it already carried funerary meaning.

Plots of land were surrounded by cypresses and designated as cemeteries. Easily visible from two hills away.

Two more things

Two plot twists that make the cypress in Italy story even more interesting.

In 2011, the comune (municipality) of San Quirico d’Orcia added a regulation over commercial use of images of its territory. In practice, tourists and journalists were exempted, but advertisers and people using the images for commercial purposes became the target.

The effort by Roberto Rappuoli, the mayor at the time, was to stop people from appropriating imagery of the valley for products and campaigns with no connection to it.

Then in 2013, he had to send a cease-and-desist to McDonald’s over the Gran Chianina burger campaign. It used the famous cypresses and a hilltop farmhouse as a backdrop. McDonald’s replied that it had meant the campaign as a tribute to the region, and offered to promote San Quirico d’Orcia to its 720K Facebook followers. The controversy faded from there.

Seiridium cardinale, a canker fungus from California, was first identified in Florence in 1951 and spread through most of Italy within two decades. By the 1970s, researchers at the CNR in Florence had started breeding resistant clones. The first ones were patented in 1990.

So the oldest symbol of immortality in the Mediterranean now comes with a patent number.

My father gave me the Sienese investors, the trees as markers, and Ovid. He never mentioned the fungus, or that some of those trees would be replaced by patented copies.

He couldn’t have. The lab in Florence was still working on it.

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Sardinia has 377 comuni (municipalities), spread across 24,090 square kilometers. Run a strict livability filter, and you’re left with five.

Not fifty. Not fifteen. Five.

This is part of my series evaluating Italian towns for relocation using objective filters. So far we’ve covered Marche, Tuscany, Veneto, Campania, Abruzzo, Piedmont, and Umbria. Today: Sardinia. The filters were brutal here.

The framework adopts simple filters. Boring questions, really. Is the town big enough to have basic services like a pharmacy, a high school, and a full ER within 25 minutes? Are people slowly but surely leaving, as if they know something we don’t?

We also ask a safety question. Is seismic activity a concern?

Good news and bad news. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about earthquakes in Sardinia. The bad news is that the boring filters alone are enough to make most of the map go dark.

Demographically, Sardinia is kinda dying

Sardinia’s population is in a tough spot. It has the lowest fertility rate in Italy, the average age approaches 50, and nearly all provinces have residents leaving.

Sardinia has roughly three million sheep and 1.56 million people. About twice as many sheep, a ratio that should worry all but the most pecorino-obsessed readers.

Speaking of age, Sardinia does indeed have a reputation as a Blue Zone. The Ogliastra highlands genuinely produce an extraordinary number of centenarians. But longevity is not replacement via newborns, and sooner or later, inevitably, older people die.

Our filtering framework is apathetic about longevity, but does care about how alive a place is now and how likely it is to remain fifteen years from now. When a town loses a tenth of its people over ten years, services soon follow.

Work

Many Sardinian people will resist the label “south” applied to their region. However, when it comes to work, Sardinia is very much a region of the south.

The employment rate is around 57% versus the national average of 63%. Perhaps even more problematic for a would-be expat hoping for a local job, the work is mostly centered around tourism (so seasonal) and the public sector. The private industry that is not tourism-related is genuinely thin.

In other words, don’t plan to find local work. If you arrive with your own income or remote job, however, Sardinia is likely as close as it gets to the digital nomad fantasy of working on a beach from your laptop.

Language

In downtown Cagliari and along the tourist coast, English might be enough in a pinch, but you’ll need Italian to live here.

The locals also speak several varieties of Sardinian, which is a separate Romance language recognized by Italian law, rather than a simple dialect. Around Olbia and Sassari, though, the local speech is Gallurese and Sassarese, which are Corsican-derived rather than Sardinian. Italians, including myself, will not understand much of it unless they are from these parts.

In Alghero, the local language (i.e., Alguerès) is a dialect of Catalan, not Italian, so much so that a Catalan speaker can converse with a local with just a few adjustments.

Of course, Sardinians understand that you’re a foreign speaker, and will use Italian with you. It’s also worth noting that dialects are slowly disappearing among the younger generations. To put it in videogame terms, the ultimate language boss in Sardinia is a 100-year-old lady from the aforementioned Blue Zone.

The provinces are a mess

The provinces of Sardinia that I studied in school no longer exist. It’s almost a joke at this point, but Sardinia keeps changing them. The comune of Genoni changed province four times.

So here is the short version of it: Cagliari and Sassari are two città metropolitane (metropolitan cities). There are 15 in the whole country.

The rest of the region, at the time of writing, includes the provinces of: Gallura Nord-Est, Nuoro, Oristano, Ogliastra, Medio Campidano, and Sulcis Iglesiente.

Below you’ll find a table with only five provinces whose quality of life is measured and ranked by Il Sole 24 Ore and ItaliaOggi for 2025. Five, not eight, because when they measured, those were the provinces in Sardinia.

The one ranking that sticks out

Regardless of the messy subdivision of the territories, it is clear that Cagliari comes out ahead of the rest of the island.

As you can see from the table, in Il Sole 24 Ore’s 2025 quality-of-life index, Cagliari came 39th nationally, the best result in the south. In ItaliaOggi’s ranking, its health system is 8th in Italy. For a place in the south, this is an outstanding result.

Statistically, Cagliari and the rest of Sardinia are practically two different countries.

Crime

Some good news: Sardinia doesn’t have an organized crime problem like the rest of the south.

It doesn’t have much petty crime either. For example, Oristano is the safest province in Italy on Il Sole 24 Ore’s rankings.

The one exception is the Barbagia interior. Nuoro leads Italy for homicides per capita. Before you get too scared, this is a historical pattern that wouldn’t affect an incoming resident.

Crime exists, but it is genuinely not a main concern when choosing to relocate to Sardinia.

Weather

Sardinia is often seen as paradise by Italians. It has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, and the weather is stereotypically warm year-round. It’s where rich people from Milan go on vacation, and billionaires go to party. A true jewel of the Mediterranean.

In reality, things are a little more nuanced than that. Yes, the coast, particularly the south, has a Mediterranean climate. It’s hot and relatively dry in summer, and never really gets cold in winter. However, move north or to the interior, and winters can get cold and wet, particularly at altitude.

The Maestrale wind, blowing from the north-west, brings a cold breeze that can last for days, with Alghero and Oristano being particularly affected by it.

I might look silly pointing out the “cold” in Sardinia, typing this from Canada, where real cold was practically invented. However, Sardinia is an island and the weather report matters. The August paradise can quickly turn into isolation in February due to ferry cancellations.

What actually gets you here is fire and water

All 377 Sardinian comuni sit in seismic Zone 4, the lowest hazard tier. Crime is not a concern, and neither are earthquakes.

What you need to worry about in this part of Italy is fire and water. In July 2021, the Montiferru fires burned roughly 20,000 hectares in Oristano province, forcing massive evacuations.

In November 2013, Cyclone Cleopatra dumped a season’s worth of rain in a few hours and killed 18 people, mostly around Olbia and Arzachena.

When buying here, trust the past as a predictor of the future, and see if the property you’re considering was anywhere near wildfires or floods.

Running the filter on Sardinia

In Sardinia, our population filter does most of the cutting. With a band of 15K to 100K residents, we go from 377 comuni to 14. From the excluded list, Cagliari and Sassari are the ones that are too big. The rest of the municipalities are all too small.

Seismic risk removes none of them. Services, almost none. The two exceptions are Sestu and Sinnai, both without a high school of their own. Down to 12.

Population stability is where things get serious: we go from 12 to just five. Nuoro (down 11.4%), Carbonia (11.7%), Iglesias (9.8%), and so on. Oristano is the narrowest miss of the series so far. Down 5.08% against our 5% threshold. It missed the mark by so little that I won’t blame you for considering it.

Five towns remain, clustered in two parts of the island. The Cagliari area and two northern coastal cities. The interior gets entirely filtered out.

The five that pass

1. Olbia

Olbia is a bit of an exception on the island. It’s the only city on this list that is actually growing aggressively, and it’s the demographically youngest in the whole region.

Its economy is powered by the port, the airport, and the money that trickles down from the nearby Costa Smeralda (the billionaires’ playground).

Olbia is also interesting for history buffs. It sits on top of a Roman fleet, dating to around 450 AD, that was discovered by a crew cutting a road tunnel by the seafront. The Museo Archeologico di Olbia holds the wrecks and is shaped like a moored ship.

Sounds lovely and it is. It’s also expensive. Gallura’s coast market is hot. In the summer, you’ll also have a constant stream of ferries and cruise ships dumping literal boatloads of tourists in the same streets you use to grab bread. Then October arrives, and the town breathes again.

Olbia is also where Cyclone Cleopatra did its worst damage in 2013. Make sure you check the flood history of the particular property you are considering.

Provided you have the budget, Olbia is a beautiful town with ancient history, a bustling port, great access to the rest of Italy, white sandy beaches nearby, actual jobs, and a pulse most of the year. Something quite rare on the island, which easily explains that +5.04% population growth over the past decade.

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Facebook groups about migration to and from Italy offer a mezzanine view of cultural differences between countries.

I’m a silent observer, watching people with different faces and different names tell the same stories, which feel like restless ghosts. Familiar ones, as I’ve been through their experiences myself.

A common story is the sociable Italian colliding with Canadian politeness.

You just arrived and start seeing strange social dynamics. Your mastery of the language, or lack thereof, takes the blame for a while, but years pass and that excuse fades. People are courteous, but courtesy does not build friendships.

It’s a bit like the hollow “how are you doing?” It doesn’t mean “come stai?” It means “hello.” The person asking might care about you, but the social script doesn’t know what to do with a real answer.

Extend that idea to other aspects of your social life, and Italians abroad are often caught off guard.

Last night, an Italian couple who moved to Canada complained about it in one of those Facebook groups. They couldn’t understand why people suggested getting together for dinner or grabbing coffee and then never did, or even cancelled on the day of. Multiple people in different social circles. Enough to form a visible pattern for them. The comments largely validated that experience.

To be fair to Canadians, the cancellations are not indifference. Distance is real, winter is real, and most people here build their lives around work in a way that leaves the weekend as the only unclaimed time of the week.

However, much like “how are you doing?”, “we should grab coffee” is not a social contract. It’s an “I like you,” and if you pry deep enough, it’s an “I like you, but Saturdays are essentially the only free time I have in my week, and I must protect my schedule at all costs.”

It’s not a promise, even if a date and time are set, so most locals shrug when things don’t happen, because everyone raised here reads that social grammar correctly.

The most memorable episode related to this happened a while back.

For context, my fiancée Alicia is so used to fellow Canadians cancelling plans that special preparations, if we are hosting, are left for the last minute, because the risk of cancellation feels remarkably high. The two of us have been left with lasagna and tiramisù for six people after hours of preparation, more than once. (Hey, I’m not complaining; my cardiologist is.)

The downside of this approach becomes evident when people actually follow through. It turns into a stressful scramble. But it is a habit we developed because, in our experience, plans here often remain possibilities rather than commitments.

Back to the story, I met a local Italian and invited him and his family over for dinner.

Alicia approached this like we always do, ready for the last-minute cramming in the remote chance they showed up. I told her, “Baby, Italians actually show up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust me, they might be late, but they’ll show up.”

And sure enough, they did show up, and on time. (In fairness, the guy is from the north-east of Italy. If he were from Naples like my relatives, dinner might have been at 9:30 pm.)

Yes, I had to explain to Alicia that Italians actually show up at get-togethers because the experience is not the norm locally.

As I was working on this very article, I received two messages relevant to the conversation.

The first was a Canadian friend cancelling our plans for coffee on Saturday morning. I genuinely laughed.

Thirty minutes later, a second message arrived from someone else confirming dinner for 6:30 pm, also on Saturday. The lovely couple who sent that message are Polish and Venezuelan. I’m highly confident the dinner will happen.

After decades abroad, I’ve noticed that many of the people who became my closest friends were not necessarily from the country where I was living. They were often people who, like me, came from somewhere else and brought different assumptions about what friendship requires.

My theory is that, regardless of nationality, immigrants don’t have the built-in social network the locals assembled in their formative years. So they largely embrace the idea that relationships require showing up and are willing to make the extra effort with new prospective friends.

Still, showing up is the default assumption in Italy. In my experience, Poland and Venezuela fall in the same bucket of countries where a social invitation binds you. Canada sits outside of it.

For people thinking about moving to Italy, this is easy to underestimate. Bureaucracy and wages are the headliners, but nobody warns you about how much of your calendar belongs to other people in a society like that.

If dinner is a promise, then your presence is a promise too. Your cancellation requires a legitimate reason. Feeling a bit tired won’t cut it; you’ll burn your social reputation quickly.

The other side of the coin in a society that values personal interactions is intrusion into your life and your time. For some, it’s social bliss; for others, it’s Kramer barging into Jerry’s apartment unannounced. It’s a trade-off (a fair one, even), but you should be aware of it before you move.

I know expats who relocated to Italy expecting to make lots of friends, then declined invitations or cancelled the ones they accepted, a little too often. Until invitations simply stopped coming.

In Italy, dinner is not just something that happens before an event. Dinner is the event. A three-hour meal with friends is not considered a waste of time. Conversation at the table is one of life’s great pleasures. So it is savored, and nobody asks for il conto (the bill) just because the plates have been cleared.

A friend who watched Perfetti sconosciuti told me he liked it, but felt it wasn’t realistic. “Who sits around the table for a whole two hours?” I told him, in Italy, that’s the most realistic part of the movie.

I don’t think one culture is just better than another. It’s a matter of what each society prioritizes and whether that priority jibes with what you want in life.

I grew up in Italy. To me, “come over for dinner” will always mean showing up and sitting at that table until nobody has anything left to say.

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“Pace” (pronounced pah-chay) is the ever-so-simple Italian word for one of the hardest things to get: peace. Many non-Italians find the flag depicted above intriguing, as it is not very well known outside of Italy, despite its international intentions and being in existence since 1961.

Firstly, one clarification. The colours vary slightly from the better-known rainbow pride flag by featuring seven colours, rather than six, and colours that often slightly differ in terms of shade. The colours are (from top to bottom) purple, blue, azure, green, yellow, orange, and red.

“With nonviolence, we recognize the right of everyone to exist; with non-mendacity, the right of everyone to truth.”
— Aldo Capitini (Poet, Activist, Philosopher, and Educator)

On December 23rd 1899, in Perugia, Aldo Capitini was born into a modest family, the son of the custodian of the town hall’s bell tower and a seamstress. Money was tight, and he was steered into practical accounting studies rather than the literature he loved. So he taught himself. As a young man he took up Latin and Greek as an autodidact, reportedly studying up to twelve hours a day, and the strain left him physically exhausted and frail. It was in those years, by his own account, that he first felt the fragility of a human life caught between birth and death. This physical struggle, and the solitude of a self-made scholar, led him to become a deep thinker.

Capitini was intrigued by philosophy, literature, and religion from a very early age in an attempt to find answers. Those proficient in war history may have noted the era of his birth as one which experienced the seemingly endless horrors of World War I. Capitini, despite being the perfect age for the draft, was not enlisted due to his poor health. However, that did not mean he was immune from the tragedies of the war. No one was, even if they were ill and on the sidelines. One notable quote that captures this:

“Forgetting the deeper unity beyond the war? I remain here, isolated from everybody, working for deeper togetherness.”

