Where Are Expats Living in Italy? 2019 – 2025 Analysis

If you read enough property pieces on Italy, you will end up with the impression that the entire country is in the middle of an expat gold rush. Pensioners from Idaho buying farmhouses in Le Marche, Londoners restoring trulli in Puglia, the Dutch colonising Umbria, the French taking over the Riviera. In broad strokes, these stories are not untrue. The trouble is that reality is far more complex once you look at the data.

Town-level data covering 2019 to 2025 across all 7,500-plus Italian comuni (municipalities) offers a more textured picture than the headlines suggest. Italy’s recorded foreign-resident population rose from 4.91 million in 2019 to 5.28 million in 2025, a 7.5% increase. That is real growth, but it is also slower than most regional growth narratives imply, and the more interesting story sits one layer down: the growth is not landing where people think, and the nationalities that “expat Italy” is supposedly built around are not all moving in the same direction.

Why should this matter if you are planning a move? Because the practical question is rarely “is Italy attracting foreigners?” — that one has an obvious yes. The useful questions are: which kinds of foreigners are growing, dove are they actually settling, and how durable are the clusters you would be moving into. As we wrote last week on the 7% scheme, expats tend to follow other expats before they follow tax policies. That makes the texture of the map matter more than the headline number.

Methodology note. This piece sits on top of a comune-by-comune panel of foreign residents from 2019 to 2025, including a tracked subset of around two dozen “Western and selected” nationalities (US, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, the Nordics, Switzerland, Austria, Russia, Japan, and a few others). We use this subset as a proxy for lifestyle expats, not total immigrant numbers. We are looking at residents, not visa holders, not tax claimants, and not tourists.

Key findings

• Foreign residents rose 7.5% between 2019 and 2025, from 4,907,142 to 5,275,158, but the path was not smooth. The total fell by 2.8% in 2022 before resuming growth.
• Il “expat” group grew only 3.4%, less than half the overall rate. Their share of all foreign residents fell from 6.89% to 6.62%.
• Mid-sized comuni (20,000 to 100,000 residents) gained the most ground, lifting their share of foreign residents by 0.50 percentage points. Sub-20,000-resident comuni did not gain share over the period.
• Liguria (+18.5%) and Puglia (+17.4%) lead the regional growth table, with Basilicata posting the highest percentage gain (+21.8%) from a small base. Umbria is the only outright shrinker (-3.4%).
• The British count fell 7.9% nationally while the number of Italian comuni hosting at least one Briton also fell. The British map is consolidating, not broadening.
• The American count rose 17.3%, and the number of comuni with at least one US resident jumped from 2,659 to 2,890. Americans are spreading, not just landing in Rome and Florence.
• The Dutch footprint widened to 212 new comuni, and Airole in Liguria has become Italy’s most extreme small-town Dutch pocket.
• Turkey is the fastest-growing tracked nationality (+28.4%), with both an industrial-belt geography and a surprising southern-Tuscany cluster around Seggiano and Castel del Piano.
• Russian residents are concentrating into resort and prestige towns: Forte dei Marmi (+124%), Silvi (+165%), Scalea (+227%), and Campione d’Italia, where Russians now make up 44.8% of the foreign-resident base.
• Genova quietly added 13,597 foreign residents (+25%), the second-largest absolute gain in Italy after Milano.

Most New Foreign Residents Aren’t Western Expats

Let’s start with the bluntest numbers. Italy added roughly 368,000 foreign residents over the six-year window. That is a meaningful gain, but it is also less than the increases of the 2010-2018 period and it included a clear interruption in 2022, when the total fell by about 141,000 before resuming growth in 2023. Whatever combination of post-pandemic mobility, Russia-Ukraine displacement and statistical resettling drove that dip, the recovery has not been uniform.

The more awkward fact for the “Italy is being discovered by Westerners” story is that the “Western expats” nationalities only grew 3.4% over the same window. Their share of all foreign residents fell from 6.89% to 6.62%. In other words, Italy did become more international, but it became more international despite the tracked expat group rather than because of it. The bulk of the rise was driven by other origins than the traditional Western expat nationalities.

