Explore every episode of the podcast Magic Towns Italy

Explore the differences in school performance in northeastern Italy, featuring top schools and INVALSI testing insights on the Magic Towns Italy podcast.

Explore insights on buying property in Italy with Luca and Justin. Discover challenges foreign buyers face and tips to navigate Italian real estate.

Justin Mavity is back in the studio — this time in person, with wine — to talk through the two things foreign buyers get wrong in Italy: the money and the paperwork.

At 24, Jasmina Wanders left the UK for Italy with no guarantees and a beginner's grasp of the language. First Mantova for a master's in historic architecture, then a leap most Italians warned her against: south, to Noto in Sicily, where she now works as an architect after sending her portfolio to studios across the country.

This week she tells Anna what the move actually took. Converting a student permesso into a work permit before the deadline. Living without a car in a place that demands one. Watching Noto's property market reshape itself as tourism and the 7% pensioner tax regime pull in foreign buyers. And the quieter shift underneath it all: learning, in a place that runs on comu veni, si cunta, to stop daydreaming about another life and start living this one.

A conversation about bureaucracy, belonging, and why the south rewards the people brave enough to bet on it.

Discover the ins and outs of banking in Italy with Magic Towns Italy podcast's latest episode. Join Luca and Anna as they chat with Revolut's Jeffrey Chanseau about opening accounts, saving on fees, and more.

Discover an inspiring journey of cultural integration on the Magic Towns Italy Podcast. Join us as Joe Reagan shares his adventures in revitalizing a remote Abruzzo community.

Discover the expat lifestyle in Malta with insights from Gill and Boba. Compare living in Malta versus Italy on the Magic Towns Italy podcast.

Discover the surprising truths about Italy's rail network in this week's episode of Magic Towns Italy. Explore what data reveals about connectivity, debunking common myths of train travel in Liguria and beyond.

Discover Italy's top regions for public healthcare, with insights into how data reveals surprising leaders in quality and access.

Discover Jaid Newstead's inspiring journey from Toronto to Bari, Italy, as she navigates challenges and embraces new beginnings in this engaging interview.

Discover where expats settle in Italy beyond Rome and Milan. Explore the charm of smaller towns popular with Americans, Brits, and more on our latest podcast episode.

Discover Shelby Canon's inspiring journey from a restless nurse in Michigan to finding her true home in Florence, Italy. Listen to her story now!

Discover the latest Italian legal update that could reshape your retirement plans. Learn how a simple change expands the 7% pensioner tax regime, offering more town choices for retirees.

Luca: Happy Saturday everyone. Welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast

This week we have a special guest. Justin Curtis Mavity. He’s been a real estate agent, one of the very few qualified, licensed, real estate agents from America in Italy.

After 10 years in the country, he has a lot to say about buying a property, which areas to pick, which areas to avoid. You can just hear straight in his words now.

Nice to meet you Justin.

Justin: You as well. Luca.

Luca: I think it would be interesting to start from how you got to Italy.

Justin: In 2017. I had been a teacher for about 15 years. I was a music teacher, in a public middle school in a suburb of Denver. And I’d always had this love of Italy. I’d been on several vacations before, and in fact, that’s how I discovered Bologna. We [00:01:00] stopped in Bologna and I said, wow, this place is magic.

I studied Italian for a year, a whole year, and before I kind of started getting my feet under the ground and I could be, you know, functional.

In Italy,

Luca: Did you have a network or did you just pick Bologna because you liked it when you visited? Uh,

Justin: In Denver we have an Italian friend, Lucia, who is from Bologna. And so that was, uh, that was the connection. At least there was somebody, uh, that I could reach out to in case of, emergency.

Luca: So you’ve been there for the best part of 10 years?

Justin: Yeah. For the best part of 10 years. It’s changed quite a lot, honestly. I mean, when I first came to Bologna, it was. It was a touristy city in the summer, of course, but not as much as Florence or Rome or Milan in the last few years, especially after COVID tourism here has exploded.