The neighbors who did not come home, the stories of friends and families meeting a horrible end, and the economic hardships were apparent to all who were living. There is little doubt that this left a profound impression on the young Capitini. The war was the catalyst that led him to pursue deeper meaning through philosophy, and eventually motivated him to find ways to share his vast knowledge for the hope of a better and more peaceful world. With the war ending, he worked toward a master’s degree in philosophy, and like many young people, worked on finding his identity both politically and socially.

In the late 1920s, Capitini found himself captivated by the teachings of Gandhi. These readings and the political changes surrounding him led to a great change in his philosophy and lifestyle. In an effort to become even more pacifistic, he became vegetarian. In a country that loves its traditional meats, in an era where conformity was praised, that was an incredibly radical and rare form of activism in itself. He had found deep comfort in faith, but soon that faith was shaken, and personal change followed.

Life in the shadow of fascism

A charismatic dictator named Mussolini arrived on the political scene, quite uninvited, bringing violence with his army of Blackshirts and the deaths of many who opposed him. After gaining power, and under much pressure, Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty in 1929. It resolved a rift that had lasted since 1870: the Vatican secured recognition as a distinct sovereign nation and was compensated for the Papal States that Italy had absorbed decades earlier. The irreligious Mussolini now had everything in place to keep Catholicism from interfering with his larger goals. To Capitini, this was a betrayal, and he saw the church as complicit in the rise of fascist power.

By 1930, he secured employment at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa as its secretary. He found himself surrounded by like-minded, or sympathetic, students who also shared a desire for political change and pacifism. Soon, he made two bold moves that would cost him his employment. Capitini became a conscientious objector, and also declined an invitation to join the Fascist Party that was extended to him by the director of the school. This was the end of his formal employment, but in a sense provided him with greater freedom.

He returned home to Perugia and began to teach private lessons. He was no longer under the thumb of an institution and could continue his research, writing, and activism more readily until the end of the war. Amazingly, he even managed to publish three books during the fascist era that passed censorship and were widely praised.

Post WW2 activism

While settling into the life of a citizen in the new Italian Republic, Capitini formed the Centro di Orientamento Sociale (Centre for Social Orientation). Despite its initial success and spread across Italy, this movement soon faded into history due to opposition from the Christian Democratic Party and lack of political support in general. He had hoped left-leaning political groups would take interest, but he was left disappointed.

Soon he found himself touring Europe as a public speaker, meeting with like-minded people at conferences in Rome, London, and beyond. He spoke of non-violence and vegetarianism, and enjoyed discussions around the teachings of his mentor Gandhi. The fame that followed him soon landed him in Sardinia as a professor at the University of Cagliari, and eventually things went full circle and he was approved for a transfer to the University of Perugia.

The 60s were the perfect era for Capitini, as you can well imagine. He now found himself in an era where the public desire for peace was greater, questions were being asked of superiors, and the public felt safer to demonstrate. He now had a captive youthful audience and realized this was the time for on-the-ground activism.

Upon reflection, he realized every movement needs a symbol to unite under, and to convey a clear message. The fascists had a bundle of wooden rods with an axe, the communists had their hammer and sickle, and yet he was without one to represent the contrary. He soon found himself looking to other movements for one to adopt, or even modify.

The flag is raised

In 1912, a U.S. Methodist pastor named James Van Kirk created a “World Peace Flag.” It featured a blue background with yellow stars, and in the foreground the Earth with a rectangle of rainbows beside it connected by lines. He felt this idea came to him from God himself. Van Kirk wanted to express the many colours of the human family in the rainbow (with a nod to the biblical rainbow after the Great Flood), represent international cooperation through the connected lines, and add stars to represent nations. This flag was used in various forms at demonstrations and became the inspiration for Capitini and others.

Despite Capitini’s aversion to organized religion, many close to him speculated that he was inspired by seeing this flag from the campaign for nuclear disarmament in England. The rainbow was seen as a symbol of peace and hope after the great storm that was WW2.

Capitini urged the 12-year-old daughter of his friends on the committee, Francesca Siciliani, to gather fabric. With the help of two older girls, they sewed the first flag. The colours differ from those of today, perhaps due to a sense of urgency, fading over time, and limited materials. But the moment of its creation was symbolic in itself: a group of people collaborating, using what they had, and creating something in the name of nonviolence for the world. Something bright and uplifting contrasted with the starkness of black, brown, and red used in violent movements.

The flag debuted in Perugia in 1961 at the 24 Km “March for Peace and the Brotherhood of Peoples” with the intent of encouraging people to ease international tensions. Along the way, Capitini saw, much to his frustration, many marchers holding the blood-red flag of communist movements that had swept much of Italy after the fall of Mussolini. According to Francesca, he was frustrated as he felt “peace in the world should not take political sides.” After the march ended in Assisi, Capitini gave the flag to Francesca.

One may wonder: what became of the flag over the years? This would not be an Italian article without the usual dose of controversy. There are two rival claims to the original. The Imago Mundi Foundation, in Treviso, has exhibited what it calls the only surviving example of the flags made for the 1961 march, the one it says Capitini gave to Francesca. But a second flag, kept in Perugia, makes the same claim; it came down through Lanfranco Mencaroni, a friend and collaborator of Capitini, who handed it to the city in 2011. Both carry their own stories of previous owners and of how they arrived where they are.

Pace da tutti i balconi

After the death of Capitini in 1968 (a mere seven years after the famous 1961 march), the flag lived on and carried out its purpose. It even received a makeover. Somewhere along the way, it began to appear with the white lettering of PACE. It is unknown when exactly this started, but these versions began to appear in the 1990s. Some say it was added to differentiate itself from the Pride flag, but this is not confirmed.

In 2002, the pace flag received its biggest moment, one that made it visible again to younger generations and cemented it into Italian history.

As the Iraq war loomed, with the war in Afghanistan already underway, a campaign called “Pace da tutti i balconi” was launched. It translated as “peace from every balcony,” and asked everyone to hang the flag from their balconies as a call for peace.

Many say the founder of this movement was the missionary Father Alex Zanotelli, but it has been clarified that he was the face of a larger collective movement organized by the Catholic movement “Pax Christi.”

It was a success. Italians who felt weary of war, even if it was beyond their shores, felt the same frustration and helplessness that was at the core of Capitini’s early experience. In a moment of unity, they began to hang the flags from every balcony, and soon every piazza was cloaked in a patchwork of peaceful solidarity for all to see. This moment solidified the flag’s place at future protests and events, and as an everyday reminder that peace starts with us.

In closing, a boy from a poor house beneath the town hall’s bell tower taught himself in near-monastic solitude, then rose from his desk and stepped outside. He started to walk. His walk became a purposeful march, others joined him in this journey, and he marked his place in history with a flag for everyone.

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Umbria is a region in central Italy. It sits between Tuscany and Marche, sharing some of the landscape and cultural characteristics of both.

The pitch is this: it’s cheaper than Tuscany by a wide margin, and you get fewer crowds. If you love great food and wine, nature, and medieval towns, you can’t go wrong with Umbria. It’s called the green heart of Italy and, for the most part, it’s a slice of peace.

The price to pay is the lack of coastline (beautiful Lake Trasimeno notwithstanding), shaky ground, and young people leaving.

This is part of my series evaluating Italian towns for relocation by applying objective filters. So far we’ve covered Marche, Tuscany, Veneto, Campania, Abruzzo, and Piedmont. Today, we’re covering Umbria.

When I delved into Piedmont, we started with 1180 comuni (municipalities) and reached 40 candidates by applying our usual criteria. We actually deployed an extra filter to get to a more manageable shortlist of 20 towns.

Umbria has the opposite problem. We are starting with only 92 comuni, so instead of adding filters, we’ll relax one and end up with five livable candidates.

Assisi makes the cut. Some of the other famous names like Spoleto, Orvieto, and Gubbio do not. In Umbria, three filters do virtually all of the work: population, seismic risk, and depopulation.

What Umbria is actually like to live in

Umbria has roughly 850,000 people spread across just two provinces: Perugia, the capital of the region, and Terni.

Perugia is a proper full-sized city that stays vibrant thanks to its two universities. It’s big on art, history, and chocolate. Terni is a strange one. It combines an industrial steel legacy with a romantic side (St. Valentine was born here) and Roman roots (the Cascate delle Marmore, built by the Romans, are the tallest manmade waterfalls in Europe).

Il Sole 24 Ore’s 2025 quality-of-life index placed Perugia 37th out of 107 provinces and Terni 48th. ItaliaOggi, using a different method, put Perugia 40th and Terni 45th. Both indices agree: they sit comfortably in the middle of the table, which is fitting for a region in the center of the country.

If we dig further, more useful details emerge. Perugia does well on climate, demography, health, and education. It fails on theft and workplace safety. Terni is cheap, fourth in Italy for rental costs, but people are leaving, and it’s almost dead last for climate (literally 106th out of 107). Its frequent extreme heatwaves make it unbearable in summer. (As I write this, the temperature there is 37ºC / 99ºF at 5 PM.)

The region is also split from a seismic risk perspective. 18 comuni sit in Zone 1, the riskiest tier (most along the eastern edge). Notable examples include Foligno, Spoleto, Trevi, and Campello. All of these are excluded as candidates.

Local jobs outside of the two provincial capitals are few and carry modest wages. You move to Umbria for the slow life, ideally with your own source of income, not for a career.

The one genuine upside is that Umbria became the third Italian region to finish the government rural-fiber project, reaching 77 small comuni. So remote work from Umbria is a viable option without having to get Starlink.

English-wise, Italy is last in the EU, and Umbria is mid-pack at best in Italy. You can expect some English while shopping in Perugia or visiting Assisi, but plan to speak Italian for everything else (Linguetto can help).

Being a region of the center, Umbria doesn’t qualify for the southern 7% retiree tax regime. The few comuni that would are those included in the crateri list. In other words, it’s an incentive to get you to live in areas massively affected by the 2016 earthquakes. We exclude such towns by design in our framework, so no town on our shortlist qualifies for the 7% program.

Where to live in Umbria: running the filter

As a recap, our filters are: a town of 15,000 to 100,000 residents, no seismic Zone 1, a full emergency room within a 25-minute drive, a high school inside the comune, supermarkets and fiber, and a population that hasn’t declined 5% or more in a decade (ISTAT counts, 2014 to 2024).

For Umbria, this aggressive filtering leaves us with a very small shortlist, so I relaxed the population floor from 15,000 to 10,000 and checked that the resulting additional list still had all the services you’d need. One of them did.

Starting with 92 comuni, we lose 75 to size: Perugia (162k residents) and Terni (106k residents) are too big, and 73 are below 10,000 people.

Foligno and Spoleto are the right size but excluded, as mentioned above, on account of their Zone 1 seismic classification. Corciano and San Giustino have no high school of their own and are out.

Depopulation is where the screening gets serious. Many viable candidates are emptying, including towns well known for their beauty: Orvieto, Todi, Narni, Gubbio, Città di Castello, etc. All above the 5% decline threshold.

Let’s review the five that survive every filter.

1. Assisi

• Province: Perugia (PG)

• Population: 27,400

• Seismic risk: Zone 2

• Stability: -2.82% (2014-2024)

• Price range: €1,050-2,500/m² (avg €1,474)

• 7% eligible: No

• ER: In town

• Train station: In town

Assisi is the most obvious choice on the list. Just the right size, well-known, beautiful, well-serviced, and, in the center, many shopkeepers speak basic English.

Before you get too excited, a clarification is in order. The comune of Assisi has several frazioni (hamlets), the most well-known of which is Santa Maria degli Angeli on the flat, where the train and the Flixbus drop you off.

When you see relatively cheap real estate prices (around €1,400 a meter), you’re dealing with properties in the hamlets on the flat. The Assisi center on the hill will push you to €2,500 per square meter, sometimes more.

The hilltop Assisi is also a major tourist destination. Think over 5 million people a year, a mini Florence. Many of the visitors are pilgrims devoted to Saint Francis, Saint Clare, and more recently Saint Carlo Acutis.

My fiancée Alicia called it Catholic Disneyland, and it does have that feeling. A city fully catered to its Catholic visitors, including sacramentals in every other shop.

I recently re-visited it in May during the 800th-anniversary year of the death of Saint Francis, and it was as charming as ever. That said, I think overtourism has changed the city, making it more transactional and less hospitable than nearby Umbrian towns.

It’s a city that punches well above its weight in terms of services. The hospital has a real ER, and it’s good. There are schools all the way through liceo (the better high schools). The train station is on the plain, but it’s in town and well connected to Perugia. Frequent trains get you there in 20 minutes. The population has been stable for a decade.

Budget and tolerance for tourism would determine where you’d live in Assisi. If you can splurge and don’t mind the crowds, the hilltop is enchanting. If you prefer more peace and cheaper housing, Santa Maria degli Angeli or one of the many other hamlets is the way to go.

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Last week I published an article on how to buy Italian books outside of Italy. Within it, I also promised you a ladder of Italian book suggestions from elementary level all the way to challenging material best left for later on in your journey.

Most lists of easy Italian books ignore the two walls you’ll face. Let’s start with those.

The two walls

I don’t speak French, but Italian is a fellow Romance language with some vocabulary and structural similarities. This affords me the ability to guess the meaning of very simple French, but I hit a wall pretty quickly as I have not formally studied or immersed myself in the language.

Let’s put it to the test. I took the following intro from a French children’s book:

Laissez-moi vous raconter l’histoire d’un Poulet. Ses amis l’appellent Petit Poulet. Petit Poulet vit dans une petite maison de poulet normale, dans une petite ville normale.

Without cheating, this is what I think it means:

Let me tell you the story of a chicken. Called the Small Chicken by his friends. Small Chicken lived in a small house of normal chickens, inside a small normal (something).

The real translation is:

Let me tell you the story of a chicken. His friends call him Chicken Little. Chicken Little lives in a normal little chicken house in a normal little town.

I don’t speak French, but Italian mostly carried me through.

Now let’s try the same with the French novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert:

Nous étions à l’étude, quand le proviseur entra, suivi d’un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d’un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre. Ceux qui dormaient se réveillèrent, et chacun se leva comme surpris dans son travail.

There it is, the first wall. I recognize some words, but I have no idea what those sentences mean. Something about a boy (garçon) in class (classe). The first wall determines what counts as easy on every list out there. It’s the decoding wall.

Can you translate the marks on the page into concepts in your head? If the author uses dialect, “easy” is out. If they use words even Italian kids wouldn’t know these days, the book doesn’t make the cut. Long, syntactically creative sentences? Out as well.

The mistake is stopping at the first wall, because the second one is more insidious. The wall of depth.

It’s the wall that makes a book with simple words and short sentences inscrutable, because the meaning lives in the silence between what’s said, like melodies that would collapse without their pauses.

The perfect example is one of my favorite novels, A ciascuno il suo by Leonardo Sciascia. It’s a short book. The vocabulary is plain, and a C1 reader will rarely reach for the dictionary. And yet the meaning lives in the words nobody says, in irony that is never spelled out, in the cultural fabric of the Sicily it describes.

You can look up every word and still miss the book.

I’ll present one line from the book as evidence. But first, some context without too many spoilers: a pharmacist and his hunting companion have been murdered. A rumor is spreading that a young girl was the pharmacist’s lover, and the murder might be because of the affair. Her engagement gets cancelled overnight. The prospective mother-in-law visits her to hand back the gifts, and on her way out, she loudly exclaims:

«Ogni male non viene per nuocere. E non potevano ammazzarlo prima che mio figlio si infilasse in questa casa?»

A B2 reader can translate every word:

Every cloud has a silver lining. And couldn’t they have killed him before my son got himself into this house?

Objectively, they won’t even need a dictionary for this, as long as they are familiar with the common proverb. And yet, if the translation is all they took from it, they’re missing the sentence.

