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One of my most precious cards isn't a credit or debit card. It’s a water card. Yes, a water card. It’s a plastic card you can buy at my little town’s tabac shop with 5 EUR already topped up, and you can use it to get water from the local fountain. The fountain is like a vending machine, next to the church & the school. You bring your own bottle, insert your card, press natural or carbonated, and get ice-cold mineral water.

After a month here and seeing how locals do it, I bought a red plastic carrier that fits 6 bottles (pictured). The vending machine charges 5 eurocents per liter, so 0,05 EUR. It works with coins too, but putting in 1 EUR is a waste of money, so I use the card. I topped up 10 EUR, that is usually enough for a season. During busy months, like summer, now, you need to get to the fountain by 10-11 am, otherwise, it runs out of soda water. Now, insane as it sounds, this whole thing is totally normal in Italy. And my water card is part of a local identity.

This essay will cover the entire water situation in Italy because it is unique in the world and worth discussing.

Italy is the world’s leading bottled water drinker

The top 5 countries in the world that drink bottled water are usually the same, all the time, rankings might differ. Mexico, Italy, Thailand, USA, and Germany. They are not just the top 5; they rank far above everyone else in per capita consumption. But they rank for very, and I mean very different reasons.

Mexico and Thailand are ranking for obvious reasons. Both have questionable tap water quality, a lot of people, and historically solved this with bottled water. If you have spent a longer period in Mexico, all I can say: garrafón. You get it.

The USA is a mixed bag. Americans are notorious for not trusting their tap water. They also have giant water bottles, and they think hydration is a longevity hack. Having a water filter for them equals having guns at home. To be fair, not all of this is paranoia, sometimes tap water, especially in rural USA, is surely questionable. Also, if you have no ideas but you are excellent at marketing, you'll probably launch a water, energy drink, or gym powder brand, people will buy it anyway. Bottled water is convenient, and convenience is an American word.

These countries do not sell mineral water. Almost all bottled water in these countries is glorified tap water, nothing more. European countries are different. Bottled water here is always mineral water because, guess what, tap water in both Italy and Germany is perfectly drinkable.

So much so that Italy has one of the best tap waters. Groundwater is nationally protected, tap water is not just drinkable everywhere, but also top quality. And the country has an insane number of natural springs, spas, water resorts, and medicinal water heritage, so water itself is taken seriously. Very seriously.

Same in Germany. But Germans, Northern Europeans in general, they have a personal bond with fizz. They drink almost exclusively carbonated water, which, in itself, can’t come from the ground, so it has to be bottled.

Italy? The bottled water market outsells the entire soda market 7X. And you know what this scale means, because I wrote about the soda market before: it is the world’s most diverse soda market, completely different from other countries. And if you’ve ever been in a restaurant in Italy, you know the first question they ask is: still or sparkling?

It’s never about hydration

Hydration is a basic service everyone has access to, mostly for free. At least in Italy. Tap water is excellent, everywhere, all the time. Sometimes it’s a bit more chlorinated, or it’s hard, so limescale can build up in pipes, but overall, it’s among the best tap water in the world.

The carbonated mineral water vending machine in my town charges 0.05 euro per liter. I guess it covers the cost of electricity, transporting the water, and carbonation. Vending machines like this are common. Also like free fountains.

Most big cities have free fountains everywhere. Not just that, but every city picked a name for its fountains. Rome = nasoni, over 2,500, one of the largest municipal fountain networks in the world. Most of it is spring water, runs continously, free. Torino = toret, same concept, they have around 800. The water comes from little bull heads, toro, the city’s symbol. Milan = vedovelle. And these are just the branded ones. Any town that has some population has at least a fountain, running, for free, spring water mostly.

Hydration doesn’t put a European country at the top of the world in water consumption. You need something else. A different view on water.

Water is medicine

The first driver is medicinal purposes. It is not the main driver in the numbers, but I believe it is the main driver in how Italians think about water. And, well, as with anything in Italy, it all comes from the Roman Empire. It’s called a thermal bath.

For a thermal bath, you need thermal water. For thermal water, you need the right geography and geology. Because of that, there are two well-known bathing cultures in the world. The Asian and the European. The Asian one is from Japan or China, depending on who you ask, and it also has the highest numbers. The number of Japanese springs outnumbers any other country. I had the chance to try an onsen, it was amazing. European ones are everywhere: Italy, Germany, Czechia, Hungary, Russia, etc. It’s not arrogant to say: all European thermal bathing cultures, including American-exported ones, are copies of the classic Roman bath. In England, the city of Bath is literally named by the Romans because of this.

Anyway, doesn’t really matter where this concept comes from. What matters is that it's still here. Italy is one of the few countries in the world, as far as I know, that has thermal medicine classes in the universities, along with oncology and internal medicine. They learn the different health benefits of different mineral waters. Water is taught as medicine to doctors and medical professionals at the highest level.

Also, the water, including the thermal medicinal water springs, is owned by the state. The region owns the area. The thermal hotel owns the bottle it sells and the bed where you sleep after treatments. Speaking of those, you can get a prescription from your doctor that covers the basic services in these hotels. Meaning: you can go on a wellness trip at a much lower price at qualifying hotels. Why? Because water is medicine.

And you are not just bathing in these waters. You are drinking them.

Water is local pride

Italy has around 300 active bottled springs. If you are from Germany reading this, you understand why. It’s all about those mountains. In Italy, it means the Alps and the Apennines. Because of this, it’s not a surprise that Northern Italy produces most of the spring water (Piedmont is leading). But every region in the country has its own collection of springs, each with its own mineral water brands. And yes, every town in every region swears that only their water is the cure for everything. I know Italians who bring their local town’s water with them on international trips, no joke.

Since it’s more than 100 brands total, I don’t even bother giving examples. But the bottom line is this: water is local, it is a matter of pride, and this pride shows up in consumption and price. This entire scheme has a market behind it that makes actual sense: local bottled water is 2-3X cheaper than national brands because it has almost no transportation and marketing costs. Umbria drinks Sangemini water not just because the town of San Gemini is famous for its spring, but because it costs half the price of national brands, or any international one.

I’m a marketer by trade, so for me it’s interesting to see how they brand this. The local water brands have the world’s simplest marketing: they name and brand everything after the spring and the town where it is. Uliveto, Panna, Fiuggi, San Pellegrino, Crodo, Boario, Levico, I could go on. These are all towns AND water brand names. Do you know where your water is from? An Italian can tell just by looking at the bottle and reading the name.

And this is where local pride, aka campanilismo, and medicine connect. Every water has different functions. Now, I’m not a doctor or trained in this, but I bet when a young Italian asks their grandparents what they recommend for <insert sickness here>, they probably flash a water name along with the list. Sangemini is for babies and pregnant women. Fiuggi is for kidney stones, because maybe Michelangelo took it and got cured. Uliveto is for digestion, TV ad literally says it’s the water for sportsmen. Lete is for hypertension, because it is low on sodium. Again, the list is endless, I could go on.

Water is life, life is faith

Madonna appears, water comes out from the rock. A sanctuary is built on the spring. The water is sacred, and it has healing powers. If you see a Madonna in the name of the fountain, this is the story. Obviously, there are people who do pilgrimages to that spring. They pray, then fill their water bottles. There are stories about people who were healed of incurable diseases by these waters. The thermal baths? Those are ex-Roman “pagan” baths, baptized and blessed by the Church. It’s Italy after all.

But pilgrimage can be secular. We literally call our walk to our local water a pilgrimage. Our house and the fountain? 10-minute walk. We've fully optimized and figured out the whole process. We have a rolling cart so we don’t need to carry 20+ liters. We have the red carrier with 6 bottles. And almost endless small bottles, plastic and glass. In winter, we're mostly fine with tap water. But during Spring and Summer, we make two weekly pilgrimages to the fountain. Fill up on local spring water. Even though our tap water is perfect.

Water is good manners

The next time you are in a restaurant and they ask if you want still or sparkling, don’t ask for tap water. Not that it doesn’t exist or isn't pure. It’s because ordering the local water is good manners. It shows respect.

On trains, you sometimes get a half-liter bottle for free. Airlines too. Almost every hotel puts free bottled water in their fridge. When guests come over, offering tap water is just cheap, rude, and bad manners. You pop up a bottle, spend a 5-minute small talk on the water itself, where it’s from, what it does, why you have it at home.

Lastly, you know water is important when there's snobbery around it. Frizzante is for barbarians. Cultured people drink slightly carbonated water at most, but still prefer it. If a pharmacy tagged the bottle, it’s even better, and of course, it is even more expensive. And then there is the water that comes with coffee, the “in a glass bottle, please” request at the restaurant, and the Italian paranoia around ice, because ice-cold water is just “unhealthy” and drinking water with ice cubes is outright insulting. And let’s not even start on the idrosommelier, aka the water sommelier, in bars in Rome and Milano, where they sometimes have a water menu separate from their wine list. Yes.

