---
title: "Living in Italy as an expat starts with a town, not a country"
deck: "A practical guide to living in Italy as an expat: how to narrow 7,894 towns to a shortlist using house prices, climate, regional healthcare and well-being data, following an American couple's search across Puglia, Sicily and Abruzzo."
author: "Caitlin"
published: 2026-10-16
updated: 2026-10-16
canonical: https://www.expatliving.it/articles/living-in-italy-as-an-expat
status: published
license: "CC BY 4.0 — https://www.expatliving.it/terms#articles-license"
credit_required: true
cite_as: "“Living in Italy as an expat starts with a town, not a country” by Caitlin, Expat Living Italy, 16 October 2026. https://www.expatliving.it/articles/living-in-italy-as-an-expat"
---

Free to use with credit: cite Expat Living Italy and link to the article. Cite as: “Living in Italy as an expat starts with a town, not a country” by Caitlin, Expat Living Italy, 16 October 2026. https://www.expatliving.it/articles/living-in-italy-as-an-expat

# Living in Italy as an expat starts with a town, not a country

A practical guide to living in Italy as an expat: how to narrow 7,894 towns to a shortlist using house prices, climate, regional healthcare and well-being data, following an American couple's search across Puglia, Sicily and Abruzzo.

If you've ever dreamed of retiring in Italy, you've probably pictured the things that make it so appealing: a morning coffee in a sunny piazza, beautiful old streets, fresh food, and a slower pace of life.

But once you start thinking seriously about making the move, the questions change. Where in Italy would you actually want to live? What could you afford? Would you enjoy the winters as much as the summers? And what about healthcare?

That's when I think it helps to stop thinking about Italy as a whole and start looking at individual towns.

There are 7,894 towns and municipalities across Italy, and they can be surprisingly different, even when they're just a short drive apart.

So let's imagine an American couple planning their retirement in Italy. I'll show you how they could use a few simple pieces of data to narrow down their choices, and what they'd still need to discover for themselves.

## What the numbers actually tell you about a town

One thing I've learned from looking at Italian data is that not every number tells you something about the town itself. Some describe the town, others the surrounding province, and others the whole region. It's an important difference when you're deciding where to live.

- **The town (comune).** Property prices, climate, population, foreign residents and tourism all exist for individual comuni. Two towns ten minutes apart can look quite different here.
- **The province.** ISTAT's [BES well-being indicators](https://www.expatliving.it/data/bes), which cover things like life expectancy, hospital beds, safety and broadband, come for Italy's 107 provinces and metropolitan cities.
- **The region.** Italy's twenty regions run the public health system, so the Ministry of Health's quality scores apply to a whole region at once.

Every town page on our site says which level each number comes from. That small label tells you a lot. A town figure describes the town, while a province or region figure describes a much larger area that the town is only one part of.

## Let's see how this works in practice

Imagine a retired American couple with a pension in dollars. They have four wishes:

- **Mild winters,** which I will translate as average January lows of at least 5°C.
- **Affordable housing,** under about €1,000 per square meter to buy.
- **A regional health system that scores at least 80 for hospital care** in the Ministry's 2024 results.
- **A town with everyday services,** somewhere between roughly 10,000 and 30,000 residents.

With these four things in mind, we can start comparing towns. House prices and weather vary from town to town, while healthcare scores apply to the whole region. That helps us narrow down the choices fairly quickly.

Here is how four southern towns come out against those four wishes.

**Four southern towns against one couple's four wishes**

| Town | Region | January low | Price per m² | Regional hospital-care score | Residents |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Galatina | Puglia | 8.1°C | €742 | 81 | 25,319 |
| Noto | Sicily | 7.7°C | €868 | 74 | 24,612 |
| Ostuni | Puglia | 5.9°C | €1,468 | 81 | 29,943 |
| Città Sant'Angelo | Abruzzo | 2.9°C | €871 | 75 | 14,902 |

*Prices: Agenzia delle Entrate OMI, 2025H2. January lows: Copernicus ERA5-Land, averages for 2015–2024. Hospital-care score: Ministero della Salute NSG, 2024, for the whole region. Residents: ISTAT, 2025.*

Only Galatina meets all four. The other three each miss on one or two, and I find the near misses just as instructive.

## Reading one town page: Galatina

[Galatina](https://www.expatliving.it/data/comune/galatina) is a town of 25,319 people in the province of Lecce, in the south of Puglia. Its page brings together most of what you would want to know at this stage.

