A friend who has been thinking about moving to Italy for the past couple of years told us recently that she had more or less settled on Umbria.
Why Umbria?
Because, she said, that was where the Americans were.
She had not read this anywhere in particular. It was simply an impression she had picked up over time, partly from social media and partly through conversations with friends. Which is probably how most of us form opinions about places we have not yet lived in.
I mention it because we had just finished building a map that answers exactly that question.
And Umbria is not really where the Americans are.
Neither, perhaps surprisingly, is Tuscany.
The highest concentration of American citizens in any reasonably sized Italian comune is actually in a town of fewer than 2,000 people in Abruzzo that many people outside the region will never have heard of.
We have been pulling ISTAT’s resident population data down to the level of individual comuni, covering twenty-five nationalities, and turning it into something you can actually explore.
The most interesting finding was not any one town. It was how differently Americans, Britons and Germans have settled across Italy.
There is remarkably little overlap.
The first thing to know: absolute numbers can be misleading
The natural starting point is to ask which places have the largest number of foreigners.
That usually leads you straight to the biggest cities.
Milano, for example, has 1,418 American residents. Introdacqua, a small town in Abruzzo, has just 27.
At first glance, Milano clearly looks like the larger American community.
But Milano has more than 1.3 million residents. Those 1,418 Americans account for only 0.10% of the local population, or roughly one in a thousand people.
In Introdacqua, Americans represent 1.40% of the population, closer to one in seventy.
So if the question is not simply “where are the most Americans?” but “where would I actually notice an American presence?”, the raw number tells only part of the story.
That is why we use share of local population for most of the analysis that follows.
There is one practical caveat. We only rank comuni with at least 1,000 residents. In a village of eighty people, one foreign family can suddenly represent 5% of the population and distort the rankings quite quickly.
The map lets you change that minimum population threshold yourself, and it is worth experimenting with it.
Americans: the numbers tell two very different stories
ISTAT records 17,393 American citizens living in the comuni we track.
At first, the American map looks fairly scattered. But one cluster stands out very quickly.
Five of the top nineteen comuni are all in the province of Pordenone, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia: Budoia, Aviano, Montereale Valcellina, Polcenigo and Cavasso Nuovo.
They also have something else in common.
They are all close to Aviano Air Base.
That matters because the American presence here is not primarily a retirement story. It reflects the long-standing presence of the US Air Force and the military families based around it.
In other words, one of the strongest concentrations of Americans in Italy has relatively little to do with people independently choosing the area as a place to retire.
There is another complication. Many military personnel do not appear in the normal resident registry at all because they live in Italy under status-of-forces arrangements.
So the American presence around Aviano is both more substantial than the registry numbers suggest, and less representative of the typical American retiree.
That is an important distinction.
Still, if you have a military connection yourself, these towns may be particularly useful. There is already an established infrastructure around American families: English is more commonly spoken, the local services are familiar with American residents, and the area has decades of experience with this community.
The second American pattern is almost the opposite
Once you look beyond Pordenone, another pattern begins to emerge.
This one is older and, in many ways, more personal.
Introdacqua sits in the Valle Peligna in Abruzzo, not far from Sulmona. Nearby Bugnara also appears high in the rankings. Gessopalena, further east in the province of Chieti, is another. Santa Domenica Talao appears in Calabria.
These are regions that sent large numbers of emigrants to the United States during the great Italian migration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Some of the Americans returning today are descendants of the people who left.
In Introdacqua, the number of registered Americans rose from 10 in 2019 to 27 in 2025. That is a 170% increase, although it is important to remember that the starting number was very small.
We would not draw sweeping conclusions from seventeen people.
But the same pattern appears in several towns, and it also reflects something we hear regularly from readers: for many Americans, the route into Italy is citizenship by descent, and the destination is the town their family originally came from.
If that describes you, this may be one of the most useful applications of the map.
Look up your family’s comune and see who else has made the same journey.
Beyond those clusters, the American presence is quite thin
Once you account for Aviano and the ancestral-return towns, the rest of the American map becomes much more dispersed.
There are small clusters around the lakes, including Torno and Moltrasio on Lake Como, Meina on Lake Maggiore and Orta San Giulio nearby.
There is also the Italy many Americans imagine when they think about moving here: Umbria and southern Tuscany.
Places such as Monteleone d’Orvieto, Montone, Baschi and Trequanda do appear.
But the communities are much smaller than the reputation might suggest.
In several cases, we are talking about fewer than ten American residents in the entire town.
That does not make them any less appealing. It simply changes what we mean when we say there is an “American community”.
There is a difference between a place being popular with Americans and a handful of American households having chosen to live there.
This chart puts that distinction into perspective.
Introdacqua is the highest-ranked American comune by population share at 1.40%. But even there, Americans still represent a very small part of the local population.
The British have built a different Italy
Britons are both more numerous and, in some places, more concentrated.
ISTAT records 25,060 British residents.
The highest-ranked British comune is Sauze d’Oulx in Piemonte, where Britons account for 2.59% of the population. It is a ski resort with a long history of British visitors and residents.
The stronger British clusters appear in three main areas.
One is the Garfagnana and Lunigiana, in the mountains behind Lucca, where places such as Bagni di Lucca and Bagnone have long-established British links.
Bagni di Lucca’s connection goes back well beyond modern expatriate life; it had a resident British community in the nineteenth century.
A second cluster appears in the Marche, including Sant’Angelo in Pontano, San Ginesio and Amandola.
A third appears in inland Abruzzo.
This is one of the few places where the British and American maps briefly touch.
Introdacqua and Gessopalena appear in both rankings.
There is also one interesting southern exception: Cianciana in Sicily, where British residents make up just over 1% of the population.