What the words don’t spell out is how in the Sicily of the time, the honor of the fiancé was on the line. How a whisper would permanently label the girl as a harlot and her man as a cornuto (a cuckold).

How the importance of this perception is greater than the life of a murdered man, so much so that she wishes he had died earlier. And above all, the importance of delivering it loudly to the neighbors within the warmth of a popular proverb.

The vocabulary was the easy part. The meaning behind it is the wall that blocks you.

I didn’t want to rely on my opinion alone and tell you, “trust me, bro.” So I did something slightly overzealous for a simple recommendation list: a morphological analysis of each book I wanted to recommend. Sentence length, word frequencies, density of each tense, and Gulpease score, the readability index Italian schools use. The full results are in the table below.

This largely led to a confirmation of my intuitive understanding of the relative difficulty of each book, but also a couple of interesting discoveries I’ll talk about.

The ladder below is built with the two walls in mind, and divided into three tiers. Tier 1 has no walls worth mentioning. Tier 2 raises the first wall to a height you can still climb. Tier 3 is the trap: prestigious books you will be tempted by, guarded by a wall of the first or second kind, too tall and too slippery for most learners. Tackle them if you’re a comfortable C1 reader or come back to them when you’re ready.

For each book, I’ll show you the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) level based on my own judgment as a long-time Italian teacher and the morphological measurement I did on the books. (If you don’t know where you stand, test your Italian level on Linguetto for free.)

Tier 1: Easy Italian books

Read these books extensively. A second reading at this level often teaches you more than the first. Don’t worry about looking up every single word. The goal is flow and getting the gist of things. Use the dictionary only when a specific word you don’t understand is critical for the plot.

Graded readers (A1-C1). These are books written for learners and labeled A1 to C1. Alma, ELI, and Black Cat publish full series but are mostly found in Italian stores. Olly Richards’ Short Stories in Italian for Beginners is the version you can likely grab at your local bookstore. If your reading comprehension is not yet at B1 level, I’d focus on these. Get the paper versions and annotate them as you need.

Io non ho paura by Niccolò Ammaniti (A2-B1). The story is told by a child, so the language is disarmingly simple. The topic and emotional load are heavy, but the Italian within is objectively easy. Italian kids read it in middle school. Pair it with Salvatores’ 2003 film.

Favole al telefono by Gianni Rodari (A2-B1). A traveling salesman calls his daughter every night and tells her one story. Simple language (it’s meant for kids) and short stories capped at two pages. This makes it accessible despite the playful made-up words here and there that you’ll need to watch out for.

La volpe che amava i libri by Nicola Pesce (B1). A fox in the Siberian taiga steals books from the village to read through her hibernation. It’s a modern fable some reviewers argued was “inspired” by a Russian tale. Meant for kids but appreciated by adults as well. At any rate, this one is great to master passato remoto. Of the 15 books I measured, only Pinocchio uses this tense more often. Bonus points to this book for being available as a cheap Social DRM ePub.

One more move that could pay off: read the Italian versions of books you already read in your native language. The Italian is often simpler due to fewer native idioms, plus knowledge of the plot will assist your understanding. Don’t consider it cheating. It’s a smart hack.

Tier 2: the bridge to B2

Dictionary out, folks. We are now entering first wall territory. The effort to get through these books will pay dividends and greatly expand your vocabulary.

Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino (B2). Twenty short stories of a few pages each about a laborer’s adventures in a northern industrial city. Everybody classifies this as an easy read, as it is meant for Italian readers 9 and older; yet, my analysis shows that it uses the lowest percentage of everyday words of all fifteen books on the list.

The real wall here takes dictionary work because Calvino names precisely everything in the city: plants, tools, birds. You’ll need the dictionary on page 1. Re-read each story before moving to the next.

Va’ dove ti porta il cuore by Susanna Tamaro (B1-B2). A grandmother, aware of her imminent death, writes one long letter to her granddaughter who’s traveling to America. The first wall is moderate, but understanding the full depth of the emotions and family dynamics introduces a mild second wall that earns the B2 in the estimated rating. This was big in the 90s, so you’re also reading a piece of modern culture.

Esco a fare due passi by Fabio Volo (B1-B2). Nico is a radio DJ allergic to adulthood, but life doesn’t care about his reluctance to accept responsibilities. This book is very conversational. Italian critics don’t take Volo seriously. Ignore them. He’s not Cesare Pavese or Umberto Eco, but his books are perfect for teaching you the language.

Fabbricante di lacrime by Erin Doom (B1-B2). This is an interesting one. It’s a gothic romance that came out chapter-by-chapter on the Wattpad social writing platform (the one where a lot of questionable romance novels appear). Yet, it became the best-selling book in Italy in 2022, and the 2024 Netflix adaptation was the first Italian film to top the platform’s global chart for non-English-language movies.

If the genre appeals to you, this is a great choice because the prose is simple, the pages turn themselves, and the book is relatively large. Which means it gives you volume, and that’s exactly what you need at this level.

Plus, it serves as a good introduction to congiuntivo, having the highest density of the tense of all books on the list.

Testimone inconsapevole by Gianrico Carofiglio (B1-B2). A legal thriller in Bari, written by a former anti-mafia prosecutor. It’s credited with inventing the Italian courtroom novel genre. The language is formal but also repetitive, which is quite useful for your learning purposes. It’s the first in a series, so if you enjoy it, you’ll have plenty more to chase it with.

Le otto montagne by Paolo Cognetti (B2). Two boys, one from the city and one from a hamlet under Monte Rosa, establish a friendship that develops at altitude each summer. It won the Strega Prize in 2017, the highest literary award in Italy. It’s a serious book you can brag about having read. The writing is excellent, but the sentences are sparse and relatively accessible for a B2 reader. Pair it with the slow but also excellent movie.

Novecento by Alessandro Baricco (B2). A monologue about a talented pianist adopted by a ship worker. Born on an ocean liner, he never gets off the ship. Only 66 pages, yet full of lyricism. The quickest read on this list for a B2 reader. Pair it with the film, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano, for full emotional understanding.

Tier 3: the traps

We are now in the section where the walls get tall. These books are a trap, or at least a challenge, as they look approachable but they are not. When one of them stops you, make note of which wall stopped you, as the fix is different depending on which.

Le avventure by Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (B2-C1). This is the most recommended beginner book on the internet, and it’s a flat-out terrible recommendation for a beginner. Unless you read a simplified version, Pinocchio combines 1883 Tuscan words that Italian kids wouldn’t understand with the highest use of passato remoto on the list (a tense that is largely being disused by modern Italian, especially when spoken).

La forma dell’acqua by Andrea Camilleri (B2-C1). Camilleri’s series of books on Inspector Montalbano is extremely popular in Italy. On the surface, it’s an accessible series of books, but for a foreign learner this is the case of a tall and strong first wall. Camilleri mixes Italian and Sicilian dialect. The analyzer found one word in 25 to be outside of the Italian vocabulary it used. And even that undersells the linguistic difficulty. For example, Camilleri uses the word “spiare” (to spy) to mean “to ask” as Sicilian dialects do.

L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante (B2+). L’amica geniale series developed into four volumes. It’s now an international bestseller that was adapted into a TV series as well. The language is relatively simple, so the books remain approachable by less fluent Italian readers. However, this is pure second wall. The Naples that permeates each novel must be experienced in person to truly understand the novels. A B2 reader can begin to understand the unspoken messages and the social fabric assumptions. Below that level, you miss much of the book.

Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (C1). This book was rejected by Einaudi and Mondadori. The author died, and a year later, Feltrinelli published it. It became the best-selling novel in Italian history. Lampedusa never got to see it. Nor did he, obviously, see how successful the Netflix series became in 2025, leading to a new wave of international readers.

This book captures both walls. It uses long sentences with relatively difficult words. The analysis shows it is the most difficult book, linguistically, in the whole list. But the difficulty doesn’t end there. The book mourns something that’s never said outright. The historical context is captured but never fully spelled out. Nor is the Sicilian mindset that justifies the characters’ actions.

It takes a genuine C1 reader to tackle this.

A ciascuno il suo by Leonardo Sciascia (C1). One of my favorite novels and what inspired this article. A shy professor, school smart not street smart, naively gets interested in the circumstances of the death of two acquaintances in a small Sicilian town. He starts asking questions the locals would rather not be asked.

As mentioned earlier, it’s a short book (115 pages) with plain, standard vocabulary. The sentences, though, run long, and the Gulpease score sits near the bottom of the list, so a first wall does exist to some degree.

Still, none of that is what truly stops you. You can clear every word and every long sentence and miss the whole book, because the second wall is very tall. And wall two does not show up on a morphological analysis.

What this demands is not more Italian; it is more Sicily.

How to climb the two walls

Track which wall stopped you as you approached these, because the fix is different. If the meaning of words or dense syntax throws you, you need more pages at your current level. Tackle more books on the list.

If you understand each sentence but the meaning of the book remains foggy, you might need more Italy. Watch more movies, read the newspapers, dive more into its history, visit the country if you can. You need to acquire more of the context that supports those sentences.

Then one day you will reread A ciascuno il suo and hear the pauses, the omertà in the air, the irony never spelled out.

That is the day the second wall comes down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not a coincidence.

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

The numbers are real. The conclusion is a trap.

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

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

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

Is southern Italy safe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the mob towns have the fewest break-ins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crime you’ll see

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

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

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

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

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

Immigrants and maranza

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

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

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

Very briefly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visible vs invisible risk

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

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

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

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

One last thing

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

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

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

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

Oristano has spectacular beaches.

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Pop quiz: who built the first programmable desktop computer?

It wasn’t a company in America. It was one in a humble Piedmontese town of 22,000 people.

The machine was the Programma 101 (shown below), widely credited as the first. It entered the market in 1965, years before Xerox PARC built the Alto and more than a decade ahead of the Apple I. Before Silicon Valley even had a name.

It weighed a hefty 35.5 kg (78 lb) and cost $3,200 (roughly $32,000 today), yet it sold a respectable 44,000 units. The majority of sales were to the United States, and even NASA bought ten. Programma 101 was used by engineers working on Apollo 11 calculations.

The real story of Olivetti is how a factory in Ivrea produced it. For sixty years the place was run as if it were a city, and by an industrialist who was elected mayor to test his own theories. The technology fell out of the philosophy, not the other way around.

Who founded Olivetti, and why in Ivrea

The Olivetti company was registered in Ivrea, a town in the Turin metropolitan area, on 29 October 1908. Camillo Olivetti, the founder, was a Jewish electrical engineer born and raised in Ivrea.

Camillo’s creativity and entrepreneurial tendencies ran in the family. His father, Salvador, was a textile trader, while his maternal grandfather was a banker.

His father died when Camillo was only 12 months old. Despite the challenges, his mother Elvira provided him with a good education, sending him to boarding school and eventually technical school, where he excelled.

His aptitudes and education led him toward industrial engineering, fluency in English, and extensive travel abroad. On his trips, he even met Thomas Edison.

His final stretch of time in the US was spent at Stanford in the 1890s as an assistant electrotechnical engineer before returning home to Italy and starting his company.

He built typewriters in a red brick workshop that he designed himself. The first model, the M1, was shown at the 1911 Turin Exposition and is now a coveted rare find among collectors.

Ivrea sits in the Canavese, a landscape of rivers and Alpine foothills below the Aosta Valley. A strange place to build an industrial future, but Camillo chose it because it was home.

Two values he held dear stand out. He raised his six children, with wife Luisa, on the idea that manual and intellectual labor were equal.

He demonstrated his respect for workers when the company nearly failed in 1914. He gathered them and explained there was no money. Instead of mass layoffs, he cut work hours in half while retaining the entire workforce. Many refused pay until the firm recovered.

Despite the travel, education, and influential people he met, everything Olivetti became started in that simple red brick factory.

Adriano Olivetti, the boss who became mayor

Camillo’s eldest son Adriano took over as director in 1932. He had extensively toured American factories in 1925, learning how to scale manufacturing, and returned home with a strange idea.

He wanted the factory not only to produce products, but to demonstrate a political argument.

In 1947 he founded Movimento Comunità (Community Movement). In 1956 he was elected mayor of Ivrea, and in 1958 he entered the Italian Parliament.

He wasn’t merely a benevolent boss who dabbled in politics. He was running an experiment about how people should live and work, and the company was the embodiment of that idea.

This innovative model didn’t lack critics. Some saw his approach as a form of enlightened paternalism: pro-worker, humane, even generous, but still built on the idea that a powerful employer and its management get to decide what’s best for the community.

By the early 1960s, from its humble red brick beginnings, Olivetti had grown substantially, employing around 36,000 people, more than half of them abroad.

Olivetti’s productivity secret

Olivetti offered many perks to its employees, including a nursery, library, evening classes, five-day weeks, wages above union standards, and free healthcare decades before it became universal. In 1930s Italy, these benefits were essentially unheard of.

As the company grew in size, they moved from the workshop to a glass factory (known as “la fabbrica di vetro”). Floor-to-ceiling windows allowed workers to see the Alps and passers-by to see the workers. The light and transparency were the goal.

Adriano made it a condition of taking over, one which many CEOs would struggle to sign their names to, that he would never fire an employee for financial reasons. He put the reasoning in print: “We must go beyond separations between capital and work, industry and agriculture, production and culture.”

It might seem a threat to the bottom line, but it’s a philosophy that yielded concrete results. By the late 1950s, Olivetti workers were among the highest-paid in Italian industry... but also the most productive.

The model wasn’t doing charity. It was a strategic approach.

From Lettera 22 to Programma 101

The Lettera 22 (designed by Marcello Nizzoli) is one of the most recognizable symbols of Italian design. It won the Compasso d’Oro in 1954. Five years later, the Illinois Institute of Technology named it the best-designed product of the previous 100 years. Light, stylish, and effective.

Joan Didion drafted Run, River on one. Cormac McCarthy wrote much of his work on the Lettera 32, the successor of the 22. Amusingly, he auctioned it at Christie’s in 2009 for $254,500, only to buy a replacement for $11.

But the typewriters undersell the rest of the company’s catalog. In 1959 Olivetti shipped the Elea 9003, one of the first fully transistorized commercial mainframes anywhere and the first built entirely in Italy. The lead engineer was Mario Tchou and the designer behind the console was Ettore Sottsass, who also designed the Olivetti Valentine typewriter displayed at MoMA.

Olivetti also entered the semiconductor industry, and helped found SGS in 1957, which later became STMicroelectronics, today one of Europe’s largest chipmakers.

In 1965, the Programma 101 was built by Pier Giorgio Perotto with a team of five. Affectionately known as the “Perottina”, it is widely considered the first desktop computer. At its New York debut, visitors assumed it was a terminal wired to a hidden mainframe and had to be told that the small box was the whole computer. It is also in the permanent collection of MoMA.

Between 1954 and 2001, Olivetti won 16 Compasso d’Oro awards, more than any company in the history of the prize. In 1986, it became the third-largest PC maker in the world. The 1990s then saw Olivetti become the largest in Europe.

Yet today, nobody owns an Olivetti computer or mobile phone. This story has no happy ending.

How Olivetti collapsed

Tragedy struck two key figures in the Olivetti empire less than two years apart. Adriano died of a heart attack on a train to Switzerland in February 1960, at age 58. No autopsy was performed despite the attending doctor asking for one.

Then Mario Tchou, the engineer running the Elea program, died in a head-on crash on the A4 near Santhià (Vercelli) in November 1961, at age 37.