It’s, it’s noticeable. And then of course, you know, May and July are just, just chaos if you’re in Piazza Maggiore at this point. Yeah,

Luca: That still doesn’t explain how you got into real estate here, right?

Justin: So, real estate in the United States was always going to be my backup plan, my, my second career, I started so [00:02:00] young, I could have retired at 52. Uh, I’m gonna be 45 this year.

Luca: Go 81.

Justin: Yeah, go 81. Exactly. After I got my feet on the ground here, I, of course had to do the, the teaching English thing like many of us do, you know, to get by and to feed yourself and to pay the rent.

That was a several years long process just to even get into the real estate course here and get started. It was already something that was in my mind to do. And so when I came here, I thought, gosh, this is a supernatural fit. I mean, I’m an American. This is something I wanted to do. There is nobody basically doing this here that I know of.

Luca: Huge gap.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

I got my real estate license in the spring in May of 2023. And I’m sure you guys are a bit familiar with this process, that you have to do the, the written multiple choice exam and if you pass that, then you need to go onto this oral exam in front of a panel of experts and a live audience.

I passed that and I thought, gosh, I’m gonna get picked up by, by anybody. So I went to all the big agencies in town and they’re like, you can answer phones and do translations.

Luca: Really? [00:03:00]

Justin: Wow. That’s all. That’s all we can do with you. And then you can work.

But I did find a small local agency. They didn’t quite know what to do with me either, but at least the...

Luca: Happy Saturday everyone, and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast with Luca, and most importantly, Anna.

Anna: Yes, ciao a tutti. Hi everyone. Today we’re diving into some fascinating new findings from a demographic study, Magic Towns Italy conducted using data from 2019 to 2025.

We’ll talk about which towns are growing or shrinking, how well they keep young people, and how much pressure they are under from aging populations. So if you’re a retiree or an expat thinking of relocating here, this is definitely for you.

Luca: Exactly. So we analyzed detailed population data for over 7,500 Italian towns.

And, uh, before you tune onto another [00:01:00] podcast, because you’re not a huge data fan, what we’re gonna be sharing with you are the implications of the study. Consider this for instance, that the idyllic village that you’re looking at could within 10 years turn into a place that doesn’t have a pharmacy, doesn’t have a doctor, or doesn’t have a supermarket.

This happens in Italy, so it’s worth looking out for this. Demographics make a huge difference as to whether a town thrives or fades. So if you’re looking for a place to live in Italy for the long run, you will want to look at the signs.

Anna: Yeah, I mean, nobody wants to move into a beautiful town, only to find out 10 years later that it’s become a ghost village. Let’s start with the big picture. What did the study look at?

Luca: We focused on three simple but very important questions. Number one, is the town growing or shrinking? Two, are young adults staying or leaving? And three, how quickly is [00:02:00] the population getting older.

Anna: and what are the key insights?

Luca: Let’s start with a sad fact, which is the most Italian towns are shrinking. In fact, across the towns we looked at the general trend is for a loss of, uh, about half a percentage point of population per year.

And only about a quarter of Italian towns are actually growing in population. That’s one in four. And if you look at it the other way around, it means that three out of four Italian towns are shrinking. The towns that are growing at disproportionately medium sized towns, imagine towns around 10 to 20,000 inhabitants, which are service centers or commuter towns rather than, uh, huge cities or tiny villages.

Anna: Oh, so three quarters are getting smaller. That is huge. So the typical little village we all imagine, chances are it’s quietly empty out. And the ones that are growing tend to be market towns or places within reach of cities, not the remote hilltop [00:03:00] hamlets.

Luca: Exactly. Now talking about youth retention, the ability to retain young people, we found that about 50% of towns are able to retain or attract young adults.

Unfortunately, the other half are losing the 20 somethings and the 30 somethings. And not surprisingly, larger towns and cities have an edge here, meaning that, uh, they’re more likely to attract young people for university or jobs.