Most of these aren’t treated this seriously, don’t panic. I almost always ask for ice cubes for anything I drink. Sometimes I get the look from the waiter or a “What? Ice cubes? For your water?” and I personally never really look at the water label. And, please don’t send me horse heads, but if I had a favorite water brand, it would be Perrier. But I would never dare to order it in Italy.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy.

Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay to keep us on the road.

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I’m writing this email on the 14th of August, one day before Ferragosto, which, in case you didn’t know, is the peak of tourism in Italy. As with almost anything Italian, this special day, the 15th of August, has roots in the Roman Empire, where it was an emperor-allowed celebration after weeks of hard work in the fields.

Point is: this is the week when Italy hits pause on literally everything. Good luck doing anything other than getting tanned on the beach. Everything stops, nothing gets done. Not just tourists, but the entire country goes on holiday.

Also, this happened on Wednesday, by the way:

We live in Marina di Pietrasanta, which has always been more popular with Italians than with international tourists. So this time of the year, it is absolutely flooded with people. The bicycle road running parallel to the sea is crowded with teens, and I need all my cycling knowledge (which I don't have much of) to make sure there aren’t any accidents.

So, what am I doing this week? I worked a lot. We stay indoors: it’s too humid, too crowded, and too hot anyway. We come out in the evenings, like owls, or some other nocturnal predator.

This means one thing for you, dear reader: more articles.

New articles this week

Since I’m not big on travel during August, I’ve started writing up my older visits, which means mostly Lazio, Umbria, and Calabria. Expect more of that next week. This week, I covered the Trasimeno Lake and its area:

I’ve been doing some research on Italian pop & club culture and realized I’m literally living in the birthplace of all of that, kinda, in Versilia. So, I wrote up what I’ve learned about Italian disco, pop, and clubbing. 200 years of history:

I continued the journey of Italian staples, mostly in liquid form nowadays. This time, the wonderful world of Italian sodas:

Then, as I promised, I wrote about my visit to an Italian sagra. Turns out dolce vita is more likely to be found in small village festivals, which zero tourists visit, than in the Amalfi pictures influencers are trying to sell you. But hey, who’s surprised about this at this point?

Half the country is at the sea this weekend, including, technically, us. Buon Ferragosto, and see you next Sunday.

Peter

Pietrasanta, 16 August 2026

PS: Slightly related to Anywhere Italy as a topic, but I had the opportunity (thanks Matteo!) to publish on on how to save (or not) small Italian towns from emptying out. Bit spicy, bit sarcastic, but came fully from my heart with the highest amount of goodwill:

ITS Journal

Small Italian villages don’t need to be saved

We’re pleased to welcome Peter Benei | Anywhere Italy, to our pages with a reflection sparked by our recent piece, “I borghi non sono panda…

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3 days ago · 6 likes · 8 comments · Peter Benei | Anywhere Italy

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.

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Last week, we went to the Sagra della Pupporina e del Tordello event in Bozzano, Massarosa, Tuscany. In other words: it’s the celebration of the pupporina and the tordello in Bozzano. Ok, I think we need some translation here. So, pupporina is a butter cookie. Tordello is a meat-filled pasta, I wrote about it before. Bozzano is a small village in Massarosa, above Lake Massaciuccoli in Tuscany.

Now, the obvious question is: why is this a story? Well, it is, because you are hooked on how food is different in Italy compared to anything else, and Italy is the country of dolce vita, celebration of life, that’s why. And as always, none of this has anything to do with the common clichés: dolce vita has nothing to do with riding on a Vespa in Amalfi, and Italian food is not different because it tastes better. To be honest, dolce vita is a misunderstanding of a condemnation of hedonism by Fellini, and there is no such thing as Italian cuisine. But let’s not go too dark here. Let’s just say: if you want to understand why Italian food tastes so amazing and what a real celebration of life is, you have to understand what a sagra is.

The sagra: one town, one dish, one party

If you are in Italy, you might see different event titles. Let’s quickly run through them.

Festival or festa. It’s mostly a religious event organized for a patron saint (every town has one). It’s about processions, relics, priests, a music band, and fireworks. Yeah, there’s food as well, sometimes it is connected to the town, but it is always in the background. The show is on/for the Church. It’s usually the Church that’s the organizer.

Carnevale. Viareggio (guide is here) has one. Venice has one. It’s mostly around or before Lent, and it is organized by the town itself. It’s a celebration: organized chaos, masks, satire, and mockery of the powerful. It’s a fun event with music, dancing, and a show. Food is fuel, mostly deep-fried stuff. No one goes to a carnival to eat.

Food festival. The classic one which you are most familiar with. Beer festival, meat festival, or just simply food festival. It’s a professional event with ticketed entry, vendors, kiosks, and so on. I’m sure everyone is familiar with it, every country has this. The main point: it is transportable. It doesn’t matter where it is, as it is rarely connected to a town.

And then there is the sagra, which is completely different from all the others.

The sagra is connected to one town, and it is about one dish, maybe two, which are somehow connected to that particular town. It’s an annual event. I know some countries have this, but the way Italy organizes this is completely different. More on that later. But this is the bottom line: one town, one dish, one party. It’s like a Celebration of the Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich every August 12th. I love that sammy, unrelated, but it is, of course, invented by Italians living in the US.

The way it is organized is absolutely Italian. There is a network of organizations called Pro Loco. I didn’t know who that was. I just saw the charge on my card during my festival, and the next day I was like, WTF, what’s this charge? It should be the festival, but it appears oddly on the card, just Pro Loco. Anyway, this is a network of volunteers, organized into a civil association or some sort, they are all from that local town, they make almost no money on this, they do it to celebrate that town and that dish, together. There are thousands of Pro Loco micronetworks in the country. They all do one thing: organize an annual event to sit down and stuff their mouths with local food, together with hundreds of other people.

The celebration of life, through local food. I’ve told you. This is dolce vita, and this hyperlocal gathering around one hyperlocal food is the reason why Italian food is so different from anything else.

I know this happens in other countries. In Hungary, we celebrate Békéscsaba sausages once a year. There are also wine festivals in each region. The difference in Italy is the scale of these events. Every weekend, there are, I am not joking, hundreds of them, everywhere. Just check the Sagre Toscane page. The list is endless. Also the size of these events: it’s small. Usually it’s 10 long tables, one canteen, a small podium, and some playground for kids.

I just love their posters, hilarious:

Famous ones are visited by many outsiders, including tourists. At the Pupporina Sagra, which we picked, well, we were the only ones not speaking Italian, let alone the mountain-Tuscan dialect… Everyone was super nice with us, but I saw some surprised eyes as in “who the heck are these people, they not from my village.”

Why visit and how it works

So, I’ll be practical this time because we also had to learn this, and it took us all our Italian language skills to figure it out, so let us help you out.

First off, why visit? Aside from the fact that you are at an absolutely Italian event where you are probably the only non-Italian, and that alone is worth the experience? Well, it’s about the food, so come because of the food.

The food will be the freshest, simplest, and best Italian food that you will probably have, like, ever. When I say the food is prepared in an open kitchen by local grandmamas and grandpapas, I am absolutely not joking. This is the experience that makes influencers cry out loudly as omg so Italian. Sad that most influencers are busy attending pesto cooking classes organized only for tourists. But hey, influencers are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Here is proof. Though this is the start of the event, the kitchen nonnas just barely got their espresso and started cooking.

Second reason to come: I don’t go into an altered state when I say “sale 50%” on prices, but God, events like this are damn cheap. You really pay for the food, and the food only. We had two main dishes, one appetizer, endless bread, two desserts, water, two beers, and paid less than 40 EUR. I mean…

Now, how it works. Every sagra is different, but the general rules:

• Arrive around 7:30 pm, no earlier. It’s either closed or nothing is there. 8:30 pm is even better, by that time, the nonnas start cooking. Some sagras are all-day events, which means there is lunch too. Siesta is a thing, even on a sagra, so everything is absolutely closed from 2 pm till 7 pm.

• Some have pre-booked seating and table service. Don’t expect restaurant-level service, everyone is a young volunteer, but everyone is extremely nice and friendly. If you want a table, call them or arrive before opening.

• You pay at a kiosk labeled "cassa". From the menu (there’s always one, publicly everywhere), you pick what you want and pay. My recommendation: lines are long, and Italians are not Brits, so no one knows how to queue. Pick what you want and order once. The “but I forgot to order water” can quickly turn into 30 minutes standing, while your food gets cold.

• You hold onto your receipt, go to the kitchen, pick up your food, and sit down at the long table. If there is table service, you show it to the volunteers, sit down at the table, and they bring it for you. Also, if you're at table service, you can top up your order with the volunteers. There is no extra charge or tip for table service, by the way.

• Most sagras have some basic staples, like a pizzeria, a rosticceria (roasted meats), some beer taps, and a bar. In some cases, you can buy stuff from these directly, no need to get in line at the cassa. In our case, everything was handled via the cassa, but if you ordered pizza (why would you?), you go to the pizzeria to collect it, not to the kitchen.