Italian journalists called it “il giallo Olivetti” (the Olivetti mystery). Speculation is rampant, though most historians reject the conspiracy theory. Even the declassified CIA files on Adriano never produced a definitive answer.

What is not a mystery is what the state did as the company faced pressure: nothing.

In 1964, with the founders deceased, Olivetti’s bankers forced a sale of the electronics division to General Electric as a key condition to issue new operating loans.

Other European nations fiercely protected important companies on the verge of collapse. France protected Bull. Britain did it for ICL. West Germany, with Siemens. Yet, Italy did nothing to protect Olivetti.

Olivetti didn’t lack technology or talent. It had both in spades. The collapse was a combination of factors exacerbated by the passing of Adriano and Tchou. Sure, there were financial pressure and strategic mistakes, but the real death blow came from the absence of a national industrial policy to defend such a strategic Italian company.

Italy failed Olivetti far more than Olivetti has ever failed Italy.

The Programma 101 itself only hit the market because Perotto’s team, in typical Italian fashion, pulled a fast one. They cleverly reclassified the computer as a “calculator,” keeping it out of the GE deal. “Una furbizia” (a clever trick), a bureaucratic loophole really, allowed the first programmable desktop computer to survive.

The rest of its demise was slow death. Compounding bad decisions and failure to adapt. A late return to scale in the PC years, thinning margins, and then a pivot into telecoms. Finally, the loss of identity with the absorption into Telecom Italia in 2003. Olivetti ceased to exist as an independent company. By then, the part worth saving had been gone for forty years.

Ivrea today, and what tourists miss

In July 2018, UNESCO inscribed eighteen Olivetti buildings across Ivrea as World Heritage Site #1538, Italy’s first site recognized specifically as 20th-century industrial heritage.

You can walk it in an afternoon and visit the glass factory, workers’ housing, canteen, original red brick workshop, and open-air architecture museum. It still stands like a memorial to its accomplishments. Many older Italians share memories of the products they recollect, or wonder what could have been if they had held on longer.

However, those who remember are fewer every year. Almost nobody comes for this heritage site. Most visitors show up in February for the Battle of the Oranges, the carnival where the town splits into teams and pelts each other with three hundred tons of citrus. If you prefer a contemplative moment to step into another era of technology, rather than being pelted with oranges, this is the more interesting visit.

Why Olivetti still matters

The easy reading of all this is nostalgic, and at times tragic. A beautiful European moment ended; we mourn it, we move on.

Despite the demise of Olivetti, it has a form of immortality beyond its historical contributions to technology, as a concept. It is a case study for one specific claim: humane working conditions and frontier technology are not in tension.

A company built on the premise that they reinforce each other outproduced companies built on the opposite premise. It worked commercially right up until Italian bankers and Italian government inaction took it apart, while everyone else in Europe was doing the opposite.

Italians would call this “un’occasione mancata,” a lost opportunity. The phrase is far too small, however, for a loss so great. What was lost wasn’t an opportunity. It was a working argument in motion, already proven, that a factory could be a city and still build the best machines in the world.

Adriano saw the objections coming. He had a line for it:

“Often the term utopia is the most convenient way to liquidate what you do not have the ability, or the courage, to do.”

Olivetti wasn’t a tech company that happened to care about people. It was a project about people that happened to build some of the most important technology of the century.

Italy used to know the difference.

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After Marche, Tuscany, Veneto, Campania, and Abruzzo, today I’m covering Piedmont.

For those unfamiliar with this series, I analyze each region looking for towns that are good candidates for relocation.

I do so by applying a framework I designed to screen out towns that would be problematic or at least suboptimal for most people.

Too big, too small, depopulating, in a seriously dangerous seismic zone, no ER nearby, and so on. We want to end up with città di provincia, cities that are livable, human-sized, and have all the key services we need.

For generous regions with many surviving candidates, we narrow it further with additional filters that affect quality of life. For regions with few comuni (municipalities), I don’t apply these additional filters and, in extreme cases, even relax the core criteria.

Piemonte (Piedmont) is very generous with its 1180 comuni. Being strict, I was able to screen it down to 20 viable towns worthy of consideration.

Torino, the first capital of unified Italy, has incredible appeal to me personally. When I think of culture and elegance, I think of Torino. But it’s an ill fit for what this series is meant to surface. It’s just too big.

The beautiful, and somewhat famous, Langhe region is mostly out as well due to the opposite end of the population filter. Its towns are often too small to qualify, outstanding wine and hills notwithstanding.

So Barolo, La Morra, Neive, Monforte, and Serralunga are all out. Two Langhe cities survive and are worth considering if wine and white truffle appeal to you.

So 20 it is, spread across almost every province, with a healthy concentration in the province of Cuneo in particular.

You likely never heard of most of them, which is where the value of this exercise lies. I’m finding places you wouldn’t have thought of yourself and ensuring they are hidden gems rather than hidden nightmares.

What Piemonte is actually like to live in

Piemonte has 4.26 million people spread across seven provinces plus the Città Metropolitana di Torino, which replaced the old province in 2015. In practice, it works like a regular province as far as a resident is concerned.

The economy

Piemonte is industrious, with its economy largely divided into three sectors.

Post-industrial Torino is the huge one. With its hinterland, it employs two million people, many of whom are still in the aerospace and auto industries.

The province of Cuneo to the south has a strong agro-industrial economy. Think fruit and wine, the Italian capital of white truffle, and where Ferrero was founded.

The east is less prosperous but still has industry, including Biella’s wool, Casale’s cement, and Valenza’s gold.

The quality of life

The Il Sole 24 Ore and ItaliaOggi 2025 quality of life indexes agree that most of Piemonte’s provinces are middling. They flip the verdict on two of them: Torino and Cuneo.

Il Sole 24 Ore places Torino at 57th out of 107 provinces. ItaliaOggi has it at 26th, in the top third. The opposite happens with Cuneo, placed 27th by Il Sole 24 Ore and only 41st by ItaliaOggi.

My read is simple: Torino and Cuneo are both viable cities but have different pros and cons mostly due to their sizes. Torino is the big city option. Cuneo, the quieter one.

Don’t expect to move to Piemonte and get by with English alone. Outside central Torino and the tourist areas around Lago Maggiore, you'll need Italian. (Linguetto can help.)

The air quality

Piemonte has two shortcomings: there is no sea, and the air quality can be genuinely bad. As it’s often the case in the Po Valley, the cities on the plain are affected the most.

Torino had 39 days over the PM10 daily limit in 2025. 35 is the legal allowance for exceeding days. And 2025 was a good year. Settimo Torinese, nearby, hit 48 days. Other cities on the plain, including Alessandria, Asti, and Vercelli, do generally better, and certainly did this year, but they are still not ideal for sensitive populations.

The solution is altitude and the edges. In fact, Piemonte also has fresh alpine air. Just not at sea level.

I don’t have a filter in place for air quality, due to lack of reliable data at municipality level. However, I’ll point out for you when a surviving comune has air quality concerns so that you can choose with your eyes open.

Applying the filter to Piemonte

To recap our core framework to screen towns, we have: a population between 15,000 and 100,000, no seismic Zone 1, a full pronto soccorso (ER) within a 25-minute drive, a high school, a real supermarket, fiber-optic Internet, and a population decline below 5% on the 2014-2024 ISTAT window.

With Piemonte, which has more comuni than any other region except Lombardia, the population filter does the heavy lifting for us. We quickly go from 1,180 towns down to 45.

Torino and Novara are too big, and the rest of the comuni filtered out were all too small. I explained why tiny towns are not ideal for most people before.

You’ll be happy to learn that the seismic filter is useless here. It doesn’t screen out any town. Earthquakes are not a major concern in this region.

The services filter is also not helpful here. This is the efficient north, and virtually every town that has at least 15,000 people will have supermarkets, a high school, fiber Internet, ERs within 25 minutes, and so on.

Depopulation, even for the right-sized comuni, is a concern mostly in the east of the region. Venaria Reale (-6.58%), Casale Monferrato (-6.56%), Valenza (-5.81%), Acqui Terme (-5.49%), and Ciriè (-5.14%) are all out because they are slowly but surely emptying.

We are down to 40 viable options. Far too many to recommend. So the bonus filter I’m applying is the so-called “conurbation” criterion. I treat Torino’s belt as one metropolitan orbit with no distinct identity. They are dorm towns for Torino commuters. So they are out. Twenty of them, from Moncalieri to Volpiano, are out on this judgment call. They get the same air quality as Torino without the fancy architecture and culture Torino offers.

This leaves us with 20 comuni, which is plenty to choose from. Here they are.

1. Cuneo

• Province: Cuneo (CN)

• Population: 55,747

• Seismic risk: Zone 3S (low)

• Stability: -0.65% (2014-2024)

• Price range: €1,700-2,100/m²

• ER: In town (Santa Croce e Carle)

• Train station: In town

Cuneo is a great choice. The sensible one. It sits at 545 meters, which means the air quality is significantly better than Torino. It’s wedged between Alpine valleys (Cuneo means wedge in Italian), giving you access to literally 12 different valleys for hiking, fishing, and exploring nature.

The city itself has all the services you might expect in a medium Italian city of the north, and its porticoed streets allow you to walk the city under cover, rain or shine. Its square, Piazza Galimberti, is one of the largest in Italy.

Both quality of life indexes agree that Cuneo’s province is in the top half of Italy and its capital city is certainly a good representative of that. It even ranks third in Italy for young people’s quality of life.

What you get is an affordable, calm, tidy, and faintly Alpine city that can reach Torino by train in just a bit over an hour. It is also quite stable population-wise, so it’s not emptying.

The downside? Its winters are cold by Italian standards and quite snowy. If you’re okay with that, Cuneo will leave little to be desired.

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If you are trying to learn Italian, one of the best tools at your disposal is comprehensible input or something not too far from it. Without getting fancy with definitions, this means reading and listening to Italian content you mostly understand, but not quite 100%.

That’s how learning and all growth happen. One foot and a half in the known, half foot in the unknown.

So the fastest way from A2 to C1, and even C1 to C2 in Italian, is reading lots. Reading books, essays, news; the stuff Italians actually read. And doing the same with audio and video. Italian immersion in your own living room.

In this article, we’ll talk about the reading part. Specifically, how to get Italian books from abroad and which device to read them on. And, in next week’s follow-up, which books to actually read and in what order, using a framework you won’t find on the usual lists.

Buying Italian books from abroad is not so simple

You might think it’s easy to buy Italian books from, say, North America or Australia. It’s not.

Here are some of the issues you’ll run into:

• Locally, you’ll find very few Italian books available. Even major book chains in large cities will have few Italian titles.

• Many sites will not ship abroad or accept foreign credit cards.

• Those that do ship to you will often charge excessively.

• Local digital catalogs have little Italian inventory.

• Buying digital books abroad often runs into geo-blocks and payment issues.

So let’s see how to approach this and get you some Italian books.

Buying physical Italian books abroad

The most obvious choice you might think of is Amazon.it. It can work. However, shipping to North America tends to be very expensive.

For example, I added 7 books (novels, paperbacks) to my cart and shipping to Canada would have cost me close to $100 CAD. That’s $14+ per book. You’re doubling the cost of each book. Plus, whatever import charges your country imposes on books from Italy.

The better site, I found, is Libraccio. Their shipping costs are much more reasonable. Their selection and prices are better as well, and they carry used books, which in itself can offer you real savings.

Libraccio ships the same 7-book order for 11.60 euros (about $19 CAD). A fraction of Amazon’s shipping cost. For these specific books, they even throw in a free bag from the publisher. Plus, they give you reward points you can use for free books in the future.

For in-stock books, they arrive quickly via courier. Think a week, two max, not a month.

After trying several Italian alternatives over the years, for the paper route, Libraccio is my recommendation.

And here’s my take on paper. It has its place: illustrated editions, art books, photography tomes, specific titles you want on the shelf, or books that you can’t find digitally.

For everything else, digital is faster and cheaper. And getting to C1 is a volume game.

Why going digital

Digital is indeed faster. You can have books on your e-reader within minutes. That’s an advantage.

An even greater advantage is the built-in dictionary. You can hold a word on the screen and have it translated into your language.

I got my English foundation that way. I had a desktop version of software that would allow me to highlight words in English, and it would tell me what they meant in Italian. It was called Babylon. I probably learned my first 10,000 English words that way.

However, digital also means more complications, so I’m going to spend some time making recommendations that simplify the process for you.

Can you use an iPad or your phone to read? Absolutely. But an e-ink device is vastly better for your eyes and sleep. Plus, a device that buzzes every ninety seconds is the enemy of the deep reading that actually moves your level. Get e-ink.

Of course, you do you, but know this: reading a book on an iPad is screen time. Reading the same book on an e-reader is far closer to paper than to screen time.

Kindle vs Kobo for Italian books

Both ecosystems are fine. Both devices are great. However, in my opinion, Kobo has the better software, and Kindle has the better hardware.

By better software, I mean that Kobo gives you more options. Their devices are more open, philosophically speaking.

You can rent books from the library; on Kindle you can’t. You can read Adobe DRM ePub books on it (more on this below); on Kindle you can’t.

Instapaper is built-in on Kobo (it replaced Pocket in 2025), allowing you to add articles as you browse the web (like my own articles) and then read them in batch on your e-reader. For free. You can do that with Kindle, but it requires paying for Instapaper Premium each month in order to use their send to Kindle feature.

Kobo Plus has a subscription option that includes unlimited audiobooks as well. Connect Bluetooth earbuds or headphones, and you can listen to them from your Kobo device or the Kobo app on your phone. A great choice to double down on your Italian immersion.

The catalog is not huge, but it includes Italian books simplified for foreign learners as well as many classics from literature giants such as Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo, Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco, and so on. Amazon has Audible, and you’re paying by the book.

Where Kindle has the edge is in the device itself. Even though they use the same technology, Kindle manages to deliver a slightly sharper, crisper text with more even lighting.

If you already have one of these, or a more niche alternative like Boox or PocketBook, keep what you have.

If you don’t have one or wish to get a more modern version, opt for the Kobo Clara BW, or if available in your market, PocketBook Era for its larger screen.

PocketBook is a legitimate third option, with the widest format support of any device, including native reading of Adobe-DRM files. The problem is getting one. In Canada, at least, they’re harder to find and usually pricier than the equivalent Kobo.

Kindle can work; I own two, but the ability to read Adobe DRM ebooks present on other devices gives you a degree of flexibility not (legally) available on Kindle.

Acquiring Italian ebooks legally

You can be a pirate... arr... and get ebooks for free from various illicit sources, but you shouldn’t.

Thankfully, there are legitimate ways to buy Italian ebooks from abroad.

Being lazy, the most convenient place to look is the regular digital marketplace you use to buy ebooks in English (or whatever native language you speak).

If you use Kobo, the Kobo store in your country will have some Italian books. If you use Kindle, your localized Amazon site will offer some Italian digital books as well.

The problem is that it’s usually a fairly limited catalog. If you just want to read something in Italian, it’s convenient. Even Kobo Plus and Kindle Unlimited, the respective all-you-can-read monthly subscriptions, include several Italian titles.

But at some point, you’ll want specific books. You’ll hear a recommendation from me or a friend, and you’ll want to read that one. That’s when Kobo and Kindle’s native catalog for your region will likely fail you.

If you’re thinking of setting your device country to Italy to access Italian ebooks, it won’t work because both Kobo and Kindle have ways to check. It’s not even something you can easily solve with a VPN, because they require a credit card with Italian billing. I’m not saying a workaround is impossible, but it’s likely not worth your trouble, and it sits in a gray area legally.