This is the first sense in which the popular narrative is wrong. When people say “expats are flooding into Italy”, they usually mean Northern Europeans and Anglo-Americans. That group grew, but slowly, and unevenly.

Expat Groups Are Not Moving in the Same Direction

The simplest way to see this is to rank the main tracked nationalities by 2025 size and look at how each got there. Poland is still the largest single group at just over 70,000 residents, but it has shrunk by 18.8% since 2019. This is a labor-migration retreat rather than a lifestyle story. Russia is now the second-largest at 42,196 and has grown by almost a fifth. Germany, France and Spain occupy the next tier, with Spain’s 20.1% gain having quietly pushed it past the United Kingdom in absolute terms.

The British count, by contrast, has fallen by 7.9% and Japan’s by 3.4%. Below them, Turkey, the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal and Belgium all sit between +15% and +28%. Ireland is the fastest-growing tracked nationality at +43.4%, though from a small base of 4,188. The point is not that any one of these moves is decisive on its own but that the composition of who lives here as a foreigner is changing in ways the headline number does not show.

Mid-Sized Cities, Not Tiny Villages, Took the Win

The other myth worth puncturing early is the idea that the growth is being absorbed by sleepy hill towns and rural comuni. It is not, or at least not in aggregate. Comuni with 20,000 to 100,000 residents lifted their share of all foreign residents by 0.50 percentage points between 2019 and 2025. Comuni under 20,000 residents collectively slipped by a small amount. Comuni over 100,000 inhabitants also lost a sliver.

That is a quietly important result. There is plenty of room for individual small towns to do brilliantly. Plenty did, with Ordona in Foggia province leaping from 426 to 1,108 foreign residents and a remarkable 361.7 per 1,000 density – but il type of place that gained the most is the medium provincial city. Vittoria, Foggia, Trieste, Cinisello Balsamo, Anzio, Ragusa e Monfalcone all sit in this band, and all posted big absolute gains. Genova is the most striking example: a major city that grew its foreign population by 25.2%, faster than Milan and almost four times faster than Rome.

For an expat reading this, the practical implication is that “the next great expat village” is a less reliable category than “the next mid-sized city building a foreign-resident base.” That includes places that are rarely lifestyle-press darlings. Trieste, Foggia, Bari and Ragusa are not mentioned often enough.

Four Nationality Stories, Not One

The “expat nationalities” we look at are doing genuinely different things, and conflating them produces a false picture.

The British map is shrinking. In the time interval of our analysis, Britain’s national count fell from 27,242 to 25,085, a 7.9% decline. The number of towns with at least one British resident also fell, from 3,767 to 3,736. That said, il intensità di British presence in specific pockets remains striking: 129 Britons in Bagni di Lucca (18.8% of all foreign residents), 53 in San Ginesio (19.9%), and continued strong showings across Massa-Carrara, inland Abruzzo, and selected Puglia comuni. Britain in Italy is now a story of deepening pockets rather than spreading reach. Brexit is the obvious explanation, but the geography of who stayed is its own story.

Il American footprint is broadening. US residents rose 17.3% nationally and the number of comuni with at least one American jumped by 231. The standout growth pocket is Lucca, which more than doubled its American count from 85 to 178 — easily the most editorially robust US-focused growth story in the file. Friuli’s Aviano-Polcenigo-Budoia-Montereale Valcellina cluster, anchored by the long-standing US military presence, remains one of the most concentrated American geographies in Italy. And Introdacqua, the small Abruzzese town we have written about before, has the highest relative American intensity in the country, with 27 US residents accounting for 21.6% of its foreign-resident base.

The Dutch are quietly spreading inland. The Netherlands count rose 18.2%, with 212 new comuni added. The most extreme Dutch pocket is Airole in Imperia province: a village of 359 inhabitants, 39 of whom are Dutch — a density of 108.6 per 1,000 and a 34.2% share of all foreign residents in town. Beyond Airole, the inland Marche and Umbria belt is the cleanest broadening story: Pietralunga, Arcevia, Cingoli, Sassoferrato, Fossombrone and Penna San Giovanni all show meaningful Dutch growth from small bases. Where the British map is hardening into pockets, the Dutch map is doing the opposite.