Anna: It makes sense. Young adults often move to cities like Milan or Bologna for work or study, but yeah, it’s interesting that only half hang on to their youth.

If a place lose its young people, it’s basically losing its future, isn’t it?

Luca: Yeah. Sad but true. And the last part getting older. Aging. This is just a countrywide phenomenon. We saw that pretty much every town has an aging population getting older on average. Even those that attract some young [00:04:00] people.

And of course, and we’ve discussed this in several podcasts, the low b...

Anna: Hi everyone and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast.

Luca: Welcome back. Happy Saturday everyone.

Anna: Happy Saturday. So, yeah, today we’re talking about, one euro homes, Sicily, visas.

Luca: And before you say, oh no, another episode about one euro homes, we’re actually starting with something completely novel, which is the first one euro home program in northern Italy.

Anna: What?

Luca: Really? Yes. Anna don’t act all surprised. You wrote an article about that.

Anyway, it’s just an inside joke. So this week?

Anna: Yeah, tell me more about that. Sorry.

Luca: Yeah, so this week the towns of Recoaro, [00:01:00] Posina, and Valli del Pasubio, very near Vicenta. And for those who know where Vicenza is, that’s very near Venice have announced that the first batch of one euro homes in those, uh, lovely mountain villages.

Anna: Oh, okay. And why just now?

Luca: Well, you see, it’s actually a very interesting area that I personally know. I would say intimately. It was a magnet for tourists about a hundred years ago. Even Nietzsche, the German philosopher, used to go on holiday there and

Anna: are you joking?

Luca: No, no. Really is true.

There’s proof of it. He wrote about it. He wrote, that, it was one of the most beautiful places they had ever been to, but, it kind of fell off the map tourism wise. Because, uh, spas are not as popular now as they used to be in the past in Italy at least. And so even when I was a child at this [00:02:00] place, which was in huge tourist magnet had become less popular in the past few years. It has suffered a massive exodus of people that go and work and live in the nearby cities.

So there’s a lot of empty homes and quite simply the local governments decided to make them available to investors and people that want to move there preferentially to restore very much like the schemes in southern Italy.

Anna: Yeah, but these are just the first ones in Northern Italy.

Luca: Exactly. First ones in Northern Italy.

So if you wanna know more about this, go to magictowns.it and read the article in which we cover everything about this brand, brand new program.

Anna: And be the first one to buy them.

Luca: Yeah, maybe. And then we can have a chat with there about how you feel about that. That is, if Anna and I don’t buy them first.

What else is on our episode today, Anna? We have an interview right?

Anna: Yeah, we met George after visiting Mussomeli ourselves, and it was, how was it, Luca, because you went [00:03:00] there.

Luca: George is the English beating heart of Mussomeli now.

We spent, half an hour chatting with him about how things are going, how the city is changing now that he has brought in his massive social media following. He also has some new plans that he briefly mentions and he’s going to officially unveil in the next couple of weeks.

So without further ado, here’s a little excerpt of our chat with George.

Hi George. How are you?

George: Hello. How are we doing?

Gill: Hi. I think we missed you by a day in Mussomeli

Luca: But we met some of...

Luca: Happy Saturday to our listeners. We’re back with the Magic Towns Italy podcast. I am Luca

Anna: and Anna. Today we are heading back to one of the regions that often gets overlooked in conversations about moving to Italy, but really shouldn’t.

Luca: People go to Italy, they imagine I’m gonna go to Tuscany, Rome. Milan maybe Puglia, but Le Marche is off the radar for most people. And one of the things we like to do at Magic Towns is look a little bit further.

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, Le Marche have the sea, the mountains, beautiful towns, strong food culture. It’s a beautiful area. This area also feels more structured than most of Central Italy, and there are lots of towns that qualify for the [00:01:00] 7% tax scheme

Luca: of which you have spoken time and time and time again. You are the expert.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: So today we’re going to discuss the process of settling down in the Marche through the voice of our guest, Sara.