If you have a Kobo device and a library card, you’re likely able to rent ebooks from the library as well via OverDrive. Again, you won’t generally find a ton of Italian titles, but it adds to the ones your local digital marketplace already offers you. For free.

Plus, classic Italian books are often available through projects such as Liber Liber and Project Gutenberg. Their copyright has expired, so they are legally available for download for free. The Italian within classics tends to be high-sounding by modern standards and antiquated at times, but it’s a free option.

The real bounty of Italian ebooks, however, comes from Italian bookstores.

Where to buy Italian ebooks abroad

There are plenty of Italian ebook stores. The challenge is getting them to accept your money.

Most geo-block you. You can use a VPN to appear as if you visited from Italy and still get rejected on account of your credit card’s foreign billing address.

I’ll mention three bookstores that should accept your hard-earned money.

My pick is Librerie.coop. It’s a popular chain of bookstores in Italy, and their ebook store accepts PayPal and most credit cards.

Then there’s IBS.it and Feltrinelli, giants who will happily accept your foreign card (though not Amex). They’re perfectly fine, but there is a catch: the type of files they issue. Which brings us to an important point about ePub formats.

Social DRM vs Adobe DRM

DRM is the lock a store puts on a file to ensure you don’t distribute it freely.

The two main types are Social DRM and Adobe DRM.

Social DRM is not really a lock. The files embed your name and email in subtle ways to ensure you don’t spread the ebook around. It keeps you honest but doesn’t impose any practical limit on the file. Any reader, software, or app will read it. You can freely transfer it from device to device, upload to Kindle to convert it, and so on.

It’s a gray ethical area, but in practice, you can pass it along to your spouse or kids as well with zero repercussions.

Where DRM gets really serious is Adobe DRM. Technically, you’re not even buying an ebook. You’re buying a license and downloading a .acsm file. You then need to install special software on your computer (Adobe Digital Editions), create an ID account, and authorize both the computer and the specific device you want to transfer the book to.

So Adobe DRM is actually locked, and the road to reading these ebooks is often peppered with obstacles. Let’s start with the fact that Adobe is offloading their ebook operation to a Wipro-run outfit called ByteBooks, so we are in transition.

Adobe IDs are actively migrating to ByteBooks accounts as of mid-2026, and new installs or device authorizations now require one. The software itself is being retired in favor of something that will replace it, at some point.

Users constantly report issues with the software failing to authorize computers, devices refusing to read the books, licenses appearing invalid when they shouldn’t, and so on. Adobe DRM can work fine, but far too often it’s a pain to deal with.

Kobo will generally work with Adobe DRM if you go through the song and dance of transferring the ebooks via the Adobe software and you don’t run into issues. PocketBook devices do an even better job, since they have built-in support for Adobe DRM. Kindle is out.

One concrete example. La volpe che amava i libri by Nicola Pesce, a short, modern novel, costs €3,49 on Librerie.coop with Social DRM. The same book, for the same price on IBS, is wrapped in Adobe DRM.

Here’s the annoying part: most recent, popular titles are Adobe DRM. The big publishing houses (e.g., Mondadori, Einaudi, Rizzoli) mandate Adobe to protect their intellectual property, and the stores simply oblige.

If the publisher is okay with Social DRM, it then comes down to the store preference. Take Amélie Nothomb’s Stupore e tremori: Social DRM on Librerie.coop and directly from the publisher Voland. It sells as Adobe DRM on IBS and Feltrinelli. The two big chains wrap everything in Adobe.

Librerie.coop honors the publisher’s lighter protection and prints the DRM type on every book page.

So the rule is simple. Buy Social DRM whenever the book offers it, which in practice means selected books on Librerie.coop or straight from reader-friendly publishers. Save the Adobe acrobatics for a title you genuinely can’t find any other way, and go in knowing what you signed up for. And if you read on a Kindle, skip Adobe altogether. Buy the paper copy instead.

In summary

In short, here is what I recommend you do:

• Look in the native catalog for your device and hook up your local library to see what it has in Italian. (Skip the library for Kindle.)

• If a title you want isn’t there, search Librerie.coop and other Italian ebook stores, and opt for a Social DRM copy whenever it’s offered.

• If a title exists only as Adobe DRM, do the song and dance to transfer it to your Kobo or similar device. If you read on a Kindle, skip Adobe and buy the paper copy from Libraccio instead.

• Use Instapaper to read online articles as if they were a book. With Calibre, you can even fetch Italian news and transfer the resulting ePub to your device.

Reading is still the work. Rewarding work, but still work. Nobody will transfer the book into your head. Access alone won’t make you C1. The reading will. But the excuse of not having access to Italian books is gone, and the work can begin.

Do this enough, and your reading comprehension will climb to C1.

Next week, I will publish a ladder of Italian books I recommend to my students. When you reach its last ranks, you’ll be able to reach past any vocabulary or complexity wall.

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We were done having dinner when my sister turned toward me and said, “By the way, should you ever return to Italy, don’t move to the south of Marche. There is f**k all there.”

I have a very good internet connection at home. 1.5 Gbps of fiber-optic. Rarely down. Recently, while staying at a guesthouse in Assisi, my fiancée Alicia asked me, “Is the Wi-Fi slow for you as well?”

“Yeah, a bit,” I replied. I checked. 42 Mbps. Forty-two through fifteenth-century stone walls in a hilltop town is just short of a technological miracle. Yet, it felt slow and frustrating.

The internet connection I use most often has skewed my perception of what fast and slow mean. How quickly we adapt.

From my sister’s point of view, living in Pesaro, a relatively large city by Marche standards, the south of the region does appear to have “un cazzo di niente” (f**k all).

Was she right? Let’s contextualize what nothing means, through my adoptive North American eyes. Because it matters when you relocate from abroad. Are you moving to “nothing”?

F**k all vs Un cazzo di niente

Alicia and I love day trips. We also have a problem. Every time we consider going somewhere for a day trip, we realize that even driving 3 hours straight, there is essentially nothing.

Now, the Okanagan in British Columbia is beautiful. People pay good money to come to this area on holiday. If you love fishing, boating, hiking, drinking wine, there is lots to do.

I’m not arguing that there is nothing to do here for the right person. But it’s all mono-thematic. It’s a good place for the outdoors.

Within a 3-hour drive, you get Salmon Arm, Vernon, Kelowna, Kamloops, Merritt, Osoyoos, and Greenwood (the smallest city in Canada).

Towns that are essentially larger or smaller versions of Penticton, where we live, with not much to do outside of the aforementioned outdoor activities.

If you like art, history, theater, music, beautiful bookstores, culinary experiences, cultural events, exploring cities on foot, and so on, the Okanagan becomes a desert metaphorically as well. Kelowna has a gallery and a university. Granted. But the culture is thin.

And that’s with a car. There are no trains available locally.

F**k all, as we were saying.

My sister characterized the south of Marche in similar terms. I’ll concede that there are more lively places, especially for young people. Pesaro is certainly more vibrant than a small town in the province of Fermo.

But “un cazzo di niente” is not quite rural North American “f**k all.” And the Okanagan, compared to many parts of this country, is hardly rural in the first place.

The Fermo, Macerata, and Ascoli Piceno provinces preserve most of the outdoor playground options available in the Okanagan (with the sea in place of lakes). And they add a whole lot more.

Ascoli Piceno is cut from travertine; its Piazza del Popolo is among the most beautiful squares in the country.

Macerata keeps one of Italy’s oldest universities and fills a nineteenth-century open-air arena, the Sferisterio, for a serious summer opera festival.

Recanati was Leopardi’s town; the hill of “L’Infinito” is still there to experience.

Fermo hides Roman cisterns beneath its streets, and a frescoed library and cathedral at its top.

Nearly every town of any size holds onto its own historic theater. Marche is known as “la terra dei cento teatri” (the land of a hundred theaters).

Then there is the food. You don’t even need to drive anywhere, because ciauscolo, vincisgrassi, olive ascolane, and some great wines are all in town. Plus all the sagre (food festivals) nearby.

So my sister is right: Fermo is quiet. It is. But quiet is not nothing. And when you move from abroad, you don’t live only in a town. You live in what it can reach.

Within a 3-hour window of, say, Porto San Giorgio in my own Fermo province, you have:

• North: Ancona, Pesaro, San Marino, Rimini, Ravenna, Bologna.

• West: Urbino, the caverns at Frasassi, Assisi, Perugia, Spoleto, Orvieto, Arezzo, Rome.

• South: Termoli, Pescara, L’Aquila, Foggia.

Some by car, but most even via train or bus. Yeah, the list above includes Rome. The Rome. The antithesis of nothing.

You can also reach half a dozen UNESCO World Heritage sites in less than 3 hours.

From Penticton, I can reach the COSTCO heritage site in Kelowna, since it moved and was replaced by a Canadian Tire.

Access to such cultural depth is missing in much of rural North America. Something that can’t be easily replaced.

To my starved North American eyes, “un cazzo di niente” in Italy is quiet and peaceful, with culture and excitement not too far away.

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This post is part of a series of articles meant to help you find Italian towns worth moving to.

So far I covered:

• Marche

• Tuscany

• Veneto

• Campania

This time around, we’ll explore Abruzzo.

In this series, we apply strict filters, region by region, and see what comes out. The surviving municipalities are usually livable cities, neither too big nor too small. It is the framework I would use myself if moving back to Italy today.

Our framework does something interesting to Abruzzo: it completely erases the mountains.

Don’t get me wrong, the mountains are arguably the most beautiful part of Abruzzo. The real issue is that we are looking at potential relocation spots and when the postcards and the safe choices are far apart, we must opt for the latter.

The eight surviving cities in Abruzzo are all coastal. Let’s put on our swimming goggles and dive in.

What Abruzzo is like

Abruzzo has 305 comuni (municipalities). Actually, make that 303 since Pescara is about to swallow two neighbors in 2027.

It’s home to 1.27 million people, spread across four provinces: L’Aquila, Teramo, Pescara, and Chieti. That relatively small number of people is going down each year.

Whether Abruzzo is central or southern Italy is a contested topic. Geographically, it is central. Culturally and economically, it is slightly more southern. My take is that it’s both.

The 7% tax haven

What matters more is that Abruzzo qualifies for the 7% retiree/passive income tax like southern regions do. It’s a fantastic fiscal deal, so I’ll be pointing out which towns on our list qualify for it.

It’s worth mentioning that Abruzzo has the most participants in the program. The number of people who took advantage of it to date is relatively small (hundreds, not thousands), but Abruzzo was their first choice. In fact, it has more people retiring there (on this tax haven program) than Campania, Calabria, Basilicata, and Molise combined! That should tell you something about the region’s value proposition.

Two regions in one

Abruzzo is essentially two regions in one. Coastal Abruzzo is the one spread along the Adriatic, with its flat sandy beaches, warm climate, busy summer, and jobs.

Behind it, the gorgeous Abruzzo of the high Apennines, the Gran Sasso and the Maiella. Postcard-worthy. A dream if you like the mountains and hiking.

For most people, living in Abruzzo means living in the first one. The second one, despite L’Aquila being the regional capital, is best reserved for visiting.

“Antonio, let me get this straight: I get the beaches, the mountains, the 7% tax rate if retiring there; where is the catch?” I hear you ask.

There are two honest catches.

Seismic risk

The first is that Abruzzo is one of the worst regions of Italy for seismic risk.

This is not theoretical. In 1915, in Avezzano (L’Aquila), 30,000 people died in a single morning. In 2009, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake killed 308 people in L’Aquila itself. The region’s own capital is still rebuilding fifteen years later. In 2016 and 2017, the Teramo mountains were hit hard. And in January 2017, an avalanche caused by an earthquake buried a luxury hotel in Rigopiano, killing 29 people.

Thankfully, we have our seismic filter in place. It will eliminate all of the riskier places for you. And if that means getting rid of the mountains, so be it.

The economy

The second catch is the economy.

Tourism is real but mostly seasonal. There is some light manufacturing in the north and an auto industry around Atessa, where Stellantis runs the biggest van factory in Europe.

Most of my readers won’t be able to rely on local jobs. I suspect you’ll either retire here, move with passive income, or work remotely from a laptop.

So for you, the lack of jobs mostly shows up as a cheap cost of living. It’s an unfair advantage, but as long as you pay your taxes, you are helping a depopulating region, and the locals won’t resent you for it. I have seen countless testimonies of people who moved to Abruzzo, and they are almost universally happy.

Quality of life

Because of Abruzzo’s few jobs and business opportunities, all four provinces score middle of the pack or worse on Il Sole 24 Ore’s quality-of-life index.

Namely:

• Teramo (68th)

• Pescara (40th)

• L’Aquila (69th)

• Chieti (62nd)

Out of 107 provinces. Pescara in particular ranks respectably, on top of being first in Italy for cultural shows per capita.

By the way, language-wise, don’t expect Abruzzo to speak English. You might hear it on occasion in Pescara in August, but this is squarely Italian-is-a-must territory.

Crime

Abruzzo is safe, but a small degree of visible crime does exist. For example, Pescara is 31st in the country for crime, with car theft being particularly prominent there.

Teramo is 53rd (5th for prostitution exploitation). Chieti, 79th (3rd for loan-sharking, but it’s a very small sample of only four reported crimes).

L’Aquila is 86th but 3rd for attempted homicide and 10th for smuggling.

On the whole, crime is not a major concern here.

Climate and Cost

As we were saying, Abruzzo really is two regions in one. The mountains are cold and snowy. L’Aquila is one of the coldest regional capitals in Italy, and Roccaraso is a legitimate ski town.

Conversely, the coast is mild in winter, and hot and humid in the summer.

As you can expect, it’s more expensive than the interior. That said, by Italian standards, Abruzzo remains cheap. Even coastal Abruzzo. Asking prices for the Chieti coast rarely clear €1,700 per square meter. The regional average looks big because it’s inflated by ski resorts demanding north of €2,700 per square meter.

I personally see the coast as the preferable option, plus the whole “house won’t fall on me during an earthquake” thing it has going for it.

And always remember that the asking prices you see on the portals are rarely what the sellers end up getting. It’s a buyer’s market. Especially in Abruzzo. Offer 20% below listing price and move from there.

Running the filter on Abruzzo

Abruzzo is not densely (or very) populated, so the population filter does most of the screening for us. Apply the 15,000-100,000 range and 288 comuni get dropped in one pass.

Pescara has over 100,000 people, and Montesilvano and Spoltore are joining it in January 2027, so all three are out.

Abruzzo really is four cities, and then small towns and semi-empty villages.

The seismic filter kills L’Aquila, Avezzano, and the incredibly charming Sulmona on the spot. You can go live there if you want, but do so with open eyes. Pay attention to the seismic retrofitting measures of a given property you’re considering.

The depopulation filter takes out most of the remaining comuni that won’t ultimately make the cut. Chieti is down 7.2% since 2014, well above the 5% filter threshold. Teramo down 6.2%. Ortona, 6.9%.

What we are left with is eight towns, all on or beside the coast.

1. Vasto (Chieti)

• Province: Chieti (CH)

• Population: 40,400

• Seismic risk: Zone 3

• Stability: 0%

• Price range: €1,300-2,200/m² (average: ~€1,640)

• 7% eligible: No (over 30k)

Vasto is coastal but doesn’t simply behave like a resort. It’s closer to being an actual city. At over 40,000 people, you start to have the advantages of larger towns, including self-sufficiency and services like a first-level hospital and ER. You also get seismic Zone 3, the lowest hazard level available in the region.

The downside for retired and passive income folks is that it’s too big to qualify for the 7% tax rate. But if you are still working, its size is mostly an advantage for you.