• Parking is free, but arrive early or park elsewhere and walk in. There are no tickets to enter either.

• Location, that is probably the hardest one, because on most promo materials, there is only the name of the town. They probably think that if you are from there, you will know where the sagra is exactly. Well, we didn’t know, so we had to search for it. All it said: Bozzano. My tip: it’s a big event in a tiny town, so it’s either in their stadium, high school yard, church piazza, or something equivalent. But it is definitely in the centro, or on or near the main road. Ours was next to the main road, so it was easy to find it.

• You can pay by card. Almost always. But bring cash, just in case.

And lastly, obviously, depends on the event, but don’t expect that anyone will speak to you in any languages other than Italian. In some cases, even the Italian is so local that people like me, who learned classic Italian, struggle to understand it. But, as always, a big smile and some pantomime will get you really far. Everyone is super nice and happy that you are there, they are always trying everything to help you out.

So, normally, I don’t mix my practical how-tos with essays like this, but Sophie said it’s a brave thing to visit an event like this. We live here, so it’s different. But if I think about a traveler, an event like this might be a sink-or-swim style happening. If you are new, it’s hard to figure out how this works: what’s happening where, what to get, how to get it, how to find it, and so on. So, I thought maybe this practical detour can help. Because these events are 10000x better than any cooking class, food tour, or whatever bullshit you got sold to by tour operators.

We came home early because we wanted to take a walk by the beach as well, so we left the sagra before 10 pm. Most Italians arrived around 9 pm, just saying… We’ve also stuffed so much food into our faces that we brought back the desserts in paper bags. It was a local-style donut and the world-famous pupporina, the event's namesake.

So, we took some bites from it before I made a photograph at home, but this is pupporina.

It’s basically a rounded thin cookie, heavy with butter, flavored with aniseed, and a candied cherry in the middle. I remember when I first saw the cookie and took a bite, what went through my head: “This? For real, this?!”

Yeah, this. This entire article should have been about this cookie, so it would click in your head the way it clicked in mine. The Italian village of Bozzano hosts an annual event for an absolutely simple cookie. It looks like a woman’s breast, by the way, intentionally, historically, this is a cookie that is made for kids during the festivity of Saint Bartholomew. The breast-shaped cookie resembles nurturing. During the procession, it gets blessed by the Church, then kids eat it. In Bozzano, it has been cooked for hundreds of years as the main event on August 24th.

The sagra is the grandest celebration of the simplest food, all under the light of God, eaten together, only in that village, only on that day, every year. If this is not dolce vita, I don’t know what it is.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.

Join free →

Last week I wrote a story about amaro, the line-up of Italian bitter alcoholic drinks. Sometimes, I also mention wine here and there. But I am far from a wine, beer, or any kind of alcohol expert, for two reasons.

One, if I drink alcohol at all, I drink whisky, which means scotch, and almost exclusively scotch that comes from the island of Islay, from the Inner Hebrides. You know the ones that smell as if you set fire to a dead lamb’s carcass, let it burn with oakwood, put out the fire by shoveling damp dirt on it, shoveled the results into a barrel, distilled it with alcohol, and there you go, you have whisky. OK, maybe this was too much information, but you get it: if I drink at all, which is rare, it’s scotch, neat (obviously).

Two, I don’t drink. It’s a health choice, so nothing serious is behind it. I just don’t drink at all, for quite a while now. I don’t even miss it, which is kinda weird to me a little, but the world of non-alcoholic drinks is getting deeper and deeper. Of course, it’s easy for me, because there is no social pressure. I don’t go to office parties or work-related events (the last time I set foot in a traditional office was in 2014, maybe), no big circle of friends, no nightlife, and I am married (Sophia also rarely drinks).

But we do go out a lot. We also enjoy just sitting down in a bar or a café and watching people. A normal dinner in a restaurant is easy without alcohol: you order water, maybe a soda. But sitting down just for a drink, it’s pretty lame to have just water. The situation screams for a cocktail, a beer, or whatever you prefer.

Yes, there are these non-alcoholic versions of alcoholic drinks that we all know. But these are almost always similar to vegetarian and vegan versions of meat and dairy products. No one on this planet has ever said that “hmmmm this seitan-based burger patty is so much better than a smashburger.” Or “this dairy-free milk is sooooo much better than full-fat milk.” Likewise, no one has ever had the bravery to say that “OMG this zero alcohol beer is so much better than your IPA!” Almost all zero-alcohol imitations of alcoholic drinks are horrible. The best compliment you might manage is “hmmm, this is almost as good as the real one.” Which means it’s not a suffering to drink it. I can name a few 0% beers. I had a good 0% wine once. And there is one non-alcoholic Martini vermouth that earns its place. The rest are exactly like a vegan burger patty. Not meant for human consumption.

So what can you do then? You are a grown-up. You want to enjoy the view with a cold drink in your hand that is not alcoholic, not overpoweringly sweet like a cola or basically any American-style drink, and not among the usual suspects of tonic water or ginger beer (nothing wrong with them, I’m a sucker for a proper ginger beer or a good dry tonic).

Thankfully, the Italian line-up of sodas is here to save your day.

The national heritage of soda

If I say Waco, Texas, most people, but Americans for sure, would say two things. Dr Pepper would be one of them (the other is probably the siege). Atlanta? Of course, Coca-Cola. If I say Fanta, the ones who know the story will tell you it’s the Aryan cola, which pretty much covers the origin, since it comes from Nazi Germany due to Coca-Cola shortages during the war (but it was barely drinkable, thanks Germany, so an Italian had to intervene, and now the world drinks drinkable Fanta). If I say Kofola, the entire Czechia and Slovakia jump up from their seats. Staying around Slavs, Oranzada, hello, Poland? Or Irn-Bru? Scotland. Traubi or Márka? My turf, Hungary. Vimto? Manchester, England (although I wouldn’t be so proud of that lads, it’s almost undrinkably sweet). Inca Kola? Peru, and Coca-Cola had to buy into it, because the Incas dominated the market. Julmust? Oh my God, Sweden, why? Almdudler from Austria? It’s actually pretty good. The list is endless.

Anyway, you get it. Soda is as much a national heritage as wine regions are. Some brands survived the Coca-Cola and PepsiCo domination and market colonization because the locals had genuine feelings towards these brands. Others not just survived but still beat the giants at their own game, so the biggies had to buy them up, or still compete with them on the market.

But I think it was obvious from my list of national sodas: a country has one, maybe two or three heritage soda brands. I have not seen anything remotely close to what Italy has in this game. It’s pretty unreal. And if you look closely, it’s even wilder.

Don’t believe me? Remember the national list above? OK. This is Italy’s soft drink market (short version): Lurisia, Chinó, Sanbitter, Crodino, Lemonsoda, Oransoda, Tassoni, San Benedetto, Paoletti, Spumador, Chin8 Neri, Mole Cola, Polara, Tomarchio, Abbondio, Baladin, Gingerino, Plose, Galvanina, Brasilena, and this is where I give up, but I have twice as many names like these.

A small detour on economics and consumerism

Who owns soda and who drinks soda? Economics and consumerism. I love economics because it is basic and mostly black and white, since it’s numbers.

Who owns the drink brands? It’s the same as with anyone else: mostly the giants, some local bigger brands, and a thin slice of no one (still independent). The top four groups in the Italian soft drink market, Coca-Cola, San Benedetto, Sanpellegrino, and Spumador, control 70% of it between them. Add the next four, and you’re at nearly 90%. Inside that, the cola segment alone is over 60% of everything carbonated Italians drink, and cola belongs to Coca-Cola almost entirely, with Pepsi as a rounding error. As for the heritage names: the Sanpellegrino line-up (Chinò, Sanbittèr, the aranciate) is Nestlé (Swiss, like Nespresso). The citrus sodas (Lemonsoda, Oransoda, the Crodo brands) are owned by Royal Unibrew, a Danish company. Spumador belongs to the Dutch (Refresco). Some others sit with big Italian companies like Campari (Crodino) and San Benedetto, and even Coca-Cola picked up a local artisanal brand, Lurisia.

But roughly 10% of the market is fully independently owned by small local Italian companies. And they give most of the brands in numbers. All of them small-produced, local, almost fully family-owned. On one hand, it is super unusual compared to the world’s economics, and on the other, it is 100% Italian and goes hand in hand with campanilismo, the hyper-local Italian way of life that gave us 100 different pasta shapes.

Consumerism is different, and it’s worth a word here, because it defines the place of soda and soft drinks in Italy. While volume is controlled by the giants, variety is owned by the locals. And the answer to the why is in the volume itself. Italy consumes around 2 billion liters of carbonated soft drinks a year. That’s around 50 liters per capita. The US? 40 billion liters, 130 per capita, from less than six times the population. Italy sits at the bottom of soda consumption in Western society.

And this is the paradox. Italy consumes the least amount of these drinks. Yet Italy has the highest variety of them. The unbelievably long line-up of fizzy drinks in Italy survives on the thinnest margin of people who actually consume these drinks.