**Price.** OMI puts a square meter at about €742 to buy and €3.04 a month to rent. That's an average, of course. Prices can vary quite a bit depending on which part of town you're looking at. And at these average prices, buying would cost roughly the equivalent of 20 years of rent, compared with about 22 years nationally.

**Climate.** January lows average about 8.1°C. Summers are hot, with July highs of about 31.4°C and around 57 days a year above 30°C. It rains on roughly 90 days a year, for about 654mm in total.

**People.** Of the 25 nationalities we track, Galatina has 84 residents, among them 19 Germans, 14 Americans and 12 British citizens. Those are small numbers, so I would read them as a sign that you would be one of only a few foreigners in town rather than as an established community. The population fell by about 4.2% between 2019 and 2025.

**Tourism.** Galatina has about 0.02 registered tourist beds per resident, so it is very much a town people live in all year rather than one built around visitors.

**The province.** Looking beyond Galatina itself, the wider [Lecce province](https://www.expatliving.it/data/province/lecce) compares well with much of Italy for specialized hospital beds and safety. But it doesn't score as well for green spaces or high-speed internet, which is worth checking if you plan to work remotely.

**The region.** Healthcare is worth looking at carefully. In the Ministry of Health's 2024 assessment, Puglia scored 81 for hospital care, 85 for prevention and 76 for services outside hospitals. These are regional scores, though, so they won't tell you what your experience at the nearest hospital or doctor's office will be like.

**Tax.** Galatina also appears on our [7% pensioner map](https://www.expatliving.it/data/tax/7-percent-pensioners). That describes the town. Whether the regime could apply to you depends on your own tax history and where your income comes from, so it is worth checking whether you qualify with a professional.

None of this tells our couple to move to Galatina. It tells them Galatina deserves a visit.

## The near misses deserve a second look

[Noto](https://www.expatliving.it/data/comune/noto), in the province of Siracusa, meets three of the four wishes comfortably. Its January lows average about 7.7°C, a square meter costs about €868, and it has 24,612 residents, a number that grew by about 3.8% between 2019 and 2025. It misses on the regional healthcare score: Sicily scored 74 for hospital care and 49 for prevention in 2024. Whether that outweighs everything else is a personal decision, and our [piece on healthcare by region](https://www.expatliving.it/articles/healthcare-by-region-italy) may help with it.

[Ostuni](https://www.expatliving.it/data/comune/ostuni), in the province of Brindisi, shares Puglia's scores and has January lows of about 5.9°C. It misses on price, at about €1,468 per square meter, roughly twice Galatina's. Ostuni also has about fifteen times as many registered tourist beds per resident as Galatina, which may explain part of the gap. Our [piece on towns built for tourists](https://www.expatliving.it/articles/beds-to-body-ratio-towns-built-tourists-residents) looks at what that ratio can and cannot tell you.

[Città Sant'Angelo](https://www.expatliving.it/data/comune/citta-sant-angelo), in the province of Pescara, is affordable at about €871 per square meter and has 14,902 residents. Its January lows average about 2.9°C, though, and Abruzzo scored 75 for hospital care. A couple who cared less about winter might put it straight back on the list.

That, to me, is the real value of working this way. Each wish you loosen brings different towns back, and you can see exactly which one did it.

## What the numbers leave out

The data can take you from 7,894 towns to a handful in an afternoon. It cannot tell you whether you will feel at home in any of them.

It cannot tell you how easy it is to find a doctor who speaks English, whether the bar on the piazza stays open in February, or how long the drive to the hospital feels on a winter night. It also cannot tell you how a town changes with the seasons, which is why I would always try to visit in the season you would normally skip. Our [piece on rain and climate](https://www.expatliving.it/articles/here-comes-rain-again-just-rainy) goes into that a little further.

I would use the numbers to decide where to look, and time on the ground to decide where to live.

## A few things worth keeping in mind

Before you get too attached to any of these numbers, there are a few things worth remembering.

**Regional and provincial figures are shared.** Every town in Puglia has the same healthcare scores, and every town in the province of Lecce has the same BES figures. A town can sit some way from its province's average.

**OMI prices describe the market rather than a house.** They are midpoints of surveyed ranges for ordinary homes in normal condition. Some towns have no OMI figure at all, and our pages show those as missing rather than estimating them.

**Small numbers need care.** A town with 14 American residents tells you something about who lives there, but not very much, and I would not build a decision on it.