Like many cities on the Adriatic Sea, Vasto is somewhat seasonal. It has an old center on a hilltop that remains stable and a newer coastal marina area that gets busy during the summer months. Choose according to taste and budget. The seafront can be quite a bit more expensive than the old town.

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The US Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a former heroin addict. He also knows how to fix the American drug crisis.

I envy his certainty, never letting nuance get in the way of his ideas.

Because the man does have one idea worth discussing.

RFK Jr.’s blueprint for the drug epidemic is a vineyard in the peaceful hills behind Rimini. He has been enamored with Italy’s San Patrignano, the largest drug-recovery community in Europe, which he sees as the template for a national network of “wellness farms.”

He has talked about children being “reparented” on such farms, and has described San Patrignano as a beautiful place with 2,000 children working the land. When challenged later on, he said he did not recall using the word.

The wellness farm concept is not new. In the Victorian era, this approach was a common mental health treatment that spread across the UK and North America.

“Asylum” or “pauper farms” were large agricultural estates that were self-sufficient due to the labor of their patients.

Dairy, meat, vegetables, and other goods were produced to feed the large numbers of staff and patients who lived on site. They were almost like towns unto themselves with many self-contained services.

Mental health experts at the time saw this as not just an economic advantage, but a chance to teach its residents self-discipline and practical skills. Additionally, physical labor and exercise were seen as therapeutic.

Just like San Patrignano, these farms’ approach looked holistic. Common sense-driven. Even idyllic. However, this treatment came as a smooth-coated pill that’s easy to swallow but leaves a bitter aftertaste for decades.

To correct claims RFK has made: there are around 850 residents, not 2,000. Most of them today are adult men, not teenagers.

Reporters inquired, and the community itself showed surprise at the attention. They had no memory of Kennedy ever visiting or contacting them.

The reason the model appeals to him is clear: it echoes his own recovery. What he and his administration keep missing is that San Patrignano was never a model.

The long-standing argument around it is still alive. Italy has been debating it since 1978 without ever reaching a verdict.

What San Patrignano is

Much like the Victorian farms, San Patrignano is also, in essence, a self-contained village located on an extensive amount of land (i.e., 700 acres).

It sits in the comune (municipality) of Coriano, an inland town in the province of Rimini. The community has everything it needs, including a vineyard, horse stables, multiple kitchens, and dormitories. It also features dairy, leather, and textile workshops.

Residents do not stay for the standard short-term treatments of 28 days, but for approximately three to four years. They develop a routine of waking up on schedule, working all day in one of the production sectors, and nothing is owed for their stay.

The whole community runs on their labor, and the generous donations of wealthy donors well known to their founder.

The method is total abstinence, strictly enforced. No prescriptions of methadone or buprenorphine, the two medications most addiction doctors consider the standard of care for opioids.

Recovery is peer-led by graduates of the program, not by physicians. For many years, there were barely any doctors on site at all. A fact that would later lead to many questions of safety.

So if you’ve been imagining a posh wellness retreat with Italian sun, recalibrate. Kids of celebrities have been here, but this isn’t celebrity rehab. It’s a working community. One whose exit was controlled for decades by a single man: its founder, Vincenzo Muccioli.

Before Italy built a system, it built Vincenzo

To understand why San Patrignano came into existence, one must understand how heroin found its way into the homes of everyday Italian families with a death grip that no one could seem to loosen.

Heroin arrived in volume in the mid-1970s and then suddenly blew up. Estimates placed the number of opiate users in 1977 at 28,000. The number tripled in five years. In the following decade, over 5,000 people died from drug use, most of them from heroin.

As a child in Ostia (Rome), I remember having to step carefully due to the large presence of needles on the sidewalk and playgrounds. Everybody knew someone whose kid was addicted.

What users did not anticipate were the consequences of sharing needles. AIDS came as the unintended passenger and finished what the overdoses started.

The state did little in response to the bodies piling up for decades and the families screaming for help.

In fairness, it’s a hard problem to crack. But in 1975 Italy’s drug laws were some of the most relaxed in Europe. Public addiction services, the SerT clinics, did not exist in nationwide organized form until 1990, when a law created them.

Into that desperation walked Vincenzo Muccioli. Burly, mustachioed, magnetic. A hotel-family businessman, farmer, natural-health enthusiast, and fringe spiritualist with no medical training and total conviction. He started taking addicts onto his farm and getting them clean by force.

Desperate parents worshipped him for setting boundaries and speaking to their loved ones in ways that they could not. He became, on Italian television, a kind of secular saint, or a strong father figure for those who wandered and found themselves lost.

Italy didn’t design a response to its heroin generation. Instead, its desperation built a well-spoken hero, and then it felt the problem was contained safely within his hands.

That is the classic role Italians recognize instantly, and Americans typically don’t: the padre-padrone (father-master). That is the strongman whose methods we might not like, but he gets it done when institutions won’t even dare to touch a problem. And for his trouble, he demands absolute obedience.

Muccioli wasn’t so much running a clinic; he was running a patriarchal society. A frightened country was grateful to let him wrestle an enemy it did not yet understand. He was their David, as they waited anxiously for Goliath’s head.

The chains, and the body wrapped in a blanket

The trouble with handing one man absolute authority over thousands of people (who are essentially captive) is that it works only as well, and as compassionately, as the benevolent dictator who runs it.

Within a few years of its opening, both success stories and rumors of abuses began to emerge. In 1983, the first official scandal was prominently featured in the newspapers: il processo delle catene (the Chains Trial). Muccioli was accused of chaining residents.

Detoxification is a complex procedure that is normally medically supervised. The process is brutal, and without proper oversight it can turn dangerous, or even deadly, fast.

San Patrignano had almost none of that oversight. It was focused instead on keeping residents from leaving and returning to the streets, by any means necessary.

Muccioli was convicted at first instance in 1985, then acquitted on appeal and cleared definitively by the Cassazione in 1990. Former residents nonetheless testified, in detail, to being chained, and described a community where someone was tasked with hunting down those who escaped and beating them.

The violence they applied at San Patrignano had a logic. A twisted one. One you wouldn’t assume. But a logic nevertheless.

For most residents, what got you chained was not using again. The mortal sin was attempting to leave before Muccioli arbitrarily decided you were ready. By and large, the beatings were reserved for those trying to escape or refusing to show enough reverence towards Muccioli. Much of the documented abuse appears to have centered on refusal to bow and assimilate.

Then, it happened. It was bound to. A body appeared.

In 1989, a former resident, Roberto Maranzano, was beaten to death at San Patrignano, his body then dumped near Naples, five hundred kilometres away, wrapped in a community blanket.

In 1993, recordings surfaced in which Muccioli discussed having learned of the killing and not reporting it, the conduct he would be convicted of covering up.

He was convicted of helping to cover up the death of Maranzano. In 1995, at 61, he died with the case still on appeal. The family never publicly disclosed the cause of death and, as one would expect, many speculative theories have been born.

We are not here to judge a dead man, who, drunk on power or not, ultimately tried to help a lost generation. We are here to judge his approach.

And the approach is stripping people of everything, locking the gate, removing any agency, demanding absolute compliance, and giving one charismatic father figure unchecked, medically unsupervised power over them. The abuse is not a bug. It’s the logical conclusion of the design.

Why Italy still argues about Vincenzo Muccioli

Italians are often split on matters of public opinion. That is not unique to us. What’s slightly more unique is our television culture that builds heroes and then tears them down.

We certainly did with Muccioli.

In the 1980s, the talk shows couldn’t stop talking about this saint saving our addicted youth. The big names of Italian TV all put him on. The donations rolled in, most of them from one family. The Morattis, the oil dynasty behind Saras, would pour in something like €286 million over the years. Celebrities sent their own kids who struggled with drugs.

When the trials came, the same cameras swung around and filmed him in a much less favorable light.

This is yet another case in which giustizia spettacolo, justice as television, plays out just as it did in the Cogne murder case. The audience becomes the judge of the court proceedings replayed as a prime-time melodrama on TV. One that reaches its verdict well before all the evidence is even presented.

In 2020, Netflix dropped SanPa: Sins of the Savior, a scathing documentary that allowed a whole new audience to judge.

Muccioli’s heirs sued for defamation. His son wrote a book calling the portrayal biased and one-sided. Former residents published their own accounts, some damning, some grateful, all of them certain, and all adding to the confusion that is “SanPa.”

Forty-plus years on, there is still no agreed story. Italy does not metabolize its past and move on. It argues about it, loudly, indefinitely. In the end, the public jury is perpetually a hung one. San Patrignano is just one of the louder arguments.

Is San Patrignano still open today?

Yes. It runs today, but in a smaller and quieter form. Here’s what changed:

• Muccioli has been dead for 30 years;

• His family stopped running San Patrignano in 2011;

• It admits a much smaller number of addicts and only those who are no longer in active withdrawal;

• There is no credible evidence that chains or beatings are used today.

What changed is the coercion, not the model. The long stays, the abstinence-only approach, the unpaid work.

We can argue about what’s left, but the chains and the blanket thankfully belong to a man who has been dead since 1995.

San Patrignano, by its own account, has taken in more than 25,000 people across four decades. It sells goods to keep itself going, such as wine, cured meats, and leather goods. It’s also perfectly possible to visit, eat there, or order a case of its Sangiovese.

The community publishes the numbers that make Kennedy and others swoon: 72% of graduates stay off drugs, and 92% find work. Treat those as claims, not verified findings.

Long-term abstinence rates are notoriously hard to measure and harder to compare across programs. Take those stats with a grain of salt, as an organization that grades its own homework is not peer-reviewed research.

Actual researchers, meanwhile, warn that an abstinence-only model with no medication is exactly the wrong tool against fentanyl, where medication is often the only thing keeping people alive long enough to recover.

The most honest take on the community, arguably, came from a firsthand witness: Pierfrancesco Villaggio. He’s the son of Paolo Villaggio, the actor every Italian knows as Fantozzi.

Pierfrancesco started shooting heroin at seventeen. By age twenty-two, his family had burned through a fortune trying clinics in Switzerland and California with no success.

In 1984, his father got him through the gate at Coriano by deception, allegedly an Oscar-worthy performance involving a rented car. He stayed there for three years.

He claims the place saved his life. He has also admitted to being beaten there, and that things close to torture happened. He claimed that of all of the men he detoxed alongside, a couple got clean, but sadly most are dead.

Both halves of this argument are him. When asked years later whether he’d send his own child to Muccioli, he didn’t blink or hesitate: yes, without a doubt.

That is the whole complicated story in one man. Not a column of pros and a column of cons to be added up.

The same gate, the same hero (or monster) and the same three years that broke people and freed them, sometimes the very same person.

What RFK Jr. gets wrong

Kennedy’s idea was publicly challenged in April 2026, when Senator Angela Alsobrooks questioned him for his remark about “reparenting” children on these wellness farms.

He said he apologizes if he used that term, but doesn’t recall using it. He still stood firm on the idea, which at times he's floated for more than just addicts, including kids he says have been harmed by the overprescription of antidepressants.

RFK Jr. treats San Patrignano like an Italian recipe America could cook at home. The main ingredients: grapes, work, and abstinence. Perhaps a strong man in charge. A real man. Like Vincenzo. Or himself.

What he doesn’t see is the whole picture and the place's history. San Patrignano wasn’t engineered. It emerged out of a specific catastrophe: a dying generation, an absent government, and parents frightened enough to surrender their kids to a man’s total authority.

The farm was the visible front of the deal. The respectable one. The desperation and unchecked power, the invisible one. At times, the deadly one.

The community itself, notably, has not been campaigning to become America’s blueprint. It seems to understand its own story better than its loudest American admirer does. It operates quietly and wishes to distance itself from the controversial past.

San Patrignano’s own medical director, Antonio Boschini, told NPR the model can’t be safely scaled to a national program: when the community tried to expand in the 1990s, he said, it went out of control, and someone was killed.

The vineyard is the easy part to copy. Anyone can plant grapes on a hillside and set recovering addicts to work among them. Implementing this model compassionately in a way that’s aligned with current evidence on addiction treatment is the real challenge.

The stories from SanPa and the echoes of abuse from the Victorian past do not help to get the public on board with another attempt at this model of treatment.

The saddest part is the absence at the center of it. A generation was dying, the state had gone quiet, and a country was frightened enough to hand its children to one large, certain man and call whatever he did to them love.

In the end, Italy got the man it needed and asked for. Whether he was a hero or a villain depends on whom you ask.

For decades, the country has tried its best to decide whether to thank him or to condemn him for what he built, somehow managing to do both.

Now, an ocean away, another certain man wants to try the same.

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In 1998, in a popular episode of Seinfeld, a robber grabs Jerry’s small leather bag. A cop nearby asks him to describe what was stolen. He hesitates. He uses euphemisms. He squirms. Finally, he relents and loudly admits that it’s a purse. He carries a purse.

For the entire duration of the episode, his defense was that it’s not a purse. It’s a European carry-all.

Jerry was actually right. It was European. He was wearing a borsello, the Italian man bag. He was just twenty years too early to win that argument in North America.

Because, believe it or not, the man purse won. Quietly, worn slightly differently, and under an assumed name, but it won. Many North American men carry one even if they would physically fight you for calling it a purse.

The women reading this, meanwhile, solved the whole problem around the invention of the handbag and have probably been watching men reinvent it ever since.

What is a borsello?

A borsello is a small men's bag. The word comes from borsa (bag), and the masculine diminutive marks it as a men's item.

Italian has a remarkably specific vocabulary for bags. Portafoglio is a wallet. Borsellino is a coin wallet or very small bag. Marsupio is a belt bag, what North Americans call a fanny pack. The tracolla is any bag worn crossbody. The pochette is a flat clutch bag carried in hand (rare among straight men, even in Italy). A zaino is a backpack.

Size-wise, a borsello sits in between a portafoglio and a zaino. It has a strap that you wear on your shoulder or across your body.

Inside you’ll typically find a phone, keys, wallet, tissues (virtually everyone in Italy carries pocket tissues), and other small accessories.

Italian trousers are cut close, and we really care about style in Italy. So the borsello emerged as a solution to the problem of bulging pockets wrecking the line. Form leading to function. Very Italian.

Why North American men rejected the man purse

Ask an Italian man why he carries a borsello, and he’ll be puzzled by the question. Where is his stuff supposed to go?

Ask the same question to a guy in rural Alberta, and you’ve just questioned his masculinity. Fighting words.

The gap is cultural, not practical. North American culture spent decades mocking any man carrying a bag without a laptop in it.

Seinfeld is the documentary record. So is Friends, where Joey insists his man bag isn't a purse. And so is The Hangover, for that matter, where Alan insists he’s not wearing a purse. He’s wearing a satchel. Indiana Jones wears one.

In three of America’s most prominent examples of a man with a bag, the guy scrambles to explain that the thing on his shoulder isn’t what it obviously is.

Here’s what they were dancing around: the bag was never the issue. The word purse was.

An Italian man doesn’t need a cover story. Carrying your things in a bag is culturally normative for both men and women. Nobody will question your sexuality because of it.

A man in Naples with a leather tracolla reads as put-together and well-prepared, not soft. So if you’re visiting and you’re worried that a bag would make you look unmanly, stop. The locals dropped that anxiety roughly half a century ago.

The sling bag is a man purse with a rebrand

Centuries ago, both men and women wore purses. Then men’s clothes began to have pockets, and men stopped wearing them while women continued.

The need to hold things never went away. North American men simply remedied it with bulging pockets. But the amount of stuff we need to hold has grown over time. Phones alone take a full pocket. Our keys include car key fobs. In the summer months, having sunglasses with you is handy. You get the gist.