Why? Short answer? Because soda is not for kids, silly!

Soda is for grown-ups

This is where the circle completes. Italy consumes the smallest volume of soda but has the widest variety of choices to pick from, all locally produced by local companies.

Why? Because soda has a completely different use case for Italians. It’s part of the aperitivo culture. Soda is the non-alcoholic alternative for aperitivo. Sometimes it is even preferred as the only alternative for aperitivo.

It is rarely consumed by the liter. Go to any Italian grocery shop and look at the soda aisle. Soda is almost exclusively sold in small bottles, 20 to 40 centiliters. Only a few sell big (1-2 liters), usually the ones owned by the big brands. The local ones? They fit into your mini-fridge, and they look cool on a bar shelf.

What makes a soda for grown-ups? The same flavors as alcohol: bitter, savory, even spicy. Not overpoweringly sweet. Yes, they have sugar in them (plenty), but the taste note is almost never sweet. It’s either more bitter than most alcoholic amaros, or more citrusy than biting into a whole lemon. Or it’s spicy, a mixture of bitter and sharp the way a ginger drink is, or a tonic is.

Also, as with amaro, as with most aperitivo drinks, you can’t drink too many of them. No one drinks five Sanbitters or chinottos. You drink one, maybe two, with ice, over an hour or two at a bar, sitting, eating nuts or something with it.

The campanilismo of fizz

In Italy, as a foreigner, it feels like locals sometimes deliberately can’t and won’t see beyond their immediate circles. Even a street can have its own “national” identity here that is fundamentally different from the others. Every town has its own pasta version, its own cookie, its own amaro, its own heroes, its own version of tomato sauce, and, of course, almost everyone has their own soda.

So, what can be local in a soda? The flavoring, the water, and the bottling factory. Yeah, it’s this simple.

Let’s start with flavoring. Almost all chinotto brands come from Savona. Why? Because that particular tree that produces this inedible orange grows on a 40km stretch of the Ligurian coast. Nowhere else does it grow in quantity like there. Cedrata? The weird-shaped Diamante cedro, a citron, not a lemon, grows on the Riviera dei Cedri in Cosenza, Calabria, and travels north to Saló on Lake Garda every October. It’s called the viaggio del cedro. There it gets bottled as cedrata. Aranciata rossa? Blood orange pigments properly only with the cold nights on the volcanic soil around Etna, Sicily. Even the premium blood-orange version of Fanta runs on Sicilian blood orange.

The water. There is an entire line-up built around Italian natural, thermal, and hot springs, where the soda brand’s main ingredient is the special water. Crodino bottles the water only from Crodo, because it’s a thermal spa natural spring. Same with Gingerino (Recoaro Terme), Lurisia (Roccaforte Mondovì), Plose (Bressanone): these drinks won’t bottle any other water than the natural spring they originally came from, period.

And there are the ones with nothing special in them, but the factory and the production location keep them local, and people would probably riot and rebel if these places got shut down. Mole Cola, from Turin, named after Turin’s icon, the Mole Antonelliana. Or the two spumante: the nera from Cermenate, Como, which the Northerners mix into red wine in their working men’s circoli, a native Lombard tradition with its own dialect name, sü e giò (we have a version of this in Hungary where some people mix cola into wine, which is horrible, so I shouldn’t judge), and the bionda from Ascoli, rarely seen north of Tuscany, the Marche, and Abruzzo. And lastly, Brasilena from Girifalco, Calabria, a coffee-flavored soda you can’t find even in Italy outside of Calabria, but ask anyone who’s originally from Calabria, I bet they have it fuckin’ shipped across continents for themselves (with the packs of nduja).

The special case of Italian soda

Almost none of these drinks come as syrups. This is the core difference between Italian, or any small-batch local sodas, and the giants like Coca-Cola. Almost all soda brands started the same way. It's a similar story to amaro.

Most current brands were started by pharmacists as a digestive. Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper, even Pepsi (started by pharmacist Caleb Bradham as "Brad's Drink" in New Bern, North Carolina), all come from pharmacists. As do most Italian soda brands, at least the old ones. But then came the separation of location and ingredient, with the introduction of the syrup. This is why and how giants like Coca-Cola could dominate the world. One syrup above all, adapted to whatever carbonated water you have at your factory. We bring the syrup, or not even that, just the recipe of the syrup, and you bring your fizzy water, ciao. It can be global. Try this with, for example, the aranciata rossa, with blood oranges that are local only to the slopes of Etna.

The lack of syrup is one reason these drinks come in small bottles. The natural way to consume this is sitting at a bar with a 10cl bottle of Sanbitter, Campari-red, non-alcoholic, with ice and a slice of orange, a small bowl of chips, and talking to your table or watching the people. The American soda-drinking culture is totally different: it revolves around the magic word, refill. It’s unlimited, it’s refillable, it’s portable, it’s endless.

Also, I mentioned this above, but these drinks are sometimes not separated from their alcoholic cousins, especially wine. Spuma, which is the Italian version of a simple sugary carbonated soft drink with some caramel flavor (much like any cola, sort of), is closely connected to wine. Cheap wine topped with some sugary fizzy drink: practically the working man’s spritz.

And lastly, it’s so embedded in the local culture that you can’t tear it out. Chinotto itself is a nostalgic gesture of hipster culture nowadays, because the drink is older than the Italian Republic. And my favorite, which you can see almost anywhere in Sicily: the live soda experience. Kiosks selling the lemon, soda, and salt combo. Lemon squeezed into your plastic cup by hand, sea salt in, topped up with soda and ice, all in front of you, live. Ask for completo, and you get mandarin syrup with sugar as a “spice.” It’s alive because it’s live, part of the street culture.

I'm a big sucker for Dr Pepper. I also prefer Coca-Cola over Pepsi, and I drink Coke only from cans, close-to-frozen, ice-cold. But most days, when I am at the bar, just sitting and doing nothing, I prefer my Sanbitter or Chinotto.

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I simply can’t write about Italian lakes without addressing two things: the sea itself, and Lake Balaton in Hungary. Both will make sense, but since I have more readers who are not from Hungary, let’s start with the sea first.

I say “lakes in Italy” and 99.99% of people would say Lake Clooney, I mean, Como. A few would say Lake Garda. Maybe, just maybe, the ones who are really into this might mention Lake Maggiore. But I am sure almost everyone would name a lake under the Alps, up in the North. No one would mention anything south of Garda.

And why would they? If you go that far down in Italy, you are going for two reasons as a tourist: spend some time in Rome, Florence, or Naples, or vacation by the sea. Maybe see some hilltop towns in Tuscany. If you are a travel connoisseur, you might check out Abruzzo and its hilltop towns, maybe Calabria. But who the heck would go to a lake in Umbria, a region most travelers have never even heard of, that is at best 7 meters deep, basically a geological rain collector, where the closest place tourists have actually heard of is an hour’s drive away (Siena)?

Well, we did.

But it would be hypocritical to say that we would pick this destination over the option of a sea, since we literally live 50 meters from the sea. We went there because there was an event in Perugia with some friends we wanted to meet, and we didn’t want to stay in the city. The lake is a 30-minute drive from the regional capital, so why not book a calm and relaxed house overlooking the lake instead of a city apartment?

Our main question for today: why pick a lake when you can pick the sea?

I’ll explain with Lake Balaton. In case this is new for you, I’m Hungarian originally. I grew up there and, like any other Hungarian, I spent many summers at Lake Balaton. The lake is the largest lake in Central Europe, according to Wikipedia, which also thinks Hungary is Central Europe. Cute. Anyway. Balaton has everything that a large lake can offer to a country with no sea access: hotels, beaches, ferries, some local food culture, some local wine, and it is Europe, so it has old palaces, castles, and fortresses. Of course, Balaton is not Como or Garda, so there is nothing grandiose in the built environment, mostly post-socialist-era buildings mixed with old Habsburg-style centers, and it is also not like the Austrian lakes up in the mountains, so the water is not that cold and clear, and there is an absence of cows (though I think this is a good thing). But, all in all, it is a lake, big-ass water, and it is wonderful during summertime.

It costs the same, if not more, than a vacation by the sea. And, because of this, tourism at Lake Balaton is a dying industry. Well, there are other reasons, of course, this is Hungary, so people are absolutely incapable of innovation and change, and, on top of this hard-headed mindset, most of the lake’s tourism infrastructure is controlled by oligarchs who are the same hard-headed idiots just with more money. But Hungary being Hungary is just a small piece of the puzzle if you look at the map. Just 3-4 hours more driving or a short flight and you are by the sea in Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, or Greece. If you don’t have a vacation home by the lake, or a friend with one, and you need to pay for accommodation anyway, why would you pay the same for a lake when the sea costs a couple of hours more of travel? To most people, the answer is obvious. You wouldn’t.

But what if you want something completely different?

