Expats in Italy

Expats in Italy are not one group. Some arrive on a company transfer to Milan, some follow a partner to a small town in Puglia, and a growing share work remotely for employers who will never set foot in the country. What they share is a first year that looks less like a holiday and more like paperwork, apartment hunting, and learning which office opens on which morning.

This page is written for people in that first year, or still deciding. It covers where foreign residents cluster, how the social scene shifts between a large city and a hill town, what changes when your income comes from abroad, and how people find each other once the novelty wears off. Figures on cost, tax, visas and connectivity sit in the data block above.

Where expats live in Italy

Foreign residents concentrate in three broad bands. The industrial north around Milan, Turin and Bologna draws people with employment contracts and international companies. The centre, meaning Rome, Florence and the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, attracts a mix of students, remote workers and people who fell for the region on a trip and came back. The south and the islands pull a smaller, more scattered crowd, often couples restoring property in villages that have been losing population for decades.

Choosing between those bands is mostly a question of what you need from an ordinary week. Northern cities give you airports, fast trains, English-speaking workplaces and a rental market that turns over quickly. Southern towns give you space, slower rhythms and neighbours who know your name by the second month, at the cost of thinner transport and fewer English speakers.

Rome, Milan and Florence feel like different countries

Rome runs on institutions. Embassies, UN agencies, universities and a long-established international school circuit mean there is always an incoming class of foreigners and always someone leaving. That turnover makes it easy to join a group and harder to build friendships that outlast a posting.

Milan is corporate and fast. People arrive with a job already signed, the working language in many offices is English, and the social calendar is built around work and aperitivo rather than neighbourhood life. Florence sits somewhere else entirely: small, walkable, saturated with art students and short-stay visitors, which leaves the year-round foreign population unusually tight-knit. Bologna and Turin get overlooked and reward the people who look at them, one with student energy, the other a quieter, cheaper Milan.

Americans, Brits and the paperwork gap

Americans in Italy tend to arrive through three doors: citizenship by descent, a remote job, or a study year that turned into staying. Italian consulates in the US handle a heavy volume of descent claims, and plenty of people who start that process discover they qualify through a grandparent they never met. The rules were tightened in 2025, so what was true for a friend who applied years earlier may not be true for you now.

British residents sit in a different position since Brexit. Those who were legally resident before the end of the Brexit transition period keep protected rights. Anyone arriving after goes through the same non-EU route as everyone else, with a consular visa, a residence permit and renewal appointments. Two Brits in the same town can be living under completely different rules.

Working remotely from Italy

Remote workers are the fastest-changing slice of the foreign population. Italy opened a dedicated route for highly skilled remote employees and freelancers, which put the country on the shortlist for people who had been cycling through Lisbon, Barcelona and Athens. Applications run through consulates, and the paperwork asked for differs enough between them that comparing notes with someone who has already been through it beats any generic checklist.

The practical picture is mixed. Connectivity is solid in cities and uneven in rural areas. Coworking exists in every provincial capital and clusters heavily in Milan, Rome, Bologna and Turin. Summer empties the coastal towns of anyone seriously trying to work. Tax residency is the part people underestimate: spend enough of the year in Italy and you become taxable there whatever your employer's address says.

How expat communities actually form

The visible layer is the easy one. City-based Facebook groups, international meetups, language exchanges, Sunday football. Those carry you through the first weeks and rarely get you further, because everyone in the room is also new and also asking where to find a dentist who speaks English.

The layer that holds is built sideways. A gym, a choir, a climbing wall, a school gate, a regular bar where the owner starts pouring before you order. People who settle well in Italy almost always describe the same two relationships: one Italian friend who explains the unwritten rules, and one foreigner a year or two ahead who has already made the mistakes you are about to make. Online groups are the front door, not the house.