So the moment it became socially acceptable to have a bag, many North American men flocked to it. The clever trick was rebranding the bag.

It was no longer a man purse, a murse, or a men’s bag. It was a sling: one strap, worn across the chest or back, marketed within an inch of its life. The fastest-growing men’s bag in North America.

Go to Amazon, and the bestsellers in the men’s category aren’t labelled as purses. They are “sling bags”, “tactical sling bags”, “technical sling bags”, “anti-theft crossbody bags”, and “EDC chest rigs” (EDC being everyday carry, a whole hobby around things you keep on you just in case).

The product is a small bag you wear on your body. Which is to say, a borsello! The marketing just bolted on some webbing and called it gear.

The man purse in North America started calling itself tactical (for the blue-collar crowd) or technical (for the white-collar one). Both groups, the same ones who'd have mocked Jerry, now buy theirs in coyote brown or solid black.

This isn’t me projecting. Industry numbers show a men’s luxury bag market north of $10 billion in 2025, and the broader chest-and-sling category has been growing at double digits year after year.

Google Trends shows an 80% worldwide growth in search interest for the keyword “sling bag men” over 2025. And it doubled in the United States. “crossbody bag men” grew 300% in the US over the same period.

Sling vs borsello in Italy

In Italy, the keyword “borsello” is up 10% over 2025, a modest number justified by a more mature market and the diversification introduced by sling bags. “borsa sling” grew over 5,000%, and it’s a breakout keyword in Italy.

In North America, a generation of men decided pockets weren’t enough and found a word that gave them permission. “Sling” was the magic word, one that is starting to appeal to Italians too.

The split between borsello and sling in Italy is geographic and demographic.

Younger men, especially in the north, are embracing slings or a slim tracolla, often by well-known designers (Gucci, Lacoste, etc.). Older men, especially in the south, tend to prefer the traditional borsello option. In the north, the borsello is starting to have zio (uncle) energy.

I’m 45 and an actual uncle, so I’m perfectly fine with my preference for the traditional borsello.

A good bag solves a real problem (pockets are small, cities have thieves, men carry phones now) without announcing itself as a fashion statement or a gender role argument. The bag, whether a borsello or a sling, is just a bag.

Jerry, Joey, and Alan were mocked for carrying a man bag. Two decades later, men everywhere carry a small bag to the gym, the office… even the club. What changed is the product name and the price tag.

Italians skipped all of that. They looked at a small bag that holds things and figured it was useful and stylish. So, they never felt the need to come up with a cover story.

Sometimes carrying a purse and calling it that is the most confident thing a man can do.

Appendix: my borselli

I’m not a prepper. You won’t find a basement full of canned beans, just in case. But I do like to be ready, and I'm into the everyday-carry hobby to some extent. A multitool, flashlight, pen and notebook, tissues, the medical basics… that kind of thing.

They have to live somewhere. So over the years I’ve ended up with more borselli than a man strictly needs. Alicia doesn’t feel judged for doing the same with her purses, so our addiction to bags is something of a family bonding activity.

The one I bought in Assisi (depicted above) is the truest form of borsello: Italian leather that creases and darkens with age, vertical in cut, with room for just the essentials. Pure zio energy.

The one that makes me look like a tourist is a gray Pacsafe with lockable zippers, an RFID pocket, and a slash-proof strap with embedded steel wire. It’s my travel one. The ultimate borsello for the borseggiatori (pickpockets) problem. Form following fear.

But any bag worn across your front with your hands on it offers an effective defense. Wear it on your back, and you’ve just gift-wrapped it for the borseggiatori.

The other borselli I own, in case you’re curious, are from Tumi, Piquadro, Tom Bihn, and WaterField. All four brands make remarkably good borselli, and I highly recommend them.

Finally, the bag on me most days is made of nylon. A Fjallraven Vardag 6 (in coal black). Not leather, not Italian, horizontal instead of vertical, but still a borsello.

That is a man purse. I carry a purse, officer.

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This post is part of a series of articles meant to help you find Italian towns worth moving to.

We apply strict filters, region by region, and see what comes out of the other end of the sieve. The survivors are typically livable cities, neither too big nor too small. Towns and cities that are generally worthy of consideration. It is the framework I would use to choose a town myself.

So far, I covered Marche, Tuscany, and Veneto. Today, we are discussing Campania: the region of Napoli (Naples) and the Costiera Amalfitana (Amalfi Coast).

Where to live in Campania turns out to be a tougher question than the postcards suggest.

A disclaimer

I’m biased when it comes to Campania, and it’s not just the food. My entire family is from near Napoli.

I love the region despite its many flaws. My parents spoke to us in Neapolitan at home, and I grew up on Neapolitan songs and movies. I still have more relatives in Ischia (near Napoli) than in Roma or the Marche.

There is a romantic part of me that would move there. I won’t let it affect my judgment. This series is about applying rigorous filters to each region, so I’ll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly, even for regions I’m partial to.

What it’s actually like to live in Campania

Campania has 550 comuni (municipalities) and about 5.6 million people, one of the most crowded regions in the country.

Nearly three million of those people live near Napoli. So the region is certainly densely populated, but in a lopsided way.

Along with its capital Napoli (one of 15 metropolitan cities), Campania has four additional traditional provinces: Caserta, Benevento, Avellino, and Salerno.

Campania has the Tyrrhenian Sea, a beautiful climate (especially near the coast), and amazing food (some of the best in the whole country). The people are warm, friendly, and genuinely funny.

Dialect is heavily used around these parts, but the hospitable nature of the local population means they'll do their best to speak Italian with you. You’ll need Italian outside of tourism hotspots, and over time, you’ll pick up some of the local dialect. Integration in this region should not be particularly challenging.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. We are in the south, after all. There are problems. Big ones. So I’ll spend a little more time than I normally would to warn you about them before you pack your bags and move there. I’ll even introduce some ad hoc filters to spare you the worst this region has to offer.

First and foremost, Campania’s unemployment rates are among the highest in Italy. Youth unemployment around Napoli is 43%. The national average is 16.9%.

If you show up with retirement income or a remote job, this is mostly background noise. If you arrive hoping to work locally, these statistics should give you ample pause.

And so should the rankings of the Campania provinces in Il Sole 24 Ore’s latest quality-of-life table (for 2025):

• Caserta (101)

• Benevento (76)

• Napoli (104)

• Avellino (77)

• Salerno (90)

Those rankings are out of 107 provinces. So all five “provinces” are in the bottom third, and Napoli is almost dead last (a dishonor that consistently belongs to Reggio Calabria).

Residents can’t get jobs and don’t feel safe, and this is reflected in the provinces’ rankings. Sadly, there are bigger, related issues that deserve their own section.

The Camorra, the fires, and the water

I cannot in good conscience write about living in Campania without mentioning the Camorra. The Napoli-based mafia is not a highly hierarchical structure but rather a group of fighting clans sustaining themselves through pizzo (protection money), drug trafficking, public contracts, waste, and counterfeiting.

Let’s go beyond what you see on Gomorrah and look at what the Camorra actually means for you. If you are an ordinary resident with a salary or working remotely, the Camorra is not going to be a major problem. They affect everything in the territory and the local economy, don’t get me wrong, but they won’t shake you down on your way to the local bar.

If you open a cash business, on the other hand, you can count on a member of the local clan coming knocking and asking for a monthly protection payment or “else.”

Yet, for you, a retiree or remote worker, the waste management is the bigger problem. For decades, various clans dumped and buried toxic waste across the region, particularly on the plain between Napoli and Caserta. This stretch is known as Terra dei Fuochi (Land of Fires) because of the burnings used to destroy waste.

Years of contamination have led to well-documented high rates of cancer in this zone. In January 2025, the European Court of Human Rights found Italy in violation of the right to life for its decades-long failure to address toxic waste contamination across the Terra dei Fuochi zone. If you find cheap real estate around those parts, that’s the reason.

And then there is water quality. The Domizio coast (in northern Caserta) has a long record of bathing bans. The Sarno river is among the most polluted rivers in Europe. Il golfo di Napoli has polluted, busy waters.

If you go south down to Salerno, the coast cleans up nicely, and you’ll even find Blue Flag beaches. The good news is that most of the towns that survive our filters cluster around that area.

The expanded filters

For Campania, I used the core filters we always use: a town between 15,000 and 100,000 inhabitants, an ER within 25 minutes, a high school in town, a full supermarket, fiber internet, outside of a seismic Zone 1, and not depopulating fast (up to a maximum 5.0% loss over the past decade).

The population and depopulation filters do the heavy lifting here. Southern Italy is emptying. Remember the lack of jobs? The youth are leaving for better opportunities in the north of Italy or outside the country altogether.

The world-famous Sorrento? It's beautiful but has lost almost 10% of its population over the past decade.

All these criteria screen out most cities in Campania, but not quite enough to hand you a list.

On top of these standard filters, in generous regions, I have also applied the optional filters: train station in town and within 30 minutes of a provincial capital. Here, they do virtually nothing to further screen the candidate cities.

Instead, I added three extra filters that help you distinguish livable from problematic towns.

1. Terra dei fuochi

I excluded any comune on the official list of Terra dei fuochi municipalities. I will simply not send you to a town controlled by the Camorra with toxic waste all around you. Yes, real estate is incredibly cheap there. It’s still not worth it.

2. Volcanoes

You’re likely familiar with the story of Pompei and Ercolano. The volcano that caused all that? It’s still there.

Our original filters focused on seismic risk, since it’s a much more common issue across Italy. But in Campania, volcanic activity is a key concern, and I must introduce a special filter to exclude the most critical areas.

Campania has two zone rosse (red zones, mandatory evacuation areas). I treat them as if they were seismic Zone 1, because the risk profile is similar.

The Vesuvius red zone removes 17 towns by itself, including Torre del Greco, Portici, Ercolano, Pompei, and Torre Annunziata.

The second red zone is Campi Flegrei (Phlegraean Fields), a supervolcano that has shown a lot of activity lately, including consistent ground uplift (bradyseism). This removes Pozzuoli, Bacoli, and Quarto.

The latter in particular is at risk not only from volcanic activity but also from earthquakes. I am not sending anyone to live on top of that.

3. The towns that pass every test and still aren't places

The third special filter is qualitative rather than quantitative, but it exists because I’m very familiar with the Campania region and I don’t want to steer you in the wrong direction.

A town fails this filter if it is swallowed up into a “district” (technically, a so-called conurbation) rather than a place. I’m talking about dense rings around major Campanian cities.

These include the ring north of Napoli (Casoria, Afragola, Arzano), the Agro Aversano around Aversa, the Caserta belt, the Agro Nocerino-Sarnese, and the Nocera-Pagani-Angri-Sarno corridor toward Salerno.

Even if these comuni pass most filters, they are still not cities in the way this whole framework intends them.

A bit of backstory will clarify the issue. Napoli grew fast after World War II. The overflow had to go somewhere. And it ended up on the flat farmland on the outskirts through abusivismo edilizio (build first, get it condoned later), with the roads and sewers arriving many years later.

Eventually, these became comuni, all very similar to each other. The boundaries between them were fields at some point. Eventually, housing went up, and the line between comuni with different names became blurry. A road sign indicating the boundary was the only distinctive feature between one town and the next.

In Italian, we call this saldatura urbana (the welding of separate towns into one mass). Move there, and you inherit the density, traffic, bad air, and the Camorra’s footprint of a big city. In exchange, you get… none of the payoffs of a real city like Napoli or Salerno, or a real città di provincia.

Speaking of big cities, it might be worth briefly mentioning what rules out all the capital cities in Campania:

• Napoli and Salerno: too big (population ceiling).

• Benevento (seismic zone 1).

• Avellino and Caserta: (depopulation).

Eight comuni survived all this, six on the mainland and two on an island. Let’s review them.

1. Montoro

• Province: Avellino (AV)

• Population: 19,437

• Seismic risk: Zone 2

• Stability: -1.00% (2014-2024)

• Price range: €850-1,050/m²

• 7% eligible: Yes

Montoro is an agglomerate of fifteen villages, scattered across the Irno valley, between Avellino and Salerno.

It’s not particularly pretty, but it’s functional. You get cheap property, a quick commute to both Avellino and Salerno, all the services of a larger comune, without much of the chaos.

The real downside is that it’s not really an historic town with a beautiful piazza. And on occasion, you’ll catch the smell of the Solofra tanneries a few kilometers away.

In my mind, Montoro is a consideration if you need a tranquil, well-positioned area that is not affected by major issues and can still be had for sub-€1,000 per square meter.

You’re choosing convenience over character, and your wallet is rewarded for it.

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Montroz (in the town of Cogne) is a hamlet in the Aosta Valley. Think peace, fresh air, and snow-capped roofs.

A three-year-old was bludgeoned to death here.

A little after 8 am on the morning of the 30th of January 2002, a local woman named Annamaria Franzoni started the usual school-day ritual of taking her eldest son for a short three-hundred-meter walk to the school bus stop.

At 8:28 am, she frantically called for an ambulance. She also placed a call to the family doctor who lived next door. When she had returned home, she went upstairs to discover a gruesome scene. Her three-year-old son, Samuele Lorenzi, was in bed upstairs, covered in blood.

That heartbreaking phone call opened the Delitto di Cogne (the Cogne Murder). It also led to the most followed crime story Italy has ever seen.

Cogne is the case that taught Italian television a trick it never unlearned: how to turn a dead child and a wrecked family into a cardboard model of a house wheeled onto national television.

The events in Cogne on 30 January 2002

The facts are simple, but the timeline is crucial to the whole case.

Stefano Lorenzi, Samuele’s father, had left for work. Annamaria stayed home caring for their two young boys like any other day. The six-year-old, Davide, went off to school while little Samuele stayed home in bed.

By her own account, Franzoni walked Davide to the bus stop, was away only a few minutes, and came back to find Samuele clinging to life in the parents’ bed with severe head trauma.

His little body had been brutally struck seventeen times. The walls, bed linens, floor, and surfaces of the bedroom were sprayed with blood in the savage attack.

Curiously, there was blood in a basin of water that someone had used to wash his face. Samuele was urgently flown to nearby Aosta by helicopter, but tragically, he was declared dead at the hospital.

Here is the fundamental problem that three courts and the public spent six years debating. The family home showed absolutely no evidence of a break-in. No items of value were taken, damaged, or even moved. The only adult inside the home that morning was Annamaria.

An even more challenging aspect of this case was the narrow window of time in which a stranger could have entered, killed a sleeping child, washed the boy’s face, and slipped away unseen. This was, depending on whose stopwatch you trust, somewhere between approximately eight minutes and almost none.

The defense built everything on those eight minutes. An intruder, in and out undetected, in the time it takes to walk a kid to the bus.

The prosecution built its case on this timing and the mother’s blood-stained pajamas and clogs.

The part that outlived the trial

Within weeks, the case stopped being an investigation and became a television format. The case was discussed in bars, living rooms, and every piazza. Every week, more details and speculation were released like a weekly episode in an ongoing crime drama.

On Rai 1, the journalist Bruno Vespa wheeled out a plastico (a scale model) of the Lorenzi home. This detailed model featured rooms, stairs, and a small bed. The model home was built in such a way that a studio audience could easily follow the competing theories like a board game.

His show, Porta a Porta, had found its signature object. Vespa would go on to build plastici for half the tragedies of the next two decades, from Avetrana to the Costa Concordia. Cogne was just the first.

After initial reluctance, Franzoni did the talk-show circuit in an effort to plead her innocence to an entire country. She freely wept on camera. On the Maurizio Costanzo Show, the host drew out of her, on live air, that she was pregnant again. This pregnancy came less than a year after Samuele died.