And this is the most important advice I can give to anyone doing hospitality business by a lake. You should never compete with the sea, because that’s a race you can’t win, ever. Especially if your lake is like Balaton or Trasimeno. Hard pill to swallow, but just as not all seas are created equal (the Aegean versus the Black Sea, for example), lakes are also different. A super-deep, up-in-the-mountains lake has tranquil, clear, cold water. The lakes in Austria or Northern Italy are fundamentally different from the lakes below Florence, or from Balaton. These lakes are shallow. Lake Trasimeno is almost the same size as Como, but while Como is 400 meters deep, Trasimeno is 7 meters at best. Even Lazio’s volcanic lakes, Vico, Bolsena, Bracciano, run between 50 and 165 meters. Balaton is around 10 meters, super shallow.

So it is shallow, which makes it hard to sell as a beach destination, and as a big surface of water it competes with a sea that is a couple of hours away by car. The water is clean, but not as clear and cold as a mountain lake. Oh, and I forgot to mention that there are no big palaces, no famous sights, and no celebrities doing anything worth the news of any relevant magazine. I would bet multiple figures that most of my readers heard about Lake Trasimeno for the first time from this very article.

So: why pick Lake Trasimeno, and who should?

The ideal location for…

I have one type of traveler in my mind who can value Lake Trasimeno, aside from local Italians who are visiting this place anyway. And this person is the one who is doing multiple weeks in the middle of Italy, discovering Southern Tuscany, the hills of Umbria, and the North of Lazio, also known as Tuscia.

Siena is close by (our Siena piece is here). Arezzo is also near (our Arezzo piece). And you can freely roam Maremma and Val d’Orcia from here. You will definitely need a car, obviously. You will definitely need a car, obviously. But with one, you can cover this part of Italy with a couple of hours of driving daily, spreading your day trips out from the lake.

We did two weeks here. If this had been my first time in Southern Tuscany and Umbria, I would have spent more, probably a month. But the only places we hadn’t seen until then were Assisi and Perugia. Two weeks were enough. We spent a full week just around the lake. It was the perfect home base for us. It was also my birthday (in April), and the place we booked was a private house overlooking the lake from the borgo of San Savino. The lake itself was calm and relaxing, and the house doubled it. The owner is a photographer, from a family of photographers, and the whole house was built around one floor-to-ceiling window facing the water, letting in as much light as the sky had to give. Even when the April rain kept us inside, we had the lake.

On the wall of the house hangs a photograph the owner’s father took, decades ago: a fisherman alone in his boat, working the water. I looked at it every morning over coffee and thought nothing more of it than that it was a good photograph. Then we took our first walk up to the borgo. The castello of San Savino is one simple street bent into a circle with a small piazza inside, and people actually live in it, laundry and flowerpots and all. On the only bench of the piazza lay a huge red cat, a big hairy beast, sleeping, minding a business that consisted of exactly zero items. He was definitely the king of the castle. His name, we learned, is Leone. What else.

Then a door opened in one of the small houses inside the walls, his owner came out, greeted us gently, picked Leone up off the bench, and carried him inside. On the walk back we stopped at the edge and looked down at the lake, and there were two small boats below us, fishing, not out on the open water but tucked inside the reed beds along the shore, moving so little they could have been painted there. The photograph in our house was taken something like fifty years ago. It could have been taken that afternoon.

The three touchpoints of the lake

I don’t know how or why this works, but almost every lake where I have been has the same three towns: the working town, the postcard town, the party town. In Balaton terms: Veszprém, Keszthely, Siófok. In Trasimeno terms: Magione, Castiglione, and Passignano.

Magione is the working town. It has a big forest-like castle, and it has the economic and industrial life of the lake. People work here, live here, eat here, and get by here. If you need to buy something, you probably end up here. It’s not on the lake, and it doesn’t live directly from the lake. But it is next to the lake, and things happen here, mostly because it sits between the lake and the regional capital, Perugia. As a traveler, I would keep an eye on Magione, but I wouldn’t stay here.

Castiglione del Lago is pretty much the town described by its own name: the lake’s castle. It sits on a rock formation, high above the water. It’s a proper fortress with panoramic views of the lake and the surrounding Umbrian landscape. It’s probably your first stop by car if you are coming from Florence or Siena, as we did. There is a small borgo inside the walls, 2-3 streets, with bars and cafés worth the stop. Definitely worth a walk. The shops sell local Umbrian products, and several places sell the local torta al testo, a flatbread sandwich they fill with meat, mostly pork or wild boar.

Passignano sul Trasimeno is where you get the best of what the lake can produce for you. Unlike Castiglione, it’s flat, it has a walkable promenade along the water, and a compact center that makes you slow down. It’s perfect for a walk after the main selling point of this town: its restaurants. Of course, most lakeside places sell you the same type of food, which is local here, but not all of them can offer a proper walk after platters of fried and stuffed carp, fish stew, and grilled and smoked fish, all from the lake.

We picked a place in San Savino, which is basically like Castiglione del Lago, but even smaller.

Where the sea can’t compete

A shallow lake should never compete with the sea, because it can never win. And it works the other way around too. There are three things where the sea can’t compete with a lake like this, ever, because the lake always wins. This is true for any lake. Balaton, Trasimeno, Como, it doesn’t matter.

The first one might be surprising. The lake is like a sanatorium compared to the sea. It’s relaxed. It’s calm. It’s silent. To find this level of almost disturbing quietness, you either go up into the mountains, or you really need to know your way around the sea to find that particular spot not overrun by vacationers and beach people. In Trasimeno, this is easy. Even the most popular towns like Castiglione or Passignano sit in quiet harmony with the stillness of the water.

For me, Trasimeno was a place where you relax, chill, and recharge. We didn’t pick a wellness spa hotel (I’m not even sure there is one by the lake), but I would next time. Someone, please just massage me, feed me, and help me into the water, thanks. Or, if I were into yoga or any kind of spirituality, I wouldn’t do a yoga camp by the sea. I would do it here, overlooking the lake. There is something in humans that unclenches when we can watch a big surface of calm water do nothing.

The second one is obvious: the food. The lake produces something the sea can’t: freshwater fish. In Trasimeno, this mostly means carp, perch, and eel. Because the lake is huge and shallow, the carp especially grow mindlessly big, reaching 10-15 kilograms. Fishing is highly regulated, and most of what gets caught ends up immediately on the plates of the locals. It’s also mixed into the traditional Umbrian cuisine, which is heavy on pork and wild boar, since Umbria is full of forests and hunting is part of everyday life. On the coast where I live, most restaurants have two menus: a fish menu and a terra menu. Fish is from the sea, meat is from the earth. In the restaurants by the lake, it’s one menu. You find wild boar stew next to grilled perch.

The classic dishes alone are worth a day trip from Florence. The carp (carpa regina in porchetta) is stuffed with lard, garlic, fennel, and pepper, then roasted until the skin goes crispy. Much like a porchetta, but fish. The perch gets the same treatment, but since it's smaller, it goes on the grill to smoke without stuffing. Then there is the tegamaccio, which is basically caciucco fish stew but with local freshwater fish. And there are the battered, deep-fried eels, which you find in small kiosks on the promenades, sold like fish & chips, in small paper cups.

Lastly, a lake is fundamentally different from a sea. No shit, Sherlock. But listen to me, for real. The way you go into the water. The things you can do in the water. The feeling you have by the water. It’s just simpler, more down to earth. More natural, I don’t have a better word for it. And one thing was clearly visible by the lake: there were almost no hotels or big establishments. The place was full of campsites, glamping, and infrastructure for ecotourism, geared toward people who simply prefer something closer to nature. If I were cynical (which I am), I would say this is a German’s wet dream with their Volkswagen Westfalia and tent. I haven’t looked, but wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a nudist beach somewhere by the lake.

Also, there were no jet skis on the lake. No water parks. No paid beaches, aside from some paid campsites that happened to sit on the shore. There wasn’t even a ferry, except the ones running out to the islands (Maggiore and Polvese). No theme parks. No multistorey hotels. The entire lake area looked as if the country’s tourism board had simply forgotten the lake existed and handed it over to the locals with a shrug: do whatever you want, we don’t care.

Everything screams ecological preservation. We are not locals, so it’s hard to know precisely, but the lake feels more like a place for conservation than a place for tourism. Which makes it an excellent choice for exactly one kind of tourism: the ecological kind. Everything is protected, regulated, conserved. I am sure the reason there is no big Hilton sign by the lake is not that big hotels aren’t interested. They just can’t build there. Which, contradictorily, is the best thing that can happen to this lake.

There is a harder truth under the stillness, though, and I would be lying by omission if I left it out. I did some research on this, and the lake is shrinking. Trasimeno is fed by rain and not much else, and the rains are failing it. There is no river that feeds the lake (same problem for Balaton, by the way). The beaches get longer every year, which sounds like a gift until you understand what it means. This summer the ferry from San Feliciano to Isola Polvese stopped running, because the hulls started touching the bottom. In Castiglione del Lago they switched the streetlamps on the lakeside promenade to red light, because red doesn’t attract the clouds of midges that rise off the low, warm water. There is talk of piping in water from the Montedoglio reservoir, and talk, as usual, is most of what there is. So the conservation posture I praised above is not only a choice. Part of the reason the lake feels handed back to nature is that nature is quietly taking it back. If you want to see those two boats in the reeds, I would not wait a decade.

