What are you scared of?
Brave? I Don't Think So
People often tell me I'm brave to have done what I've done — bought a place in Italy, upped and moved. I'll be honest, I sometimes lose sight of why I found it as easy as I did.
Back in my twenties, I bought and sold a property in Spain. Buying was easy, and selling turned out to be remarkably quick too. So I already had a foundation of confidence long before Italy came along. Ever since I came back from Spain — for a mix of personal and family reasons — I'd always said I'd move abroad again one day, and that I'd go with just the clothes on my back as long as I had my wallet and passport in my pocket. I've always felt agile, always felt the pull to do it again. Buying and selling in a foreign country came easily to me in my twenties, and I think I'd lost sight of that.
It usually comes out over dinner, with a glass of wine, when I'm sat with someone in person having a proper conversation. That's when the real question surfaces: but what were you scared of?
So let me try to address that and point you towards some easy places to start — places where you can still make a complete U-turn if you change your mind.
Start here: the codice fiscale
It's free, and it carries no burden on your future. It's simply a tax reference code with an ID behind it in the Italian system. Get one — even if you never end up using it, there's no downside. Nobody checks it when you cross a border or land at an airport. It's just a piece of paper with a number on it. It is essencial for the next steps and good to have in hand.
Next: decide how you want to handle money in Italy
You don't strictly need an Italian presence for this, especially with modern banking, so you could open an account — even with a foreign address. I opened mine with my British address and transfer money across to my Italian account using a money broker for the better exchange rate and process. It's entirely in my control: my account, my money, and I could withdraw it and close it whenever I liked. It comes with a chip-and-pin card, which is handy for supermarkets and everyday spending in Italy, and it keeps things neatly separate from my other accounts overseas. Simple, and fully reversible.
Then: spend real time in the places you think you love
Holidays are wonderful — Tuscany, the Amalfi Coast, all the famous spots. They're exactly what makes people fall in love with Italy. But if that's the style of Italy you've fallen for, it's worth knowing that living there is a different matter entirely. Florence looks incredible, but I wouldn't call it an easy place to actually live — too busy, noisy and would you actually feel like a local?
So it's about finding the towns, the villages, the rural pockets that suit you and the lifestyle you imagine — while remembering that lifestyle shifts as we get older. My daughters love Senigallia for the bars, restaurants, clubs and beach — a brilliant, lively vibe. It's a world away from Corinaldo, just twenty kilometres inland, which suits me perfectly. I'd happily visit Senigallia, but I'm not sure I'd want to live there (that is a lie, I would love to live there - but I can’t afford it).
How do you find out what actually fits? Turn it into a low-risk experiment. Rent Airbnbs, stay in guest houses, try smaller hotels in quieter places. Get a genuine feel for daily life. Do you want to drive to a supermarket, or cycle down with a basket on the front to pick up produce from a local farmers' market? Those are the experiences you'll never get on a holiday built around the big tourist towns — brilliant for a weekend, but not necessarily a picture of everyday life with a slow pace.
Ask the right questions early
This is where the diversity of Italy's regions comes in — working out whether an area actually gives you what you think you want. Figuring that out is a genuinely interesting journey: asking yourself what matters most and what matters least.
Do this early and you de-risk the whole thing because you find out what you actually want. If you're doing it solo, that's straightforward. If you're doing it as a couple, it becomes a more interesting exercise — talking through what the lifestyle looks like as you both get older, how you'll spend your time, what weekdays look like versus weekends, and how you'll want to live through the winters.
Italy is easy to travel around — it's a big country, but not unmanageably so. My usual advice stands: there's a house out there for everybody, whatever the budget, and every region has something brilliant to offer. You have to go and experience these places to know what you want — but you need the right questions first, before you start booking the trips and long weekends to test your theory.
If you'd like a hand with this, I am putting together a Q&A workflow designed to help you build a priority list: what matters to you, what you're willing to compromise on, and — more importantly — what you're not. With that list in hand, you can quickly rule out a good number of regions which makes your search and weekends away easier to plan. It will tune you in on the finer detail that gets lost when on holiday. All of this at zero risk. Have a look at the guide I created — the Q&A is built right in. And if you've got questions, message me, or if you've got a lot of them, let's book a call and talk it through.
The fear, properly unpacked
There are really two sides to it: the process, and whether you're making the right decision.
The process is a well-trodden path. Billions of euros are spent every year on property by foreign investors — buying is easy, and it's so well established and professionally run that the risks are genuinely low.
The real risk is the other half: are you buying the right house, in the right location, in the right condition? Is this the right time, and is Italy even the right country for you? Once you strip the process risk away and focus on those questions — right time, right country, right region, right lifestyle — the fear disappears. That's what makes you brave, and it's what makes you a better buyer.
Good luck. Looking forward to meeting you in Italy one day soon.
