Episode Details

Anna: Hi everyone and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast. For our first episode of the year, we’re gonna talk about some really cool research with you. We’re diving into the top towns in Italy that expats are looking to move to. What are these towns, the big busy cities like Milan or Rome? Tuscany, some beautiful places in Sicily.

Luca: Hi Anna. Happy New Year.

Anna: Happy New Year.

Luca: Did you have a nice, uh, end of year break?

Anna: Yeah, it was nice. I was in Rome and it was really, really nice.

Luca: I have been, uh, home actually doing a little bit of gardening.

I know it’s minus seven outside now, but it wasn’t quite so bad before New Year’s Eve

Anna: you’re brave.

Luca: Well, I have to. Today we’re going to talk about, uh, a, um, topic that I’m very excited [00:01:00] about, that we’ve been working on for some time. We have combined search engine data with usage of Magic Towns Italy own Town Explorer to see where expats are looking to move to in Italy.

You’re not gonna hear from anyone else because they don’t have the data, but we do. And, um, we have quite a few surprises. So on the one hand, we looked at how often people abroad search for moving to specific cities or living in specific cities. And then we looked at, uh, which one of our town profiles are getting the most attention from international visitors.

So this covers both the aspiration stage, kind of Googling what to do with your life, and then the serious research stage of the expat journey. Then we have blended this data together to provide the ranking of the top 20 towns that expats [00:02:00] had their eyes on in 2025.

Anna: We’re not gonna just read you a boring list of towns, we’re gonna chat about the, you know, the surprising stuff, beyond the data and there’s a bunch.

Luca: So we have big cities versus small town dynamics. There’s some regional trends that are interesting, uh, that are frankly unexpected and there are quite a few under the radar towns that are punching way above their weight. Uh, some of them you may have never heard about, but they’re still in the top 20.

We are going to cover most of the ranking, but if you want to read the entire list and get to the top three , then you have to go to Magic Towns Italy and read the article that Anna published today. So let’s get on with it.

Anna: The first thing is this when people first think about moving to Italy, it’s usually the big cities that pop into their heads.

So, you know, Milan, Florence, Rome, but, what we found is once people go from just [00:03:00] dreaming to actually planning, a lot of them start looking at Italy, smaller towns and countryside instead.

Luca: To confirm what Anna just said, the single most viewed town on Magic Towns Italy last year was not Milan or Rome.

It was Scalea, a coastal town in Calabria that barely has 11,000 residents. And that must be a big surprise to everyone. On its full ranking basis scalea came in at number six. Although very few people frankly are Googling move to Scalea, it’s an area they discover once they get into the weeds. It is one of those towns that expats discover while browsing and using our filters and, to be fair, the place has a lot going for it. It’s where the sea, it’s very, very affordable and it is one of Italy’s special 7% tax towns, meaning that eligible retirees there, only get taxed 7% for an number of years. A topic that we have discussed time and [00:04:00] time and time and time again. So the tax break is huge for foreign retirees and no doubt adds to this town’s appeal.

Ann