April and May are off-season by the sea where we live. But people already come during this time. Florence, Cinque Terre, Pisa, all of Tuscany and the Ligurian coast are minutes away from us, and April and May are the best months to visit, not unbearably hot, no tourist hordes yet. So by April and May, our small village by the sea gets some visitors. Don’t expect too much. We just notice it’s not only the 20 people we know in the streets and us, but a couple more. Yet, when we came back from Lake Trasimeno, we felt as if we had arrived in a big city, full of noise and busyness.

I thought this kind of tranquility in Italy existed only up in the mountains, in the small old villages you reach on windy, curvy roads. I never thought this level of silence was possible by a lake in the middle of the country, only an hour drive from Florence.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.

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I write about Italy and the towns and experiences most people skip. Mine is one point of view. Others have theirs, and I love to read them all. So most weeks, I find a few pieces from other writers worth passing on.

This is Anywhere Italy’s Reading Table. Here are the latest articles from writers who made my days better.

on Franco Zeffirelli

I don’t know, but Eric simply just can’t miss. Haven’t counted, but this is not the first time I’ve included him in this roll. But I can’t help it, I’m a sucker for his small stories. This time, it’s about the maestro, Franco Zeffirelli.

Eric is a journalist who describes an encounter with Franco Zeffirelli at his villa off the Via Appia, where the 91-year-old director was presenting a limited-edition book of stills from his film about Saint Francis. The piece captures Zeffirelli in his final years. Opinionated, commanding, surrounded by the artifacts of a life spent between Florence, Rome, and the world’s great opera houses and film sets. It is a portrait of a place (the villa as museum), a person (Zeffirelli as aging maestro), and a moment suspended between Zeffirelli’s past grandeur and the present weight of age.

Read the article on Eric’s Substack →

on hidden cities of Northern Italy

I like how straightforward Alessandro’s entire publication is, even though his expat business angle is not for me. He sometimes writes about Italian towns and places, and you can tell he is from around here, because he never falls into the clickbait-heavy tips and carousel-style content which is popular on this angle everywhere on social media.

He argues in this post that these are not villages with charm plays but proper cities where Northern Italians already live, off the radar of the typical expat migration routes. It’s oriented toward readers considering relocation to Italy, not tourism, and treats place as livable texture rather than destination. I know he hit the mark because he included three cities which we have considered moving to many times: Parma, Treviso, and Vicenza. I was inches close to buying a home in Treviso a couple of years ago.

Read this article on Alessandro’s Substack →

on mountain trips during summertime

I loved this piece because we literally just did this last weekend, though not the Dolomites, but the Apuan Alps. Erica lives in Rome, and the city is gripped by a fourth consecutive heatwave, with temperatures so extreme that daily life transforms.

Romans have retreated to the coast since Augustus, a practice Ciao Bella’s author has always followed, until this summer, when she broke the pattern. The post captures the sensory reality of the city in crisis heat and hints at an unexpected turn in how one long-time resident responded to it.

Read the article on Erica’s Substack →

on the musical portrait of Genova

I loved this because it felt like we two had collaborated on this topic, since I also published a piece with a different angle on how Versilia played a huge role in Italian pop & disco. To be fully transparent, we have had a conversation in the background. This piece, though, is like a history book of Italian singers and nowadays, rappers and local artists who are coming from the multinational, busy, and narrow streets of a port town, Genova.

The piece is part of a planned series on different city portraits from a music POV, so sign up at M.M.’s blog, not missing the new ones.

Read the piece on M.M. Fosco’s Substack →

on the mortadella

Marostica, a small Venetian town of 14,000, hosts an annual Spring Festival on May 1st centered on a 226-kilogram mortadella, a giant salami that arrives by horse-drawn wagon, garlanded with flowers, and is carried by eight men to the town square. After the mayor speaks, the mortadella is carved and served with bread and local wine to the entire community until it is entirely consumed.

Perfect piece on one dish. I might add that it is probably only mortadella that is better bought pre-packed and pre-sliced. I know, please, don’t throw stones at me. You have to be in a very close relationship with your salumeria guy, so when you buy mortadella, and they slice it for you, they won’t cut finger-thick pieces. I want my mortadella to be thin like paper, thanks!

Read the article on Being in Italy’s Substack →

on the volcanic terroir of Naples

I love pretty much anything Robert writes. This time, he skips Naples and focuses on the soil around the city. He wakes in Naples’ Campi Flegrei to a paradisiacal view from his hotel terrace, then smells rotten eggs on the breeze, the natural sulfurous calling card of one of Europe’s largest active volcanic zones.

He visits winemaker Gerardo Vernazzaro at Cantine Degli Astroni, learning how the winery operates literally inside a smoldering super-volcano, unlike Mount Etna, where you can look up and see it from outside. The piece digs deep into how Campania’s volcanic terroirs have been overshadowed by the fashionable attention now lavished on Sicily’s Mount Etna, and why Naples’ wines deserve a second look.

Read the article on Robert’s Substack →

Some other hit pieces I’ve read this week that were amazing:

• ’s another piece on the struggle he had getting fed in Bologna, Too Late for Tortellini was just funny.

• ’s piece on the jetlagged tour in Rome and the sacred moment in Saint Peter’s.

• ’s post, which was moving and deeply personal on finding childhood again through the smells of a Tuscan town.

• ’s article on film memory, archeology, and the newly restored sanctuary above Rome. Super niche trip that only a Roman can write.

• Lastly, ’s review of the Siege of Paradise documentary. It’s darker than the movie itself is, which says a lot.

That was this week’s Reading Table. If you read something I missed, send it my way: ciao (at) anywhereitaly (dot) com.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.

Join free →

Ask my wife about my flaws, and she immediately tells you that I have two unbearable issues. The biggest one is my lack of humor. Or more like, my humor is too cynical and ironic that it isn’t humor at all. The second is the absolute lack of taste in music. She was a Zumba choreographer and dated jazz musicians before me, so she probably knows. I don’t think she is right on the humor part. But she is right with the music.

Yet, this post will be about Italodisco. We have a recurring playlist in the car with Italodisco tunes, sure. Do I know it? No. I had to ask my AI about Mina and De André for this article. But I’m still writing this article for two reasons.

First, there is a growing trend where English-speaking young people have a thing with Italodisco. Everyone is crazy about Italian pop. Not the ones from today (though I’m sure everyone has a thing for Damiano David), but the ones from the 60s and 70s, even the 80s. So this topic is popular, and frankly, why not jump on it? Especially since I have a second reason…

Which is why this article got written in the first place: I realized that I live in the epicenter, or the Mecca, or whatever it is, for Italodisco. I live in Versilia (guide is here), in Marina di Pietrasanta (piece is here), which is between Lido di Camaiore and Forte dei Marmi (piece is here). For all of you, fans: La Bussola, Capannina, Bussoladomani, and the new ones, Twiga, Franco Mare, Faruk, all of them are here, a 5-10 minute walk from my house.

And I have never written a piece on how disco died here. Until now.

The local disco heritage part 1: the beach

So, I can write this part without knowing anything about Mina or others. If Italodisco has a place, it is the beach club. An establishment that plays music by the beach. It is super fashionable today, look at almost all European island destinations. It all started in Versilia, on the shores of Tuscany, where I live.

Versilia is the original Italian beach. Rimini, Venice Lido, Liguria, anything on the South of Italy? All copies of Versilia. The very first bagno opened in Viareggio in 1827 (one for men, one for women). Bathing in the sea wasn’t considered leisure back then. It was medicine, prescribed like a spa cure. Later, Viareggio went full Belle Époque on the turn of the century. You can still catch that in the older bagnos and the old palazzi on the shore. Then the Agnelli family built their villa in Forte dei Marmi, then came fascism (unrelated to the Agnelli villa), where medicinal bathing turned into sport, vitals, and physical activity. There you go, you have something closer to current beach culture.

The oldest club that is still operating and where there was live music was officially opened in 1929. It’s called La Capannina di Franceschi. Literally translates to “Franceschi’s little hut.” The origin story is funny and interesting at the same time. Achille Franceschi, the original owner, hence the name on the brand, had a little hut on the shores of Forte dei Marmi, which was mostly a forest area with a fort and a couple of villas. At that time, there was no marina or anything. The only built-out beach-like thing was in Viareggio, with some hotels. This place was partially swamp, partially forest, then a grand stretch of beach. Some people built villas there, like Agnelli, but I’m not even sure there were roads or anything. Achille had his literal small hut here, which was a hut with some tables and a gramophone. It was a local carpenter’s tool shed, originally (remember, forest is next door).