After one televised interview, with the camera still running, she was overheard asking the crew whether she had cried too much. This very question followed her into the courtroom.

We Italians have a phrase for what this became: giustizia spettacolo, justice as show business. Criminologists turned into regular household names from their TV appearances. The studio became a second courtroom for the viewers, louder than the first and bound by none of its rules.

It’s the same public and argumentative streak that makes Italy relitigate its own twentieth century out in the open. Only here it was targeted at a family in the worst week of its life, with many forgetting it is a real case with a real victim.

If you’ve ever wondered why Italian true crime feels so theatrical next to the American variety, this is the headwater. Cogne is where the country learned it couldn’t look away, and decided it shouldn’t have to.

The pajamas, the clogs, and a forensic first

In Italian, an unresolved crime is a giallo, a “yellow,” after the yellow covers of the cheap Mondadori paperbacks that began in 1929. These affordable paperbacks provided a steady diet of mystery to their hungry audience of readers.

Cogne quickly became il giallo di Cogne without the flimsy cover. Except, legally, it wasn’t a mystery at all. Annamaria was convicted in Aosta in 2004, again on appeal in Turin in 2007, and definitively by the Cassazione (Italy’s supreme court) in 2008.

Franzoni was not taking psychiatric medication and reportedly suffered a panic attack a few hours before the killing. Whether that was significant remains impossible to know. What convicted Annamaria Franzoni, however, was blood, and according to the prosecution’s forensic experts, the specific pattern of it.

The morning of the murder, she had been wearing a set of light blue pajamas and a pair of zoccoli (clogs), and both carried Samuele’s blood. The Carabinieri’s forensic lab, the RIS unit from Parma, argued the stains were spatter, thrown off at the moment of the blows.

According to the prosecution’s forensic experts, these were not the smears of a distraught mother picking up her son, but the telltale signs of a full-blown assault.

To prove this theory, they used bloodstain pattern analysis. They read the size, shape, and angle of each droplet to determine where everyone stood. This technique had barely been seen in an Italian courtroom before.

This made Cogne the case that popularized bloodstain pattern analysis in Italian courtrooms. That’s the part that ages well. The circus that forgot the murdered young victim in favour of television drama is the part that dated badly.

Two things in this case were never settled. The weapon was never found, and theories ranged from a ladle to a fireplace tool, a pan, and just about every other household item imaginable. People speculated for years, but nothing was ever found, and no one established why. The courts convicted her without an established weapon or motive.

People hear “weapon never found” and reach for reasonable doubt. In Cogne, it cuts the other way. The judges reasoned that an outsider to the home would have no reason to carry the weapon off the property and every reason to run. On the other hand, someone living in the house had every reason to make it vanish. Absence became supporting evidence.

My own thoughts after researching (for what it’s worth): the idea of the eight-minute intruder always asked too much. A stranger walks into a locked house, in a hamlet where everyone knows every car, kills a sleeping toddler, leaves not a trace of himself, and takes the weapon, all inside the time it takes to come back from a bus stop. Three courts didn’t buy it, and I don’t either.

That doesn’t mean every question was answered, only that the alternative explanation always required greater leaps of faith.

But I’d rather tell you the science was strong than pretend the case had no holes. To be fair, it had them, and Franzoni has spent twenty years living in them.

Her husband and family, to this day, proclaim her innocence. Stefano never left her side or showed any feelings of doubt about his wife’s innocence.

The villagers turn on the family

Cogne, on any ordinary day, is considered a great place. Shy of fourteen hundred people, it is the gateway to Gran Paradiso (Italy's oldest national park) and sits in a region that lands near the top of Italy's annual quality-of-life rankings for safety and calm.

The village was accustomed to welcoming ice climbers and trail runners, not television crews and crime reporters. That stark contrast is part of why the case detonated the way it did.

Another forgotten aspect was that the Lorenzis weren’t from the valley. They were residents there, but did not have deep roots in the community. Husband and wife both came from the hills around Bologna, hundreds of kilometers south. They had met in Cogne and settled in to start their family. To the villagers, they were new arrivals, not natives.

A remote Alpine community closes fast when locals begin to be pulled into the crime. When the family lawyers began pointing at neighbors, suggesting a local had done it, the village’s sympathy went cold fast.

Feelings of betrayal formed as the new arrivals they previously welcomed began to point fingers at native residents. Franzoni accused a neighbor of direct involvement. A court convicted her of calunnia (criminal slander) at first instance, a verdict later wiped out on appeal when the charge timed out. The baseless accusation went nowhere, but the damage didn’t.

Cogne, for its part, got the kind of fame no quiet village wants. People drove up to photograph the infamous house. The family eventually left, likely realizing they were no longer embraced by the community, and to be closer to relatives in the Bologna area.

If you visit Cogne today for the majestic Gran Paradiso, the ibex, and the eighty kilometers of cross-country trails, you will quickly discover no locals will bring the delitto up.

In 2014, after her release, Mayor Franco Allera stated, “The news leaves us absolutely indifferent; it is the last of our thoughts. Our community has left this old story behind.”

The place spent twenty years becoming a hiking destination again instead of a crime scene. That’s the local version of justice: being allowed to be a place with its own unique identity again.

Where Annamaria Franzoni is now

Franzoni served approximately six years in prison in Bologna. In 2014, she was moved to house arrest in her family home in a mountain village 40 km away from Bologna.

By 2019, her sentence was formally over, and she has been a free woman for years. At various points, she has assisted the family business by running an agriturismo (a working farm that takes paying guests) with her family. She remains married, and their two surviving sons are now grown men.

She has never confessed. Not once, across three trials, a published book, and a small library of television appearances. Her line has always stayed constant: an intruder killed Samuele.

The Cogne villa has stayed in the family, through a bitter fight with her former celebrity lawyer (the controversial former undersecretary Carlo Taormina) over unpaid fees that at one point put the house under threat of a court-ordered auction.

She has gone back to it periodically. There are reports of her returning to the house where it happened, flowers in the windows, and the garden kept.

The law is finished with the delitto di Cogne. It decided what it could decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, and left the question of “why” frustratingly unanswered.

Sadly, what lingers isn’t the verdict but the plastico. A country watched a scale model of a dead child’s bedroom get wheeled around a television studio and decided it wanted more of that, not less.

Following this, every Italian crime since has arrived with its own model, its own studio criminologists, and its own audience of amateur investigators. “Tutti criminologi” (all criminologists) is a common criticism on social media for the latter.

Cogne is where Italy learned to watch a private and horrible event as a national television spectacle and call it news. The murders are always the story, and the victims the main characters, but sadly, they become secondary to the theatrics.

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Two bottles of balsamic vinegar are sitting on the same shelf. Both are labeled Modena. One costs a mere 5 euros. The other costs a staggering 90 euros, holds 100 ml, and comes in an attractive little bulb-shaped bottle.

The designer of that bottle? Giorgetto Giugiaro, the genius behind the DeLorean.

The legal difference between them is only three letters.

The cheap one is labeled IGP: wine vinegar mixed with grape must, ready for sale after 60 days. Caramel coloring is allowed.

The expensive one is labeled DOP because of its strict production requirements. It contains only one ingredient: cooked grape must. Nothing else. It is also aged a minimum of 12 years in a series of wooden barrels under specific conditions.

Understandably, anything that takes that long to make is going to be expensive. I made the mistake of introducing my fiancée to the DOP stuff. “Big mistake. Huge.”

Both bottles are from the province of Modena (famous for its balsamic vinegar) and have the same name on the label. Yet, there are two distinctly different experiences inside the bottles and at the cash register.

Welcome to the world of Italian food and wine labels: DOP, IGP, DOC, DOCG, STG. An alphabet that decides what a product can be called, where it can be made, and how much the consumer will pay for it.

This article is essentially a cheat sheet I designed to guide you through the confusing wilderness of Italian product labels.

I’ll spoil the surprise before the acronyms start: these labels certify origin and method. Not necessarily quality. A mediocre producer who follows the rules to the letter will get the same stamp as a top-notch one.

What the letters will tell you is that a wine comes from Montalcino and was made the Montalcino way. And that’s something, but whether it’s any good has much more to do with the individual brand and your palate for that particular style of wine.

Italy holds more protected names than any other EU country. Nearly 900 products across food, wine, and spirits. An economy worth north of 20 billion euros a year.

Let’s start with food.

Food labels: DOP, IGP, and STG

The following three labels cover the food side.

DOP (Denominazione di Origine Protetta, the EU’s PDO) is the strictest label. Everything (from raw material to finished product) happens inside a defined zone following the disciplinare (the legally binding production rulebook).

As an example, Parmigiano Reggiano DOP can only be produced in five provinces around Parma. Any identical-looking wheel made even just 30 km outside the line is legally generic hard cheese, no matter its quality.

Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP must come from water buffalo milk in designated areas of Campania and a few neighboring areas. Same idea for Prosciutto di Parma, Gorgonzola, and, of course, Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena.

Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano are both DOP and are not interchangeable. Grana’s rules permit silage feed and lysozyme, an egg-derived preservative. Parmigiano costs more as it doesn’t permit it.

As for “parmesan”: inside the EU, a 2008 court ruling reserved the word for Parmigiano Reggiano. In North America, it can mean almost anything, including the shelf-stable dust in the green can.

The Marche has a few less well-known entries here, too. Casciotta d’Urbino DOP, the soft sheep-and-cow cheese Michelangelo reportedly adored, and Cartoceto DOP, an olive oil from the hills behind Fano.

Olive oil comes only as DOP or IGP. Italy has around fifty such oils. Since oil is the most counterfeited product in the Italian pantry, the letters earn their keep here more than anywhere else.

IGP (Indicazione Geografica Protetta, PGI in English) is less strict. At least one production phase must happen in the area, and the product’s reputation must be linked to it. The recipe must be local, too. But the ingredients don’t need to be.

Mortadella Bologna IGP is made the Bologna way, but the pork can come from elsewhere. Bresaola della Valtellina IGP is cured in the Valtellina, often from beef raised in South America. That’s not cheating as it’s exactly what the label permits. Ciauscolo IGP, the delicious spreadable salami of the Marche, also sits in this tier.

So, when the origin of the raw material matters to you, always look for DOP. When you mostly care that the method used is authentic, IGP is sufficient.

STG (Specialità Tradizionale Garantita) is unique among the labels as it protects a recipe and not a place. Anyone in the EU can produce an STG if they meticulously follow the registered method.

Italy has only four: Pizza Napoletana, Mozzarella, Amatriciana Tradizionale, and, since 2022, Vincisgrassi alla Maceratese, the traditional lasagna-like baked pasta of my home region.

Wine labels: DOC, DOCG, IGT

Wine received its own pyramid decades before the EU food system even existed, and Italy never gave up on it.

There are over 500 wine denominations across IGT, DOC, and DOCG. Let’s see what they each mean.

DOC (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) ties a wine to a particular zone, approved grapes, yield limits, and aging rules. DOCG adds the G of Garantita. It enforces much stricter rules, lower yields, a government tasting panel, and the numbered paper strip (the fascetta) glued over every cork like a tax stamp.

Examples include Barolo and Barbaresco in the Langhe, Brunello di Montalcino, and Chianti Classico with its black rooster. In the Marche region, Castelli di Jesi Verdicchio Riserva DOCG is arguably the most underpriced serious white wine in Italy.

IGT (Indicazione Geografica Tipica) covers much broader areas with more relaxed rules: Toscana IGT, Marche IGT.

Below that sits the plain vino da tavola (table wine), which has no stated geographic origin or year of production.

Following the 2009 EU reform, DOC and DOCG are both legally DOP, and IGT is IGP (yes, the same labels as food). Italy was allowed to keep the old wine-specific initials, I assume, in part because nobody in the industry was going to write “Barolo DOP” with a straight face.

When Italy’s best wine was table wine

Labels and quality loosely track each other, if only because the rules tend to attract careful producers. But the presence (or lack) of classification doesn’t tell you as much as you’d think.

In the picture above, you’ll see a Chianti DOCG for just above one euro a bottle from the Eurospin discount grocery store. Fairly decent for a euro, but not the top-tier bottle the DOCG label implies.

Conversely, a lack of three (or four) letters doesn’t imply a lack of quality. One of the most interesting Italian wine stories illustrates this point.

In the 1960s and 70s, a few Tuscan producers decided the label rules were too limiting. Sassicaia planted Cabernet Sauvignon in coastal Bolgheri, where no prestigious denomination existed.

Tignanello dropped the white grapes that Chianti’s rulebook required and aged the wine in small French oak barrels (barriques), which imparted a richer flavor.

Both could only be sold as vino da tavola (table wine), the legal bottom of the pyramid.

Then, in 1978, Decanter ran a blind tasting of various Cabernets from around the world. The 1972 Sassicaia won. A humble table wine had just beaten the great Bordeaux estates.

Italy was reluctant to do anything about it for years. It finally relented in 1992, when it introduced the IGT category, in large part to give these wines (now nicknamed Super Tuscans) a respectable label.

In 2013, Sassicaia got something no other Italian wine has: its own appellation. Bolgheri Sassicaia DOC is essentially a DOC designation for a single winery.

The prestigious Tignanello remains a humble Toscana IGT, even though it sells for more than most DOCGs (something like US$180 for a 0.75-liter bottle).

The lesson is short and sweet. The pyramid ranks rule compliance, but the market ranks wine. When the two disagree, trust the producer’s name over the letters under it.

Spirits: one tier only

Spirits are a special case. They don’t get a pyramid like wines, from IGT all the way to DOCG. Instead, they have a single label: Indicazione Geografica (IG, or GI in English).

A bottle of spirits either earns the IG label or it doesn’t. No tiers hint at superior bottles.

What it protects is a place. A name tells you where the spirit was made, and by whose rules. You can distill grape marc in Germany or Canada, but you can only call it grape marc spirit. To put Grappa on the label, the pomace must be Italian, and the distilling and bottling must happen in Italy.

Below the national name sit several registered regional grappas, and a producer based in one of those regions who follows its rules may use the name.

But IG is not just about Grappa, of course. Brandy Italiano, Mirto from Sardinia, and Limoncello from Sorrento are all examples of IG protected spirits that must be produced locally.

Interestingly, Modena doesn’t simply have DOP for balsamic vinegar. It also has the IG label for Nocino di Modena, a dark walnut liqueur.

The same principle as before applies here too. The IG letters tell you that it’s an authentic walnut liqueur developed in Modena. Whether the spirit is any good is up to the producer and your perception of it.

The 5,700 unlabeled EU products

Beyond the standard Italian/EU certifications lies a register most people outside of Italy have never heard of: PAT (prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali, traditional agri-food products).

It’s a large registry of over 5,700 qualifying products. To be added, a product needs at least 25 years of documented tradition in its territory. No consortium, no official EU seal, and no fascetta. Just a simple line in a national list kept by the agriculture ministry.

In practice, the absence of a DOP seal does not mean the absence of pedigree or tradition. Some of the best foods you’ll eat in Italy carry no label whatsoever for a variety of reasons. Maybe there are too few producers, or they are too small, or uninterested in the paperwork required to form a consortium.

The PAT list is the real treasure map of such niche products.

Buon appetito

Italy built the world’s most elaborate machine for writing place names on food.

It runs on a very Italian idea: the conviction that the next province over simply can’t be trusted to do as good a job. Use these labels as we Italians do. Let them tell you where a thing comes from and how it was made.

The verdict on whether it’s good was never the state’s job. It’s yours, and it’s one job Italy happily gives out.

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