Sarah is originally from Australia and she moved to Italy after what she , described as a bit of a midlife crisis. She came to Italy to study Gastronomic Sciences. I didn’t even know it was a thing before hearing it from her. And then she made the decision to stay in Italy and to build something of our own.

Anna: Yeah. You know what I liked about Sara’s story is that it isn’t random at all. Like she didn’t fall in love with a postcard and jump, she approached the move very thoughtfully. She had a spreadsheet criteria, a town size in mind, access to airports, access to trains, and then eventually she found herself in Fabriano.

Luca: I thoroughly [00:02:00] approve of that approach as you can imagine. And the property angle in talking to Sarah is interesting too. It’s not like she came, she bought a small apartment and settled down, or she took on a big renovation project and added to, into her background in food, hospitality and walking internationally, and she imagined a creative and community-based future for the property she was fixing up.

Anna: Yeah. So in this episode you’ll hear about why she choose the town of Fabriano, what surprised her about moving inland rather than to the coast, how she found the buying and renovation process in Italy, and also what she sees in Le Marche as a place for food tourism reason and as lower, more intentional travel.

Luca: So without further ado, here is Anna with Sara on living in the Marche.

Sara: I am from Australia and i’ve been living in Melbourne for most of my life, but I’m from a [00:03:00] small country town about the same size as Fabriano. And I’ve worked in the food industry all of my life. I suppose the kind of reason that I came to Italy was a bit of a midlife crisis because I’m 50 and I applied for the University of Gastronomic Science.

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Sara: Um, which is located in Bra in Piemonte, and it’s a university that was started by Carlo Petrini from the Slow Food movement. I was accepted. So I’ve done a Master’s of Food Communication and Marketing, and I decided to stay.

Anna: And then from Bra you moved to Le Marche.

Sara: Yeah, so I really enjoyed that year in Bra. The trains were amazing. I could get to Milan really easily and just as a right size town I think as well. So when I did start my kind of like, oh, maybe I’ll just move somewhere in Italy, look around, I had quite a detailed spreads...

Luca: Hey Anna

Anna: Hi Luca. Where are you right now?

Luca: I’m actually at Catania Airport.

Anna: Why?

Luca: I’ve just come back from a little tour of Sicily. I spent a week going around. Visiting places. Meeting up with expats.

It was, it was very enjoyable. My only problem with Sicily is that every time I go to Sicily, I put on three or four kgs.

Anna: Mm-hmm.

Luca: So it’s a bad place for me to be.

The, the food is amazing, but there’s a lot of it that’s fried. So it’s good, but it’s dangerous.

Anna: Oh, and where have you been?

Luca: There was a bit of a wide tour, started off in Caltagirone. Licata Sciacca and then went off to Mussomeli. No. Of which, you know, yes. You know a lot about Mussomeli, so,

And then ended up back in, Catania.

Anna: But sorry. Are [00:01:00] the one euro houses real there, or is just.

Luca: Yes, yes. Oh, I can attest to the fact that they exist.

There’s not many of them. In fact, I don’t think there’s any of them left. That’s actually a funny, a funny thing that all the expats I met, none of them bought a one euro home. They heard about the place from, of course from George Laing, and we know him. From the one euro home system, but none of them bought a one euro home, but they’re still affordable homes, you know, so.

Anna: Yeah. So did you get to see any of these properties? Like what condition are they actually in?

Luca: Yeah, so the, you have to understand this. Mussomeli like many Sicilian towns h as an old historical center that was not made for cars.

Tiny homes, very often in a very bad state, surrounded by newer buildings, mostly erected in the sixties and the seventies. I actually had a chat with an architect a Sicilian architect yesterday who does [00:02:00] not want to be named. He told me that this is almost inevitable in Sicily, that he cannot think of a single town in Sicily that does not have this layer of frankly, a bit ugly buildings from the sixties and the seventies around it.

