Luca: Welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy Podcast, and welcome back, Anna.
Anna: Hi, everyone.
Luca: So it’s actually been a bit less of a holiday than we were hoping it to be. Lots of work, lots of crazy late nights, uh, for me. Did you stay up late, Anna?
Anna: Yeah, sure.
Luca: Yeah, yeah. No.
Anna: Not until 2:00 AM.
Luca: Yeah, no, I was up until 2:00 AM. It’s been a bit crazy. I felt like Mozart, you know, composing a requiem on his death bed, like, ” I’ll keep working until So no, it’s okay.
Anna: Um- But it’s worth it, right?
Luca: Well, I’m not dying, but no, uh, it’s been fun. I’m actually very excited. We thought we would do our first back to work podcast, of August, just talking about, very briefly, a few things that we launched, a few things we’re [00:01:00] excited about, a few things we will launch, and you’re not gonna find anywhere else. So if you’re interested in moving to Italy with brains and data and not making mistakes, listen on. And if you want Instagram, uh, ” oh, this is such a cool town” …well, you know, go to Instagram. So where do we start?
Anna: Should we start with the cost of living calculator?
Luca: Oh, yes. I love the cost of living calculator. What is it that we like very much about how we did things here? I mean, I’ve lived in many countries, and when you talk to people about cost of living, they always talk about the same website, which… Can I mention it? Yeah, I can mention it. I’m not saying anything bad. You know, they do always talk about Numbeo. They go on Numbeo.
Anna: Dun-dun-dun.
Luca: Yeah. I’d be like, “Well, I looked at the price of milk in Munich versus the price of milk in Dresden.” [00:02:00] And I’m like, you know, we’re actually thinking about this, and is this even the right way to look at it? Then we did the maths, and we’re looking at the town in Italy with the cheapest milk and the town in Italy with the most expensive milk.
And then we thought, “Okay, let’s say that you, someone who drinks a lot of milk, a gallon of milk a week, five liters of milk, you’re basically made of milk.” How much is that gonna cost us? Like, €70 a year diff- difference.
So that’s clearly not where the cost of living lies. And what actually is the input in cost of living? Cost of living depends on your lifestyle. You can live in the cheapest town in Italy and go out for dinner every night, and you’ll spend more than Anna does living on cans of beans, right? I just, it’s a true story.
My brother is still studying for his PhD, and he lives… He’s very parsimonious. He lives on like canned beans and not because he needs to. Yeah.
Anna: Tuna and rice.
Luca: Exactly. [00:03:00] Canned beans, tuna, rice. So he spends less in an expensive city than someone who goes and eats fish every day in a small town, cheap town in Sicily.
So, long story short, our cost of living calculator. We built a cost of living calculator that calculates on the fly how much it’s gonna cost you to live in almost 8,000 towns in Italy. How does it work? You take a quiz once. The quiz takes one minute to fill in, and it just picks up how you like to live.
Anna: Are you a remote worker?
Luca: What kind of place do you wanna live in? Big, small, villa, apartment? Do you want a car? Do you want a pool? Right? You go golfing. So it’s basically how you lead your life.
Very simple questions, not a enormous spreadsheet, but what we do is we map that to [00:04:00] 460 inputs, which you don’t see. We calculate them for you. What’s your property tax going to be like, depending on the town? What’s your heating bills going to be, depending on the square meters of, you know, the property you might like, the climate, etc.
You don’t have to do the work, we do it for you. And at the end of this, we give you your cost of living for free for, you know, against the national average. Now, members pay for what we do, so members get something else, something more. Every time they visit a town profile, again, almost 8,000 of that, they see how much it’s gonna cost them to live in that town, and the difference is staggering.
The most expensive town in Italy, if you have the same lifestyle, right? Family, two kids. The most expensive town in Italy to live in, which is not in Milan, it’s not… It’s actually at the border with Austria. It will cost you between [00:05:00] 50 and €70,000 a year to live in. The cheapest, same lifestyle, same… Of course, you’re not at the border with Austria. You’re near Naples, it’s half the cost, so it’s a huge difference. And where do you think that difference comes from? It doesn’t come from the price of milk, tell you that for free. It comes in large amount from the difference in property prices. There are other differences, taxes, insurance. Car insurance could be very different based on the town and the region, etc.
So we have built something, in my opinion, that is an enormous time saver first, and also something that is more analytical while being user-friendly, than anything else I’ve ever seen. So go to our website, try it out. It’s free to use. Just, you know, take the survey and then if you become a member, we say, “Hope you will,” because it keeps the lights on. Then you would actually [00:06:00] see which towns in Italy are within your budget or not with one click. No further work So that’s the first thing we shipped this week.
Anna: The second one is the property evaluator.
Luca: Oh my God, we can’t talk about the property evaluator.
Anna: Davvero?