Achille put down some tables and some music. As said, he only wanted to play cards with his friends, mostly local aristocrats. Then, the air minister, Italo Balbo, who was a great aviator at that time (and a Blackshirt fascist, by the way), landed his seaplane on the shores. Achille, like a proper bar owner, immediately made sure that Balbo got a bottle of champagne, the waiter was running through the sand with it. A year later, the bar was officially open.

There was a war mid-journey in our story. Let’s skip that part. Italo Balbo got shot down by his own air defense guns, weird. Capannina still operated, probably put up Bavarian beers on the menu. It got burned down completely in 39, unrelated to Bavarians. But at least, it finally got its kinda-current form.

Then this hiccup called war ended, and it was finally OK to serve Americano cocktails, and there was a postwar boom of everything. Half of Germany suddenly became democratic, because they had a choice and they chose The Right Thing, France had its moment, and Italy quickly became a destination for post-war-boom tourism. Rimini copied Viareggio early on, so they were prepped for the boom. Liguria and Jesolo were more like consequences of this boom. Jesolo basically became a German holiday destination, Liguria was the same for the Frenchies. It’s the same pretty much today.

Meanwhile, Versilia, the original daddy of beaches, already had two things. The kiss of the aristocracy and big money in the form of heritage hotels and bagnos, and the concept of a beach club. It’s the late 1950s. By that time, Versilia already had more than a 100-year-long history as a beach destination. The clubs were already running (Capannina was the origin, but since then, many more came). The industrialists and old aristocrats from Turin and Milan all came to Versilia, years before it was cool. The villas and the 5-star hotels (the Principe di Piemonte, a hotel still operating today, was built in the 1920s) were already up for decades.

TLDR: while Rimini, Jesolo and the others had nitpicking German pensioners thinking twice about paying for a slice of pizza, and favoring camping anyway (no pun intended here!), Versilia had something that the Italian Adriatic never has, and still doesn’t have. Cash.

So, with all that money and audience there, what would you do? Disco. Of course, you would disco the fuck up.

The local disco heritage part 2: the club

The second part of the beach club. The origin story of the Capannina is well-known. But then something also happened, and it didn’t happen in Italy. It happened everywhere. There was this weird rise of music that was called pop. And there were these things called singers who had these songs, and some of them, mostly in the USA, performed in clubs. The music history is another story, but let’s just say: Versilia’s position was more than ideal at that time to become the European epicenter of music and where the entire Italian disco was born. It had the money to pay the fees of the visiting artists. It had a beach with a glamorous history. And it had the clubs where these events could happen.

So back to the late 50s, while Rimini was busy serving cheap bratwurst and pizza with sausages, Versilia started building out the foundations for disco.

If Capannina is a legend, then La Bussola is a miracle. What Studio54 was for America, La Bussola (the compass) was for Italy. Except, like anything else, Studio54 was also a copy of anything that happened in Versilia. The club went live in 1955 under Sergio Bernardini (Studio54 opened in ‘77). Ok, so we need to talk about Sergio first.

Sergio, our boy, is from Tuscany, from a modest background, grew up in Paris, where his mom worked as a nanny for the kids of Louis Lumière. You know, the dude who invented cinema. So Sergio, who opened his club, La Bussola, grew up in the household of the guy who started cinema. Then they came back, Sergio got cocky and became a partisan against fascists, job well done, then settled down in Viareggio, started to run dance venues, then with some help, started La Bussola. He died in 1993. Streets are named after him here. His memoir: I have never lost my compass (Non ho mai perso la Bussola). Beautiful.

La Bussola quickly became the place where all the big names performed. Almost all big Italian singers started here, from Mina to De André. Mina was actually on a summer holiday in 1958 with her family, only 18, jumped on stage, started singing, and the legend was born. Her last performance was also here, about twenty years later (1978), in the Bussoladomani tent. She never appeared in public ever again. Her only three live albums were all recorded here. De André also was terrified of live performances; he waited years after his stardom got kicked in, and later he gave his first-ever live concert here.

But Sergio felt the times were changing, so he quickly built a new annex to the club, the Bussolotto, a smoky little club next to the main stage. The Bussolotto immediately signed the jazz world as we know it today. Sinatra, Ray Charles, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Duke, Aretha, Baker, I don’t know, everyone had to stop and perform on the main stage. And for the initiated, the Bussolotto ran until dawn. These weren't just stops. These concerts were prominent ones, starts or ends of European tours. On one night, there was a sold-out concert in the salon, a young pianist played there. His name was Romano Mussolini, the duce’s jazz pianist son, signed up by partisan Sergio in post-war Italy. What a night.

These events were all frequented by affluent high-rollers. So Bussola was the place for these artists where they felt that they got understood. It was also an intimate setting. The club is not big, the salon is even smaller. All of them sit 10 meters by the sea, surrounded by pine and palm trees, far from the grandiose promenade of Viareggio. Playing there, going there, it was almost like a sacred act.

The peak of the era

It’s the 60s and the 70s. Disco is peaking. Capannina gets a full-blown renovation. While the club was an orchestra place for dancing high society from Milan and Turin, the 50s changed the game. Capannina is a small place, so it was an even more intimate venue for big stars who came to Bussola.

On the floors of Capannina, in 1966, a young and bold window dresser from Piacenza met a young, quiet accountant from Pietrasanta, named Sergio Galeotti. The other guy’s name was Giorgio Armani. In 1975, together they founded a company, The Armani Group. Sergio sadly passed away from AIDS in 1985. Giorgio bought Capannina for sentimental value in 2025, because that is where he met the love of his life. He died 8 days after the announcement. The sales contract gets finalized by Armani Group lawyers in the local notary office. The club has been closed since then, under renovation. The club was run by Franceschi, the original owner, all throughout the 60s, until 1977.

Meanwhile, the Bussola has its peak. In the 60s and 70s, literally anyone you knew and had anything to do with pop music had an event here. Completely pointless to list them. All of them. The Bussola became a cultural icon, so much so that when the 68 student movement had to pick a target to rebel against, they picked the Bussola. The NYE event (which was always the peak of all events at Bussola) turns into a riot. Police come out, shots are fired, and a guy ends up in a wheelchair.

Bussola peaks so much so that it expands. After the construction of the jazz salon, the Bussolotto, Bernardini builds a giant tent in the nearby park in 1976. The forest there had just been cleared and turned into a public park. Tent up, and the Bussoladomani was born. It became a giant festival venue.

Meanwhile, more copies emerged, some of them in Versilia. Rimini and the Adriatic coast realize that this beach club is a thing, so they also start doing it, about a hundred years late in the game. Anything that is similar across the Atlantic or anything in Latin America? It’s a copy too from here (some of them were started by Italian emigrants).

Parallel, Sanremo gets a memo that there is a thing called TV that is becoming popular. Figures that they have a huge theater and casino and money to play for singers. Why not merge this spiel with this thing called TV? The Sanremo festival is born. Funnily, it started as a radio show. Then became a TV event.

And this odd little thing, the TV, that’s where everything tanked.

How Italian disco died

At least here, in Versilia. It’s mostly because of the TV. If we have to name anyone or anything as a villain, it should be the TV. Before TV, you had to either listen to these singers on records or the radio, or you had to visit them at concerts. With TV, you just needed to press the ON button.

Yes, there were still affluent people paying money to go to live parties. But they got older. And it’s the late 70s and early 80s. Economic boom for everyone. People suddenly got money to burn on travel. Mass tourism, or anything close to it, gets its start. Hotels emerge after hotels, small villas, vacation homes, and so on. We are not at the “buy Sorrento Lemon here” and fridge magnet idiocracy yet, but we are getting there. And what do you do when you see a bunch of new-money people flooding your favorite old-money club? You run inside your gated community. You quickly start asking entry ticket fees, stoked up high ones, of course, start charging a premium just to sit down, and so on. Basically, economically speaking, you cut out the proles. Let them have their aperitivo in a cheap bar where there is maybe a guy playing on a synthesizer.

I know it smells a bit of a class war here, but the by-then huge infrastructure that the Bussola and other clubs had here was financially unsustainable. The world turned to big TV stars. The 80s were about a small number of overpaid huge stars, not about niche pop singers. The DJ-era wasn’t there yet. So, our two players?

Franceschi operated La Capannina, and Bernardini also led La Bussola all throughout the 60s and 70s. They frequently collaborated as well. Musicians went on the big stages at Bussola, but gave a limited-availability, close-knit event at Capannina. But as TV got more popular and the stretch of Versilia became popular for foreign tourists as well, the economics started to crumble.

Franceschi had his prime in the 70s. The details are murky, but the Capannina got sold to the Guidi family in 1977 (Carla and Gherardo, two local hospitaliers). It was a smaller place, profitable after its peak, but still a local legend, still open. The beach had its popularity in comedy, the movie Sapore di mare was shot mostly in La Capannina. The place reinvents itself as a beach bar, rather than a disco club. The Guidi family managed it well and kept the heritage clear. The name is still unchanged. The structure is still the last renovation, 50s style. Gherardo passed away in 2024, and the heirs sold the place to Armani. It was promised that it would be open this summer, but renovation is still underway. Since La Capannina stopped being a disco club, I am sure it will reopen. It’s also in Forte dei Marmi, where even the sunbeds are D&G branded, so I’m sure the Armani Group finds a way to keep it open.

