Italy is sunny, or at least that is how we tend to describe it when we are dreaming about a move. Puglia brings to mind blue skies and olive trees, Lake Garda suggests long lunches beside the water, and Sicily is shorthand for heat. Northern Italy is usually described as cooler and wetter, while much of the south gets bundled into the vague promise of a “Mediterranean climate.”
None of those descriptions is completely wrong, but they are not particularly useful once you are deciding where you want to live for ten, twenty or thirty years. After you move somewhere, weather stops being scenery and becomes part of your daily routine. It affects whether you walk into town or take the car, how often you sit outside, what you can grow, how you use your home and, for many folks, how a place makes them feel.
That is why we added two new climate layers to Expat Living Italy: average annual rainfall and average annual days with measurable rain for individual comuni, using ten years of Copernicus ERA5-Land data from 2015 to 2024. Once you put the two measures together, “How much does it rain?” turns out to be two rather different questions.
The amount of rain and the number of rainy days are not exactly the same thing
Imagine two towns that both receive 800 millimeters of rain in a typical year. In one, that rain falls across 80 days; in the other, it falls across 150. The annual total is identical, but I suspect most of us would experience those climates very differently.
That is why the annual rainfall map is only half the story. The rainy-days map counts how many days in an average year receive at least 1 millimeter of precipitation, the standard threshold used for a measurable wet day. Put the two together and you can distinguish between places that receive a lot of water in relatively concentrated bursts and places where rain is simply part of more days throughout the year.
For someone deciding where to live, that can be much more useful than a broad regional label such as “Mediterranean” or “northern climate.”
Bari gives you one version of southern Italy
Take Bari, on Puglia’s Adriatic coast. Across the 2015–2024 period, the data shows average annual rainfall of roughly 595 millimeters spread across about 97 wet days.
The Bari comune profile also shows why climate decisions are rarely about rain alone. Summers are genuinely hot: average July daily highs are around 30°C, and the city averages roughly 39 days each year above 30°C.
If warm weather and relatively limited rainfall are high on your list, those numbers help explain Puglia’s appeal. But they also show the trade-off hidden inside a phrase such as “sunny southern Italy.” You are not simply choosing less rain; you are also choosing substantially more summer heat.
Now compare that with Limone sul Garda in the north
Move north to Limone sul Garda and the picture changes dramatically. Average annual rainfall is around 1,412 millimeters, well over twice Bari’s total, and measurable rain falls on roughly 168 days a year.
At the same time, Limone is much cooler in summer. Average July daily highs sit around 24°C, and days above 30°C are extremely uncommon in the ten-year dataset. The Limone sul Garda comune profile puts those numbers alongside the town’s other data.
So Bari and Limone are not just “dry” and “wet.” They represent two quite different climate trade-offs: Bari gives you substantially more heat and fewer rainy days, while Limone gives you far more rain but much milder summers. So you can ask yourself: which combination is closer to the life I want?
Italy’s climate is more local than the stereotypes suggest
One reason broad climate labels fail us is that Italy packs an enormous amount of geography into a relatively narrow country. The Alps influence weather in the north, the Apennines run almost the entire length of the peninsula, two major coastlines face different seas, and elevation can change quickly over a very short distance.
The climate data therefore works best at a more local level. Expat Living Italy assigns the ERA5-Land value from the nearest roughly 9-kilometer grid cell to each comune’s centroid. That gives much finer detail than a regional average, although it is still not a street-by-street weather station and will not capture every microclimate in a mountain valley or along a complex coastline.
For relocation decisions, that is usually the right level of precision. We are not trying to predict whether one side of a village gets twenty minutes more rain than the other; we are trying to understand whether two towns on your shortlist offer meaningfully different climates.
Rainfall alone still does not tell you how a place feels
The temptation with any new dataset is to rank it: which towns are driest, which have the fewest wet days, and where the “best” weather is. I do not think that is the most useful way to read these numbers.
A place with relatively low rainfall but many very hot days may be wonderful for someone who actively wants a long, hot summer and exhausting for someone who does not. A wetter town with milder temperatures might be exactly the opposite. Gardeners may care about the interaction between heat and water, walkers may care more about how many days are wet than the annual rainfall total, and someone who dislikes prolonged heat may happily accept more rain in exchange for cooler summers.
If summer heat is important to you, the separate days-above-30°C map adds another useful layer to the rainfall data. Temperature and rainfall alone cannot tell us how comfortable a place feels, but together they reveal more of the trade-off hidden inside a phrase like “Mediterranean climate.”
What does this mean for your shortlist?
If you are seriously considering a move, I would use these climate numbers to sharpen your questions rather than to make the decision for you. How often do you want to be outside? Do you enjoy hot summers or merely tolerate them on vacation? Would frequent rain bother you more than intense heat? Do you want a garden, and how much watering are you prepared to do?
Those questions may sound mundane compared with the excitement of choosing an Italian town, but they are exactly the sort of things that determine whether everyday life still feels comfortable after the novelty has worn off. It is easy to choose a climate for the person you are on holiday; the harder question is whether it suits the routine you expect to have once you live there.
Visit in the season you normally would not consider
Data can tell you what is typical, but it cannot tell you how you will react to it. That is why I would pair the numbers with one very simple test: if you are serious about a place, visit it in the season when it is least likely to charm you.
If you discovered it in June, go back in November. If you loved it in September, see what February feels like. If you are considering somewhere famous for warm summers, spend time there during the hottest part of July rather than assuming that sunshine will always feel like an advantage.
That second visit often answers questions no spreadsheet can. Is the house damp in winter? Does the terrace become unusable at midday in summer? Do you still enjoy walking into town when the weather is not perfect? Does the climate support the lifestyle you pictured when you first fell in love with the place?
Alas, there is no single Italian climate
Moving to Italy does not mean choosing “the Italian climate”; it means choosing the climate of one particular place in Italy.
Bari averages roughly 595 millimeters of rain, about 97 wet days and around 39 days above 30°C. Limone sul Garda receives roughly 1,412 millimeters, has around 168 wet days and almost no days above 30°C. Both are Italy, both are places people dream of living, and climatically they have very little in common.
That is why I would not ask whether Italy has “good weather.” I would ask whether this particular place has the weather you want to live with every day. The data will not answer that for you, but it can make the choice much more informed.