So what you can play with is the size of the historical center. Some have a very large historical center like Catania, Catania, five kilometers wide historical center. Some of them have a very small historical center and, in the case of Mussomeli, you have the outskirts, which are like I don’t wanna say modern, you know, semi modern sixties and seventies buildings. Not super pretty, although the nature around it is very pretty. Then you have the historical center, which has all these very cute, lanes, alleys, stairs, going up and down, winding, absolutely not made to be driven with a wide car. I am thankful that I had a, a Cinquecento, Fiat Cinquecento with me [00:03:00] so it will fit and the one euro homes are in this section.

They’re mostly very old buildings, they need a lot of love.

Anna: Does it feel like a place you could live year round or more like a slow rural escape?

Luca: It is surprising when George says that there’s a lot of expats. He is not kidding. I personally met quite a few of them and I’m just gonna say hi to Charlotte and Tim, I know you’re listening, so I’m saying hi to you.

There’s ma...

​Anna: Today we’re talking about something that matters enormously if you’re thinking of moving here with children. What is actually like to grow up and to go to school in Italy? There’s a lot of mythology around the Italian education system.

It’s chaotic or outdated. Others, imagine something like idyllic and community driven, but the truth as usual sits somewhere in between.

Luca: That’s right. Hi Anna. So if you zoom out and look at the data, Italy’s broadly in line with the average of developed countries. In the latest PISA rankings, the PISA rankings are these international rankings of various types of education, Italian 15 year olds score around the average in maths. A little bit above average in reading and a little bit below in science, Roughly three quarters of the students [00:01:00] reach solid of baseline across subjects, and where it is weaker is at the very top end.

There are fewer academic high flyers than in some Northern European and Asian systems. So it’s a system that works and works fairly well, but it is not especially elite. But we don’t want to talk about the data. You’ll be happy to hear that, Anna. We actually want to talk about what it feels like and, um, talking about that you actually grew up in that, inside the Italian system. Talking about the big picture, what did it feel like to grow up in a small Italian town?

Anna: I actually feel very lucky, because, you know, there is this kind of freedom that just comes with it naturally. So you know, your village, you can basically walk the whole thing and that makes you feel independent, even if you’re like just a kid. So, you know, I just grab my bike, I go buy bread or text my friends to figure out when to meet up.

I’m going to cinema. It seems like I’m [00:02:00] still doing these things, but

Luca: I know the cinema in your town, uh, it’s like, uh, tiny, but you know, still kids going to the center by themselves. It’s not taken for granted these days.

Anna: So yeah. You know, little things, but they made me feel independent. And because there’s less stuff to do, you end up being more creative about it. So, you know, you’re playing the hills behind the house.

You make things up, you, you figure things out on your own. And I think that shapes you in a good way. And I think that it, at least back then it felt really safe.

Luca: Maybe we’ll talk in the future about whether it feels less safe now, but anyway. Yeah, that sense of embeddedness in a place is something the expat families often underestimate. It isn’t just about test scores, it is more about the feeling of being a child in Italy.

But since we’re talking about schools, most Italian children attend public schools run by the state, and the [00:03:00] state system is what carries the country. There are private schools, but historically have not, they have not been seen as premium. There are income gaps, of course. Immigrant students have increased now, right now in the makeup, about 11% of the students. And that’s double what it was 15 years ago. But once you adjust for the socioeconomic factors of the families of origin, basically, once you cancel out the differences in, family economics immigrant children, Italian children perform the same in the Italian system. So that’s good news.

And how did you feel school was like at these different stages, Anna?

Anna: It depends. Kindergarten was wonderful. We had English classes, art, and this thing where the older kids would help the younger ones. So it really felt community driven. Primary school was, it was [00:04:00] good. Apart from the grembiule, I hated it.

Luca: Have to tell,...

Anna: Welcome back to Magic Towns Italy.

Today we’re heading to Sardinia, not as tourists, but through the eyes of someone who chose to build a life there from scratch.