And the Germans have built another Italy again
Germany is the largest of the three groups, with 34,981 registered residents.
But the pattern is very different.
Twelve of the top twenty-five German comuni are in Trentino-Alto Adige.
That needs some context.
South Tyrol is a German-speaking part of Italy. For a German moving there, the experience is quite different from an American moving to Abruzzo. The language, schools and much of the administrative culture are already familiar.
That makes this cluster difficult to compare directly with the others.
Outside South Tyrol, however, several patterns are much clearer.
The highest German concentration is in Dolcedo, in Liguria, where Germans account for 3.49% of the population—the highest share we found for any of the three nationalities.
Nearby Badalucco and Cipressa also appear strongly.
There are further clusters around Lake Garda and Lake Maggiore, and another in parts of Tuscany, including the Maremma and Elba.
What is striking is that these are not the same Tuscan areas favoured by the British or Americans.
And not one comune appears on both the German list and either the British or American lists.
The contrast becomes especially clear when you compare the densest comune for each nationality: Dolcedo for Germans, Sauze d’Oulx for Britons and Introdacqua for Americans.
Three nationalities, three different versions of Italy
When you put the maps together, the differences become much easier to see.
Americans show up most strongly around the Aviano military area, in a handful of ancestral towns in Abruzzo and Calabria, and in small pockets around the lakes and central Italy. The full ranking is here.
The British have stronger concentrations in the Garfagnana and Lunigiana, the Marche, inland Abruzzo and a few long-established destinations such as Sauze d’Oulx.
The German pattern is heavily influenced by German-speaking South Tyrol, but also extends through Liguria, the northern lakes and parts of coastal and southern Tuscany.
Not one comune appears in all three top-twenty-five lists.
Perhaps that should not be surprising.
People do not simply choose “Italy”. They choose particular versions of Italy, shaped by language, family history, accessibility, employment, previous migration and the communities that came before them.
How to use the data yourself
Everything in this article comes from the map, and you can explore the same information for any of the twenty-five nationalities we currently track.
The simplest approach is to choose a nationality and switch the metric from count to share of population.
Keep the minimum population threshold at 1,000 to start with, then click through to the individual comune pages for places that interest you.
Each town page shows its nationality breakdown, the trend since 2019 and nearby comuni.
That last part is particularly useful because sometimes the more interesting option is not the town that initially caught your eye, but another one a few kilometres away.
We have also added two other layers.
One shows new residency registrations from abroad, which gives a better indication of where people are moving now rather than where communities have accumulated over time.
The second shows population change between 2019 and 2025.
That can matter a great deal if you are considering a small town. A beautiful comune may look very different depending on whether it is slowly growing or steadily losing residents.
A few important limitations
There are several things the data does not tell us, and they are worth keeping in mind.
It measures citizenship, not identity or origin.
An American who becomes an Italian citizen through descent is no longer counted as American in the citizenship data, even though socially and culturally they may still think of themselves that way.
That means the figure of 17,393 Americans almost certainly understates the broader American community in Italy.
It only includes registered residents.
People living in Italy part of the year, or those who have not registered with the anagrafe, will not appear.
The “foreign residents” figure on the site refers only to the twenty-five nationalities we track.
It should not be confused with a town’s entire foreign population.
Small numbers need to be treated carefully.
A change from five residents to ten is a 100% increase, but it is still only five additional people.
And perhaps most importantly:
The south barely appears in these rankings.
The 7% flat-tax regime has attracted considerable attention to smaller towns in Puglia, Calabria, Sicily, Molise and other southern regions.
Yet very few of those places currently appear among the strongest concentrations of Americans, Britons or Germans.
That does not mean the tax regime is not working.
It may simply be too recent for the demographic effect to appear clearly in data that runs only through 2025.
But it does suggest that someone moving to a small town in southern Italy for the tax advantages may be arriving relatively early, rather than joining a large existing foreign community.
For some people, that will be part of the appeal.
For others, it is useful to know before making the move.
What should you ask yourself?
The data raises a few questions that are probably more useful than simply asking where other foreigners live.
Are you looking for a foreign community, or for a particular kind of place?
If community matters, remember how small many of these groups actually are. Even in the highest-ranked towns, we are often talking about somewhere between five and fifty people.
Does the existing foreign population resemble you?
A serving American military family around Aviano has a very different experience from a retired couple arriving from Ohio. The same is true of Germans moving into German-speaking South Tyrol.
And perhaps the most interesting question is whether you actually want to be somewhere people like you have already settled.
There are advantages.
An established foreign community often means somebody has already found the English-speaking notary, the accountant familiar with international tax questions and the doctor who has dealt with foreign residents before.
But there are trade-offs too.
More international demand can mean higher prices, and it can also make it easier to remain socially within your own language and community.
Neither is necessarily good or bad.
It simply depends on the Italy you are looking for.
Finally, think about the town outside the season in which you first fell in love with it.
Many of the places high on these lists are small, and several are seasonal.
A comune in August can feel very different in January.
A note on the numbers
The citizenship figures come from ISTAT’s resident population statistics by comune and nationality for 2025, covering twenty-five nationalities and accessed in August 2026.
Country-of-birth figures come from ISTAT’s 2024 census data and are published only in broad categories, so the two measures are not directly comparable.
The rankings in this article use share of local population and include the 5,871 Italian comuni with at least 1,000 residents.
The underlying map and full methodology are available through the data section of Expat Living Italy.
We would also be very interested to know whether the numbers match what you have seen.
If you live in one of these towns—or somewhere that does not appear on any of these lists—tell us which comune.
And if there is somewhere in Italy you are already considering, we would be curious to hear where.