A few weeks ago, we asked our readers a simple question: if you were choosing where to live in Italy, what would matter most to you?
One answer stayed with me.
A reader talked about wanting to be near places where people naturally come together - cafés, fruit stands, community gatherings. Not because she was looking for entertainment, but because she didn’t want to move to Italy and end up feeling lonely.
That gets to the heart of something that’s surprisingly difficult about choosing where to retire.
We can compare house prices. We can look at taxes. We can check how far a town is from an airport or a hospital. Those things matter.
Where in Italy would I have the best life?
It turns out Italy has been collecting data that can help us answer that question for years.
It’s just that we can’t really get a clear answer to this question.
Italy measures quality of life — but doesn’t tell you where to live
Every year, ISTAT, Italy’s national statistics agency, publishes something called BES — Benessere Equo e Sostenibile, which means equitable and sustainable well-being.
It looks at 67 different measures across all 107 Italian provinces and metropolitan cities.
And these aren’t abstract economic statistics. Many are things you might genuinely care about when deciding where to spend the next chapter of your life.
How long do people live? How good are local services? How safe is the area? How much green space is there? How polluted is the air? How easy is it to reach essential services? What about broadband, public transport or cultural life?
You can browse the underlying BES data here: Explore the BES data
ISTAT groups the measures into 11 broad areas:
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Health
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Quality of services
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Safety
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Environment
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Economic well-being
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Education
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Work and work-life balance
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Social relationships
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Politics and institutions
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Innovation, research and creativity
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Landscape and cultural heritage
But then ISTAT does something interesting.
It stops and doesn’t give an overall score. No number-one province. No official list of the “10 best places to live in Italy.”
At first, that felt slightly frustrating. We have 67 indicators and 107 provinces. Surely we can just add everything up and see who wins?
But the more we worked with the data, the more it started to make sense. It was because your idea of a good life may be completely different from mine.
The “best” place depends on what you’re afraid of giving up
Think about what happens when people start imagining retirement in Italy.
For one person, healthcare may be non-negotiable.
Someone else wants to be able to walk out the door and find cafés, shops and people around them.
Another person dreams about clean air, mountains and green space.
Someone who plans to travel frequently may care much more about transport and services. And if your children and grandchildren will be visiting, being somewhere they can actually reach without three trains and a rental car might suddenly become very important.
That reader who mentioned cafés, fruit stands and community gatherings was really telling us something much bigger: “I want to feel connected to the place where I live.”
There isn’t one government statistic that can tell her where she’ll find that. This is why a single ranking is just not enough.
Healthcare matters. But the Healthcare number doesn’t tell the whole story
Healthcare comes up again and again when we talk to people considering retirement in Italy, so this was one of the first things we looked at.
One simple measure is life expectancy.
Across Italy, the difference between provinces is meaningful. At the top end, Lecco and Treviso are around 84.9 years. At the other end, Naples and Syracuse are around 81.4 years.
That’s a gap of about three and a half years.
But there’s another interesting lesson in the numbers.
It’s tempting to look at Italy through the familiar North-versus-South lens and assume the best health outcomes will simply follow the same pattern.
They don’t.
Barletta-Andria-Trani is at 83.8 years, Bari and Cagliari at 83.7, and Matera at 83.6.
All are in southern Italy or the islands, and all sit above the middle of the national distribution.
So if you’ve been crossing entire parts of southern Italy off your list because you assume health outcomes will automatically be worse, the data gives you a reason to look at it more closely.
Key insight: When it comes to quality of life, the province often tells you more than the region.
There’s also a catch in what “healthcare” means
This surprised us.
You might reasonably assume that if you want to know about healthcare, you should look at the BES category called Health.
But some of the measures you might care about most as a retiree aren’t there. The Health category mainly measures health outcomes — things like life expectancy, mortality and chronic conditions.
Measures such as hospital capacity and availability of medical specialists sit under Quality of Services.
That distinction matters. Imagine two places. People in both live relatively long lives, so both score well on health outcomes. But one has much better access to hospitals and specialists.
If you simply tell a ranking tool that “Health” is your number-one priority, you may not be measuring what you thought you were measuring.
For someone planning retirement, we think it makes more sense to look at health outcomes and access to healthcare services together.
Key insight: If healthcare is important to you, don’t rely on one “health” score. Look at both outcomes and access to services.
So we tried something ISTAT deliberately doesn’t do
Once we understood the data, we wanted to see what would happen if we allowed people to decide for themselves what mattered most.
So we built a simple weighting tool.
Instead of us telling you what makes a good place to live, you choose what matters to you.
Give more importance to healthcare. Or safety. Or services. Or the environment. Or landscape and cultural heritage.
The tool then shows how Italy’s provinces compare based on your priorities.
