What Italy Cost Of Living Calculators Get Wrong (And How We Built Ours)

Many people budget their move to Italy by comparing the price of milk. We priced every town in the country and found that 86% of the difference between the cheapest and most expensive town is one single thing. You may have done this already: you find a page comparing the price of a litre of milk in Catania and in Milan. Then a coffee in Naples against a coffee in Verona. You add it up in your head and decide the south is cheap and the north is expensive. We’ve been there before, a long time ago. Then we decided to run the numbers properly. Here is the arithmetic that changed everything. Say milk really is twenty cents a litre cheaper in one town than the other. Say you drink a litre a day, which is a lot of milk. Over a year you save seventy-three euro. Say dinner out costs twenty euro more per head in the pricier town, and you eat out once a week. That is a thousand euro a year. So a household that has done the classic comparison, and got it right, has found around €1,100 euro a year. Now here is what we found…