Luca: Yeah, it’s actually a secret. We can tell people about it, but-
Anna: Yeah, sure …
Luca: Sì.
Anna: Just a little bit.
Luca: Yeah, just a little bit. Okay. Anna, you blew my great reveal for next week. But anyways.
Anna: I’m sorry.
Luca: No, it’s fine. It’s fine. Let’s get people excited. I’m excited. I’ve been working on it for the past week straight.
So people find their town, hopefully using Magic Towns with all our, you know, 400 indicators per town. But what happens after you find the town or the towns you like? Well, you’re gonna start shopping for property. Actually, most people start shopping for property before they find a town. We thought we have all this information [00:07:00] on a town-by-town basis, and we wrote with Matteo Conte, our architect, the Ultimate Property Buying Guide.
Why don’t we turn that into a real live assessment of each property in Italy? You give us the name and the place where this property is, and we tell you if it’s cheap, if it’s expensive, if it’s in a good neighborhood, if it has any particular risks: earthquake, landslide, flood. We mark it against your preferences. You said you wanted a golf course, but you just submitted a property that is three hours away from the nearest golf course. We flag that for you. So that has been a huge piece of work.
Anna: Okay. So basically you go on a property website and you copy and paste the link in our tool. Yeah. Is it that easy?
Luca: It’s actually going to be easier because we’re starting a WhatsApp channel where you can just send a [00:08:00] link via WhatsApp to Magic Towns like it’s one of your friends, and we all know you send your favorite properties to your friends, and so send them to Magic Towns too. And then two minutes later, Magic Towns answers back to you and says, “Hey, I prepared your property assessment.” And, I personally think it’s great. Right now we’re only having a handful of users on the lifetime plan try it out. You know, they support us, and we give them, like, previews and we get feedback. I think it’s already very useful, to know, for instance, if you said that you’re interested in having a school, to know the quality of the nearest schools to that particular property is important.
We’re adding an amazing, I think, tool which shows you how many of the properties around you are lived in permanently, uninhabited, second homes. And when you look at small towns in the south of Italy, knowing that, you know, “Ooh, this property is amazing. It’s really cheap.” But oops, 80% of the properties around me are uninhabited.
[00:09:00] Well, you know, that tells you there’s a reason if it’s cheap. So it’s a cool tool. We’re going to make it available to all members very soon, and that is unfortunately not something that we’re going to make available to everyone. And why is that? Well, very simply because it costs us money. Every time that you run a property assessment, our servers start, you know, we have to put coal in the engine. We have to process a lot of information and that’s something that we’re going to make available to members.
Anna: Great. Do we have a third tool?
Luca: Do we? Yes. That’s another one. That’s for everyone, and that’s the last one because otherwise it’s gonna be a one-hour podcast. The Find Your Town Wizard. We have thousands of people using the Town Explorer, but some people, you know…
Anna: might find it too difficult to use.
Luca: Maybe not too difficult, but it’s… before you drive manual, most people find it easier to drive automatic.
Anna: Yeah, exactly.
Luca: And the way you drive automatic is by using the Find Your Town tool. So this is a very simple wizard, a [00:10:00] questionnaire. It’s eight questions. You tell us what you like. I would like to live in a hilly town. This is my budget. I want pool. I want an airport nearby. I want a train station nearby. Very, very simple. It’s easier for you to use than for me to explain it to you.
Free of charge. Try it out, and then it gives you a list of towns from the 8,000 towns we report on, ranked by how good the match it is for you. And longtime listeners know this, we started this, I think in the first podcast, we said that those best town to live in lists are trash. They are trash because Anna likes to live by the beach, and I like to live in the mountains, so how can we both feed off the same list? And the first town is always Copenhagen, and I used to live there, and I don’t live there anymore.
So why is that, if it’s the best town to live in the world? It can only be important for you, [00:11:00] it can be relevant to you. So try the Find Your Town wizard. Again, you find it on Magic Towns. Eight clicks and you get every town in Italy sorted.
Actually, this is another news. We removed the paywall from the website. We no longer gate access to information based on region. We give everyone five free towns to explore. So those are yours forever. Create a free account. You click around. The first five you look at, you have access to. And then of course, if you want access to the others, you become a member. So there is no downside in you trying this tool. We built it with love and care. Go and try it out today. Cost of living, Find Your Town wizard, and then from next week, I think, we make it available to everyone, maybe a couple weeks, the property evaluator.
Anna: Lots of big news. I’m so excited for the property evaluator.
Luca: Yeah. Are you gonna use it?
Anna: I think so.
Luca: Are you looking for a property?
Anna: No, just [00:12:00] joking.
Luca: Well, we all like to shop for property. We got anything exciting content side? I think you wrote a couple of town profiles past couple weeks.