Luca: You might have seen her on Instagram as @americanmominthemed, Charlotte Fortier-Mutzl. Charlotte, don’t kill me if I didn’t pronounce that perfectly, is originally from Quebec. She grew up in the US and eventually left everything behind to travel through Europe. In the next few years, there was a harrowing succession of moving to Rome on a working holiday visa, starting businesses, surviving COVID, and then relocating to Sardinia without ever having seen it.

Anna: So in this conversation we talk about risk, starting a business in Italy, learning the language from zero, raising children on the island, and what slow living [00:01:00] actually feels like when you’re living in every day.

Luca: If you’ve ever wondered about Sardinia’s slower pace of life, this episode offers a honest perspective from Charlotte.

Anna: Let’s get into it.

Hi, Charlotte, how are you? You’re in Cagliari right now, right?

Charlotte: Yes, that’s correct.

Anna: Nice to meet you finally. And two things, draw me to you, your story. The first one is the sweetness and sincerity in the way you share what happens to you every day. Like you really do so much while being a mom and and entrepreneur. And now I still, you even learning Sardinian. Second that you move exactly to Sardinia, which is absolutely, I think one of my favorite places all over the world.

Can you tell me a bit more about your story?

Charlotte: I’m from Quebec, from Canada, the French part. And, uh, at 12 years old I moved with my family to the United States, to Florida. And then eventually, I moved to San Diego in California where I lived for a few years and I loved it [00:02:00] there. But yeah, I went through a bad breakup. I kind of felt for a long time that I was kind of out of place, you know, and I kind of grew up feeling like the United States, Canada is like the center of the world, and I knew that there was more out there, and so I, I had this, this need to go experience something else. And so I sold my car and I sold everything I had basically.

And I took a plane ticket to Europe and traveled by myself. And did seven countries in two months and fell in love with Italy. I went to Barcelona and got a yoga teaching certification. And then I decided to start in Italy. I had like a working holiday visa and, I was teaching yoga in the park, working at a bar in the evening.

And then I met my husband, in Rome. We lived there for a few years, I think three years. [00:03:00] But we lived there through COVID and having our first son. Afterwards everything just became a bit too chaotic. And we lived in an agriturismo in Umbria for like six months. And we loved it there. We were actually looking for houses there ’cause we knew we didn’t wanna waste money on rent anymore. ‘Cause we had moved, I think, to 12 different apartments since my son had been born.

So we just wanted some stability. And then one day we were walking and we were freezing. We were in our boots and I’m looking at my husband, I’m like, what are we doing? Are we really gonna live here? It’s too cold for me. And I think having grown up, you know, in Florida, in California, I was really missing the beach.

And so I got online and started researching, some of the warmest places in Italy, scuba diving, snorkeling, all this stuff. And then I came across Sardinia. And in reality, I didn’t even know Sardinia existed. That’s how ignorant I [00:04:00] was. And my husband said, well, you’...

Luca: I read all the time about people that don’t want to come to Italy because of the wealth tax. There was this lady that wrote on Expats in Italy, the Facebook group, that she wouldn’t come to Italy because she had calculated that the wealth tax would exceed her annual salary.

Anna: Oh my God.

Luca: Yeah, it’s, it’s not true. So that’s how the idea for this podcast came about.

Let’s start with this complex, uh, and scary subject, in, under 15 minutes.

Anna: However, and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast. I am Anna here with my co-host Luca, and today we’re talking about a topic that causes a lot of confusion and worry for internationals in Italy, which is the so-called wealth tax on money held abroad.

Luca: [00:01:00] Yes. This is a topic that a lot of people ask about and there is a lot of misinformation about. So we have to tackle this. People are scared by a term like wealth tax and we’re here to clear the air with facts and um, try to make it interesting in under 15 minutes.

Anna: We’ll break down what Italy’s, foreign wealth tax, really is, uh, talk about, you know, the common myths and give you a few examples so you can understand everything better.

Luca: By the end of today’s show, you will know that the idea of a huge Italian wealth tax is a myth. What the actual numbers are and what kind of assets are exempt from this tax. And we’ll also give a few examples I like this one how having 5 million euro or dollars in a foreign bank account could result in a tax that’s cheaper than than dinner for two.