**The four wishes are only an example.** A different couple, with different thresholds, would end up with a different shortlist, and that is exactly how it should work.

## A note on the numbers

Prices come from the Agenzia delle Entrate's OMI for the second half of 2025 (2025H2). Climate figures come from the Copernicus ERA5-Land reanalysis, averaged over 2015–2024. Population, population change and foreign-resident figures come from ISTAT (2019–2025). Tourist beds come from ISTAT's accommodation data for 2024. Province well-being comes from ISTAT's BES, and regional healthcare scores from the Ministry of Health's NSG for 2024. You can start your own shortlist on our [data pages](https://www.expatliving.it/data).

If you have already narrowed Italy down to a few towns, I would love to hear how you did it. Which wish did you refuse to compromise on, and which one turned out to be more flexible than you expected?

## Data behind this piece

- [Map layer — Property purchase price, by comune](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/omi-purchase-comune). Micro-zone within comune · 7,587 comuni priced
- [Map layer — Property rent, by comune](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/omi-rent-comune). Micro-zone within comune · 7,587 comuni priced
- [Map layer — Years of rent to equal the purchase price, by comune](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/omi-price-to-rent-comune). Micro-zone within comune · 7,587 comuni priced
- [Average January daily minimum temperature, by comune (2015–2024)](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/era5-winter-low-comune). Italy: ~9km (0.1°) grid, nearest cell per comune centroid. Europe: same grid, area-averaged within each NUTS 2 region's own boundary
- [Average days above 30°C, by comune (2015–2024)](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/era5-heat-days-comune). Italy: ~9km (0.1°) grid, nearest cell per comune centroid. Europe: same grid, area-averaged within each NUTS 2 region's own boundary
- [Average annual days with measurable rain, by comune (2015–2024)](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/era5-rainy-days-comune). Italy: ~9km (0.1°) grid, nearest cell per comune centroid. Europe: same grid, area-averaged within each NUTS 2 region's own boundary
- [Healthcare quality: hospital care, by region](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/healthcare-quality-hospital-region). Region — 19 of 20 (Trentino-Alto Adige's two autonomous provinces score separately and aren't merged into one region figure)
- [Healthcare quality: prevention, by region](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/healthcare-quality-prevention-region). Region — 19 of 20 (Trentino-Alto Adige's two autonomous provinces score separately and aren't merged into one region figure)
- [Healthcare quality: community & district care, by region](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/healthcare-quality-district-region). Region — 19 of 20 (Trentino-Alto Adige's two autonomous provinces score separately and aren't merged into one region figure)
- [Province-level comparison from BES data](https://www.expatliving.it/data/bes). Comune (~7,900) / province
- [Map layer — Foreign residents by citizenship, by comune](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/foreign-residents-citizenship) — 1 January 2025 (history 2019–2024). Comune (7,848 of 7,894) / province / region
- [Tourist beds per resident, by comune (2024)](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/accommodation-capacity-beds-per-resident-comune). Capacity: ~7,900 comuni. Flow: ~2,400 comuni (disclosure-limited)
- [Map layer — Population change, by comune](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/population-trend). Comune (~7,900) / province
- [Map layer — 7% pensioner regime eligibility, by comune](https://www.expatliving.it/data/map/italy/regime-7-percent-pensioners) — 2026. Comune (~7,900), by rule

## Places in this piece

- [Puglia](https://www.expatliving.it/data/region/puglia) — region, code puglia
- [Sicilia](https://www.expatliving.it/data/region/sicilia) — region, code sicilia
- [Abruzzo](https://www.expatliving.it/data/region/abruzzo) — region, code abruzzo
- [Lecce](https://www.expatliving.it/data/province/lecce) — province, code LE
- [Galatina](https://www.expatliving.it/data/comune/galatina) — comune, code 075029
- [Noto](https://www.expatliving.it/data/comune/noto) — comune, code 089013
- [Ostuni](https://www.expatliving.it/data/comune/ostuni) — comune, code 074012
- [Città Sant'Angelo](https://www.expatliving.it/data/comune/citta-sant-angelo) — comune, code 068012

---

Free to use with credit: cite Expat Living Italy and link to the article. Cite as: “Living in Italy as an expat starts with a town, not a country” by Caitlin, Expat Living Italy, 16 October 2026. https://www.expatliving.it/articles/living-in-italy-as-an-expat