Anna: Oh, yeah. So a few weeks ago we covered a nice town called Aulla in Lunigiana and I think this could be really interesting for a lot of people. We recently covered La Spezia, which is attracting more and more expats from all over the world. And it’s perfectly located, you know, it’s near Genoa, Cinque Terre… it’s in a beautiful spot
Luca: Aw, so sweet.
Anna: I know. And there’s a super interesting article this week. It’s called Blue Zones: The Secret of Longevity in Sardinia. You know, guys, that I love Sardinia, and it’s full of small little towns where people basically
Luca: People don’t die.
Anna: Where people don’t die. So we covered a few of those towns, how people live there, if it’s actually feasible to live [00:13:00] there year-round
Luca: Is that your plan, Anna? Find a cheap place in central Sardinia and live to 150?
Anna: Well, some of them are not isolated at all, like 30 minutes from the beach. It’s- Really?
Luca: non
Anna: much. Yeah, yeah.
Luca: Okay. Okay. So you live to 150, but it won’t feel like you live to 150
Anna: Well…
Luca: and then you wrote about Mantova last week.
Anna: Yeah. I know that you love Mantova.
Luca: I love Mantova. I love Mantova. One of the most underrated cities in Italy. You know, it’s a great Renaissance city. You have art, you have Palazzo Te, you have the River Mincio. So it’s at this confluence of rivers. It is a stunning place. Why is it so underrated? There’s always a guy, you know, it’s always a guy on Instagram, that comments, “There’s a reason if these places no one wants to live there.”
Well, you know, things can be cycles. And I think, you know, if Andrea [00:14:00] Mantegna spent years there painting some of the best frescoes of his life at the court back in the day where this place attracted artists from all over the world, well, there’s a reason. I think it will come back. And yeah, it’s hot in the summer. It is hot. It’s a, you know, it’s the plains. But it is… Uh, and the food is amazing. You are not gonna lose weight in Mantova. That’s probably its biggest downside there. If you go there, then you have to go and live in Sardinia to live to 100, because too many tortelli can, be bad for your hips.
Anna: We also talked with Jasmina a few weeks ago, and she lived there
Luca: Well, how does she feel about it?
Anna: She loved it. Actually she said that she fell in love with Italy when she moved to Mantua. Then she moved to Noto in Sicily because she found work there, but she said that it was super, super practical, walkable, super well-connected.
Luca: It’s a beautiful city.
Anna: It’s a beautiful city.
Luca: And for people that like the countryside, [00:15:00] it’s amazing. Again, no skin in the game. We don’t sell property. There’s always another guy. It’s always another guy. The comments, “You guys say these things to sell property.”
We don’t sell property. A, we have no time for it, and B, that’s not our business. We’re entirely reader-funded. So if we tell you we like a place, it’s because we like it. I love Mantova. Go and spend some time there. I think you’ll fall in love with it too.
Anna: And try the famous anguria, the watermelon.
It’s so famous.
Luca: Oh, your dad is crazy for the anguria Mantovana. This, the disclaimer, every time you eat a, a watermelon with with Anna’s dad, he’s like “This is a anguria from Mantova. They are the best.” It’s like- The best … you know, he’s on a loop.
Anna: Yeah, exactly.
Luca: True or no?
Anna: Of course. That’s why I know Mantova, just because of that.
Luca: Just because of that. But the rice too, you know? Anyway, do yourselves a favor, in your next trip to Italy, go to Mantova if you’re going on a scouting trip. [00:16:00] And I wanna say one last thing, because you have stuck with the podcast until the end, so I’m gonna tell you something that the other people that stopped after minute five did not hear.
We have beta launched an itinerary planner. Since so many people ask us, “Luca, Anna, can you tell us about, you know, I wanna spend the week in Sicily. I wanna visit such and such, such city. Can you recommend a few towns that I can visit? Can you recommend a few hotels?” And we get this a lot, and I think Anna and I could spend our lives just answering these people. And we love you, you know? Thank you for thinking of us. But we also thought, why don’t we give you the keys to the car instead of, you know, driving around for you? We have built a itinerary planner that specs out for you an itinerary in parts of Italy based on your preferences, hilly towns, 7% towns, whatever you like and it [00:17:00] fills up your days.
It tells you the driving times. You can tell it, you know, “I’m happy to drive a lot every day. I don’t wanna drive too much.” It sets you up in bases, so you don’t have to change hotel every night. You stay, like, it tends to make you stay three or four nights in one town where you can reach different places around, around you.
I think it is a fantastic tool, and we are going to make this available to members from next week, and then we’re going to progressively, you know, market it more widely. So there you go. You stuck with us to the end of the podcast. We told you about four things we did. Anna told you about a lot of stuff that she wrote about. If you like what we do, subscribe, tell your friends, and thank you for being here with us on this lovely Saturday.
Anna: Thank you, guys.
Luca: Talk to you next week.
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