Anna: Okay, so, uh, one thing I’ve heard over and over is [00:02:00] that if you keep money abroad or transfer money into Italy, the government will whack it with a 10% or 20% tax. Is there any truth to this?

Luca: The quick answer is no. There is no generic 10 or 20% remittance tax on money that is sent to Italy. There is no automatic haircut on incoming funds. In 2014, there was a shortlived, government proposal. This was like three governments ago, of course.

But the proposal was basically dead as as soon as it was discussed. This came up in the, uh, years after the great financial crisis when Italy had a, uh, like many other European countries of a huge debt problem, and they were trying to shore up their finances. Anyway, for people listening to this in 2026, it is absolutely untrue that Italy will tax, or the Italy will intercept even a single euro of money coming from abroad.

Anna: Okay, so if I move, [00:03:00] say, 50,000 euros of my saving from my home country to my Italian bank, I won’t wake up to find 10,000 missing. Right?

Luca: That’s exactly right. You’re going to wake up and find 50 K in the bank account. What is more, if those 50k are your savings that are already taxed, uh, Italy doesn’t tax the fact that you moved them or the fact that you have it. There’s no tax on savings per se.

Anna: Okay. That is a huge relief for a lot of listeners, I’m sure. People in expat forums always panic about some mysterious wealth tax.

Luca: Absolutely. As a myth, it is a remarkably sturdy one. So let’s clarify this. Italy levies a wealth tax on foreign assets, so on cash and financial instruments held abroad. The taxes name is IVAFE. You don’t need to remember the acronym, but it translates to tax on the value of foreign financial [00:04:00] assets.

And this is what people are actually talking about when they mention a wealth tax on money kept abroad.

Anna: Okay, so let’s talk like more deeply about that. Like what is it, how much is it, why Italy has it, like how much is this tax actually?

Luca:<...

Luca: Happy Saturday everyone, and welcome back to Magic Towns Italy. I’m Luca here with Anna. Good morning, Anna.

Anna: Hi everyone. Hi Luca.

Luca: This week we are talking about a question we get often, which is why are so many wonderful, gorgeous looking Italian villages and castles abandoned, or for sale for what looks like pocket change? I, myself have renovated several properties and I’m always looking for properties.

It’s, uh, as people know, it’s a bit of an addiction for everyone that has it. The area around Venice alone is home to more than 5,000 historical villas. Hundreds of these are in disrepair and sell or sometimes are auctioned for prices as low as 100 or 200,000 euro. And when foreigners see this, they think, oh, Italy’s property market must be broken.

How can it be [00:01:00] so cheap?

Anna: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it sounds too good to be true and usually it is. So today we want to correct that view. The low price is often an illusion and it’s caused by real costs like taxes, you know, renovation works.

So people and especially foreigners are often unaware of.

Luca: That’s right. These properties are not cheap because Italians don’t think the castles or villas aren’t beautiful. They’re cheap because the system makes them very costly to buy and restore. And in the next minutes, we’re going to talk about, uh, Italy’s tax code, the property register system, and the heritage laws that structurally punish historical buildings.

In other words, which part of the bureaucracy makes it so hard to use and maintain these villas?

Anna: Yeah. By the end of this episode, you will understand the reason why these villas and castles languish unsold so we’ll break down the tax traps, the luxury [00:02:00] labels, the heritage protections.

So all the unsexy realities.

Luca: Unsexy realities. Let’s start with tax.

Anna: Yeah.

Luca: 30 second primer on the cadastral category. Please don’t tune out. This is important and most people don’t know what it is. In Italy, there is something called the cadastral category, and it is a code that, indicates what kind of property each property is. Castles, villas are in three of the A categories, A1, A8, or A9. It basically means that, anything that has that label given by the tax man is deemed to be a luxury property from fancy apartments to villas to castles or palazzi.

Anna: But luxury sounds like a good thing. Like why do you say it’s a problem?