You can try it here: Set your own BES weights
And this is where things became interesting.
We tested three very different ways of looking at Italy.
For a retiree, we gave more importance to health, services and safety.
For a family, education and safety mattered more.
For a remote worker, we put more emphasis on services, environment and landscape.
We expected three quite different answers, but we didn’t get them.
Some places keep appearing, no matter what you value
Under the retiree profile, the top five were:
Trento, Siena, Firenze, Trieste and Bolzano.
For the family profile:
Trento, Firenze, Trieste, Monza e della Brianza and Siena.
And for the remote-worker profile:
Trieste, Firenze, Trento, Siena and Monza e della Brianza.
Five provinces — Firenze, Trento, Siena, Trieste and Monza e della Brianza — appeared in or very close to the top under all three sets of priorities.
That surprised us.
We built the tool partly because we thought changing your priorities would dramatically change the answer.
At the very top, it often didn’t.
And the same was true at the other end. Provinces such as Caserta, Reggio di Calabria and Foggia remained near the bottom under very different sets of priorities.
That suggests something useful.
Some places perform well across many different dimensions of everyday life. You don’t have to care about exactly the same things for them to keep appearing on the shortlist.
That doesn’t mean you should retire in Trento, Siena or Trieste.
It means the data gives you a reason to investigate them.
The more interesting choices are in the middle
This is where the tool becomes more useful for a real person making a real decision.
Because most of us aren’t choosing between Italy’s statistically “best” and “worst” province.
We’re choosing between places we already have some reason to love.
Maybe you’ve always imagined living near Lucca. Or you have family connections in Le Marche. You spent a wonderful summer in Puglia. You want to be near Florence but not actually live in Florence.
Once you get into that middle group, your priorities start to matter much more.
Padova, for example, came 8th for our family profile but 25th for our retiree profile.
Pisa was 6th for the remote worker but 22nd for the family.
Ancona moved from 32nd with everything weighted equally to 16th for our retiree.
Lecco went the other way: 18th for the family profile and 40th for the retiree.
That’s a much more useful way to think about rankings.
The question isn’t necessarily:
“Which is the best province in Italy?”
It may be:
“Of the places I’m already considering, which one fits the life I actually want?”
Your shortlist may matter more than Italy’s top ten
This is probably the biggest lesson we took from the data.
A ranking is tempting because it gives us certainty.
Number 1 must be better than number 12.
But retirement doesn’t really work like that.
If your dream is to wake up near the sea, putting Trento at the top of a national ranking isn’t particularly helpful.
If you want to live somewhere where you can walk to a café every morning and gradually become a familiar face, a province with excellent environmental indicators but a very isolated lifestyle may not work for you.
If easy access to specialists matters because of an existing health concern, you may willingly trade a little air quality or landscape for better services.
The data is most useful when it helps you compare places you could genuinely imagine living in.
That’s how we think the tool should be used. It should not be used to “Tell me where to retire.” Instead, it should be used to “Help me understand the trade-offs between the places I’m considering.”
A few things the numbers can’t tell you
There are limits to this data, and they’re important.
First, these are provincial averages. A province can contain a busy city, a well-connected medium-sized town and a tiny mountain village. Your daily life could be completely different in each one.
Second, the data isn’t all from exactly the same year. Most indicators are recent, but some come from earlier periods.
There are also missing values. Sud Sardegna, for example, is missing five of the six safety indicators. We don’t fill those gaps with guesses.
And perhaps most importantly, the dataset can’t fully measure the thing our reader was describing when she talked about cafés, fruit stands and community gatherings.
Will I feel at home here?
Will I make friends?
Will people notice if I haven’t shown up at the café for three days?
Will I still enjoy living here in February, when the summer visitors have gone home?
There’s no dataset that can answer those questions for you.
That part still requires visiting, walking around, talking to people and imagining an ordinary Tuesday — not just a perfect week in September.
Key insight: Use the data to narrow your choices. Use time on the ground to make the final decision.
So, where in Italy would you have the best life?
Italy’s own statistics agency doesn’t give us an answer.
Having spent time with the data, I think that’s probably right.
There are places that consistently perform well. There are places with clear weaknesses. And there’s a large group in between where the answer changes depending on what you care about.
That’s where this gets personal. We’ve made the full BES data available here, so you can explore how the provinces compare across the different measures.
And if you want to take it a step further, you can use our BES weighting tool to decide for yourself what matters most and see how your own ranking changes.
Try it with the places already on your shortlist.
Then change the weights.
You may find that the place you’ve been dreaming about looks even better.
Or you may discover somewhere you hadn’t considered at all.
Either way, that feels much more useful than another list telling you the “10 best places to retire in Italy.”