The Russian and Turkish maps are concentrating. Russian residents rose 17.9%, and the gains landed disproportionately in resort and prestige geographies. Forte dei Marmi added 82 Russians (+124%), Silvi added 96 (+165%), and Scalea added 100 (+227%). Campione d’Italia, the small Lombard exclave inside Switzerland, is the single most concentrated Russian nationality pocket in the entire dataset: 245 Russians make up 44.8% of all foreign residents there. The Turkish growth story (+28.4%, the fastest of any tracked nationality) is more geographically distinctive: a strong Imperia footprint (1,191 Turks, 16.4% of foreign residents), an unexpected southern-Tuscany cluster around Seggiano (where Turks make up 19% of foreign residents), and a long-standing industrial spine running through Modena e Reggio nell’Emilia.

If you flatten these four into one “expat” line, you lose the entire shape of what is happening.

Single-Nationality Signature Towns

A small but editorially important category in the data is what we are calling single-nationality signature towns: places where one tracked nationality accounts for an unusually large share of the foreign-resident base. These are the towns where, if you live there, you can plausibly say that the foreign-resident scene is di one place rather than mixed.

Campione d’Italia for Russians (44.8%) and Forte dei Marmi for Russians (28.0%). Renon for Germans (22.1%) and Capoliveri for Germans (19.8%). San Ginesio for Britons (19.9%) and Bagni di Lucca for Britons (18.8%). Imperia for Turks (16.4%). Augusta for Poles (14.2%). Airole for the Dutch (34.2%). Introdacqua for Americans (21.6%).

Each of these is a case where the foreign-resident population has a clear “national flavour”, which matters more for daily life than the raw count. A town with 200 foreign residents drawn from one country reads very differently to a town with 200 foreign residents drawn from twenty.

Imperia: Italy’s Strangest Border Province

If you wanted to pick one Italian province where the most distinct nationality maps overlap on top of each other, it would be Imperia. It hosts the cleanest French border arc in the country (Ventimiglia 310, Bordighera 125, Ospedaletti 43, Perinaldo and Apricale at high relative density). It is the single largest Turkish concentration in Italy outside the major industrial cities. It contains the Russian resort pocket of Ospedaletti and Bordighera. It has the most extreme Dutch micro-pocket in the country (Airole). And it shows up repeatedly in the British inland-Liguria pockets at Molini di Triora and Ceriana.

Imperia is, in other words, a province where five or six different nationality stories are happening simultaneously in towns that are sometimes only a few kilometres apart. It is not yet a particularly famous expat region by lifestyle-press standards. The data suggests it is one of the most layered.

What This Means If You Are Planning a Move to Italy

A few practical conclusions follow from all of this.

First, the question “is the foreign-resident population growing in this town?” is much weaker than “is the right kind of foreign-resident population growing here for me?” A town can be foreign-resident-rich without being part of any tracked Western expat geography (as we saw in our 7% piece, with places like Capua, Carapelle and Villa Literno). Conversely, a town with a small foreign-resident total can still be unusually well-suited to a particular nationality, as Airole, San Ginesio, Renon or Introdacqua show.

Secondo, mid-sized provincial cities deserve more attention than they currently get. Trieste, Genova, Foggia, Bari, Anzio, Ragusa, Monfalcone, Vittoria. None of these are obvious lifestyle picks, but all of them have absorbed serious foreign-resident growth and offer infrastructure (ospedali, airports, scuole, public transport) that smaller comuni cannot match.

Third, the British map is now consolidation, not expansion. The cluster logic still works, but the country-level tide that helped it form between 2000 and 2018 has stopped. Anyone moving into a “British pocket” town is stepping into a community that is more or less stable in size. The American, Dutch and Irish maps are the ones still actively widening.

Fourth, the 2022 break is real. It is a useful reminder that “Italy attracts foreigners” is not a permanent law of physics. The trajectory has bent before and will bend again, often in response to events that have nothing to do with Italy itself.

The simple version of the Italian expat story is that more people from outside Italy are choosing it. That is true, but in the same way that “more people are choosing Europe” is true: it gives you the direction without telling you anything useful about where, why, or with whom. The actual map is messier, more textured, and rather more interesting than the headline. It is also, we would argue, the only one worth using if you are about to make a real decision about your own life.