Luca: Because in Italy, luxury is basically a tax warning label.

Anna: A warning label,

Luca: yes. There’s a whole set of tax benefits that disappear and more taxes kick in.

Anna: Even [00:03:00] if the place is falling apart.

Luca: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. There can be mushrooms growing through the floorboards, but if the property is tagged as A8 or A9, the tax system treats it like it’s a billionaire’s villa.

Anna: What actually changes?

Luca: The first thing is that you don’t get any first home tax breaks. Normally when you buy a property, you pay 2% purchase tax if you’re gonna go and live in it. In this case, you’re gonna pay 9% whether you live in it or not.

Anna: That’s a big difference.

Luca: Huge. Luxury homes are excluded from the benefit. So for the same house price, you could be looking at paying 70,000 euro tax instead of 15,000.

Anna: Ah, okay.

Explore Italy's hidden gems with in this George Laing interview. Discover Mussomeli's one euro homes and their impact on the community!

Luca: I’m excited about yet another episode of the Magic Towns Italy podcast. Are you excited, Anna?

Anna: Yeah, I’m super excited also because we are talking about a really interesting topic, right?

Luca: We always do. What’s this topic?

Anna: So we were gonna keep talking about the most search towns in 2026, but we are pushing that to next week because that’s some really, really important tax news if you’re thinking about buying or fixing up a home in Italy.

Luca: That is right. We are going to talk about Italy’s home renovation tax breaks for 2026.

2026 is actually a bit of a special year. We’ve even called it the last really good year to renovate with meaningful tax breaks. We’re going to talk about what incentives that are there now, especially compared to the crazy, [00:01:00] Superbonus 110% from a few years before.

Anna: Oh yeah, that bonus, the government basically paid you more than what you spent.

Crazy, right?

Luca: Yes. I would say that Superbonus, born in 2020 let homeowners claim 110% of the renovation costs as a tax credit and in practice that meant that you could renovate your house and make a 10% profit in tax credits. It was the government paying for your renovation effectively.

Anna: Yeah.

Suddenly everyone was changing windows. Installing solar panels. But that, that couldn’t last forever, right?

Luca: Yeah. The bill was astronomical. The super bonus blew a hole in Italy ‘s finances. The economy minister said that these incentives had a devastating impact on public Between one and the other these bonuses have cost 219 billion [00:02:00] euro.

Anna: Oh my God, that’s insane. Like Italy basically threw hundreds of billions at home makeovers.

Luca: The initial plan was for the scheme to cost maybe 35 billion Euro that is short up to a hundred around the 160 billion euro in just four years.

And the worst thing is that because the government was effectively paying for people to renovate their home, the construction costs also went up by a lot. Uh, people weren’t even negotiating prices. I mean, uh, and why would they care if the state was paying for it? And did lead to some abuse.

Anna: Yeah, I heard about the scams.

People were definitely taking advantage.

Luca: Yeah, taking advantage of the system. Um, so far, about 12 billion in fraudulent claims had been found out. Prime Minister Meloni called it the biggest scandal that the state has ever suffered. So there has been a lot of backlash on this tax scheme. And we could do an entire podcast about what went wrong with 110% super bonus.[00:03:00]

So it shouldn’t be surprising that these incentives have been dialed back.

Anna: So the Superbonus is basically done now, right?

Luca: As of right now, January, 2026, the Superbonus, 105% is completely scrapped , for any of our listeners, this scheme is effectively over.

Anna: Oh, okay. So no more free renovation for us. I mean, it was good while it lasted, but um, what about now? Like, if 2026 is the last good year, what can we actually get this year?

Luca: That’s a good question. The government has not completely abandoned helping renovators, and in fact, uh, three of the key programs, the Bonus Casa, which is the oldest of them, has existed for maybe 20 years, the Ecobonus and Sismabonus have all been extended, but at lower rates and with simpler rules.

Anna: Wait, but what’s the difference between them?

Luca: So in a [00:04:00] nutshell, Bonus Casa is the gen...

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...