The Bussola though? Well, the tent finances weren’t so generous. As I said, his memoir is titled: I have never lost my compass. In the early 80s he sold the Bussola to, guess what, the same Guidi family. The disco operated throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s as a club. It became a place for local clubbing, but with zero glamour of the 60s and 70s, it was a classic dancehall. Word is that it was barely profitable and the only thing that made real money was the original jazz salon turned into a beach bar. A bagno. Similarly to La Capannina. The tent turned back into a park, Parco Bussoladomani, and it is currently running an annual summer festival in June and July. Similar concept that Sergio had. This year we had Nick Cave as one of the leads.

There was a documentary made about the club’s peak era:

By the mid-2000s, the last of the clubs got closed down. By this time, Bussola got surrounded by local villas, residents who lived there, and smaller hotels. In 2007, noise complaints led to the club closing its doors. Relaunched as Bussola Versilia. Goes to the ground within years. A local family leases the place; the Guidi family is still the owner. Rent is unpaid, litigation, lawyers, I don’t know, sad story. The last NYE party was in 2023/24. I was surrounded by teens wearing long coats and pretty much nothing else. Since then, it’s closed. The heirs of the Guidi family sold La Capannina to Armani for a rumored 12 million euros. They can’t sell La Bussola. The bagno next door is still open, though, as it is the only one that still makes some money.

So, disco died because no one is interested in real live music anymore. You go to concerts for the show. Spectacle that you can’t watch on TV. For anything else, you have screens. Mass clubbing moved to DJ sets, and they are moving to where the masses are: Rimini, Ibiza, etc. The irony: the ones that copied the format are the ones that kept it somewhat alive.

While Rimini’s clubs are affordable for everyone, Versilia’s new club scene priced out the original audience. Because there are new players in this game, yes. A table at these new clubs costs more than an Italian starting salary, so the local kids drink at the free beach, doing their own parties, if any, and the temples that formed the Italian pop and disco scenes are waiting for new customers who can pay for the experience.

Enter a generation that can pay…

The new clubs and their new crowd

This new generation is, of course, the Millennials. They are 40+ now, and some of them made big-time cash. But most of them are new money. The ones who go to Miami, Marbella, and Ibiza.

Now, we can argue endlessly that new-money people have zero taste, lack any cultural value, any shame, or a highly questionable reputation and source of money. But I am sure people said the same things about those who frequented La Capannina or La Bussola in the 1930s and early 1950s. First money comes, then culture and taste enter (hopefully) in the third and fourth generations. You look at the Getty Foundation today, and it’s an amazing collection. Never forget it was started by JP Getty. Sure, we don’t see a Zuckerberg art collection or a Bezos gallery yet, but who knows. Ok, if I look at them, I know the answer, but hey, I’m still optimistic…

So whatever we think about this new crowd of new money bag holders and their new expectations from a club, the thing is, they are here, and the clubs are here for them.

Speaking of these people, here is Flavio Briatore (Benetton + F1 + Heidi Klum + Naomi Campbell + fraud convictions, later amnestied, you know, new money stuff). He started Twiga in 2001, one of the first of these clubs around here. Since then, we have plenty. The recipe is the same for almost all of them: hundreds of euros just for booking a table, expensive everything, DJs are more like background music for dinner, because people would rather sit and eat raw shellfish with prosecco, while their girlfriend dances slowly holding her glass of champagne in one hand, Birkin in the other.

This recipe works so well that Flavio sold Twiga in 2025 to Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, who already owned one of the clubs here, Franco Mare (currently named Casa Fiori Chiari Versilia). Don’t know who Del Vecchio is? Well, you probably wear some of his products on your head already. He is the heir of the company Luxottica, which controls most of the eyewear market on this planet. Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Persol are all owned by Luxottica, which also makes eyewear for most premium brand names. It was founded by the late Leonardo Del Vecchio. The Del Vecchio family is one of the wealthiest, most influential families in Italy and also in the world.

And that is how the circle completes. The clubs that started as new money places in the late 90s and early 2000s now become prestige locations for the new rich. The Del Vecchio fortune is already in its second generation. Leonardo Maria is in his early 30s now. By the time he has his heirs, the entire fortune becomes old money. And these clubs, that are currently accessible mostly for the rich, become legendary places. Or will they?

This year, Twiga co-branded their entire beach club with Dolce & Gabbana. Last week, we biked late in the evening (it’s so hot here during summer that we can only bike after 8 pm) and passed Twiga.

The night had just started. Groups of people got out from their limos, SUVs, and black minivans, usually accompanied by a guide or a host. We let them through the bike lane. All groups were the same (we saw 3) as if they were grown somewhere. Guy in late 40s, 50s, bald, not very handsome but looks like someone with a bankroll. Usually the only man in the group. And then, a group of ladies, various ages. As you would imagine, yes, couldn’t tell if they are his daughter, girlfriend, or paid company. Oh, and of course, none of the groups were Italian. Frankly, it was funny to watch this scene.

If you are around Versilia this or any next year, don’t forget the age-old trick: the sea is for everyone, and no one can close it down for you. Start your walk from the bagno of Bussola Versilia, the current version and last remnant of La Bussola. Walk north towards Forte dei Marmi. Pass the clubbing beaches like Code, Petra, the free beach of Kevin, and immediately next to the boat harbor, the pricey Borsalino’s Panama beach. Pass through the pontile di Tonfano and from there, the party is yours. Faruk starts it on your left, then Franco Mare Casa Fiori Chiari Versilia, then for a good walk, you end up at Twiga. It’s on the border of Forte dei Marmi and Pietrasanta. Walk 5 more minutes, and you are at La Capannina.

This entire article is a 30-minute walk by the beach. The sunbeds, the umbrellas, the music: it’s all free to see from the sea that never left this story.

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Buona domenica!

Last weekend, we went to the Pupporina and Tordello Festival in Bozzano. Typing this down makes me laugh, and I promise I will write a full piece about it and how an Italian food festival works. Pupporina (amazingly funny word, if you ask me) is a cookie made with butter, by the way. And I wrote about tordello here.

But today I wanted to write about the small things. So here is Alessandro’s little boat selling fried fish:

Now, Alessandro has multiple boats. This is boat number 2. His boats sell fried stuff. There is one on the molo of Viareggio (guide about Viareggio is here). It sells seafood, octopus, calamari, etc. And there is one on Lake Massaciuccoli, selling local lake specialties, like frog legs (guide about the lake is here). The place doesn’t even have a name, it’s just called La Barchina 2. The boat 2.

We arrived at our festival an hour before opening, because we are idiot foreigners, but at least we’ve booked our tables. So, had to kill time, so we drove back to the boat. We had fried anchovies. They were fresh, not from the freezer, it was marked on the menu as “local catch” specifically.

The boat is in Gambero Rosso, which is basically the Michelin Guide’s Italian version. In the picture, you can see a newspaper clipping on top of aperto (open). It’s a local article about why the boat is amazing and part of the local community.

Once done, we went to the festival. We stuffed ourselves with food. We paid almost nothing. By the way, I gave up spelling my name nowadays, so you can see only Pietro on the table booking note.

The food was cooked there fresh, obviously, and everyone dined together under the sky, celebrating the pasta and the cookie. And this is one of the, I don’t know, can’t guess, but like one of the 50 options where you can go just here, just that weekend, if you are looking for a festival, event, or happening. All of them are like “fish festival” or “festival to celebrate medieval bread-making” or my favorite, “sausage festival” where Fosdinovo, a local town in the mountains, celebrates their way of making sausages. It will have a saxophone band as well.

I know this all sounds like banality. But the secret here is this: everyone is looking for this dolce vita experience, which, even writing it down, makes me itchy. Everyone is searching for the big thing, the big beach, the panoramic view, the mountain-top town, the big dinner, the big table, the Europemaxxing and Eurosummer experiences, whatever all of these mean.

But this is how you celebrate life. This. The small-town festivals. The event that is built around a butter-cookie. The article and award that is about a rusty old boat selling fried frog legs.

I am not joking, we’ve spent almost an hour sitting at the table at the boat. There were people stopping, many of them, some of them came with a bag and packed their fried frog legs home. For about 10 minutes, the line disappeared and the lady who a minute ago fried a bowl of octopus in the oil walked out, sat down with one of the dudes sitting there, smoked a cigarette, and talked.

I don’t know. I can barely remember my afternoon in Positano. I’m sure I won’t forget frog-leg-lady.

Peter

Pietrasanta, 9 August 2026

What’s new on the page

I’m back from Turin, finished with property-hunting, yaay. I wrote up my entire apartment buying experience, which I’m told is gold if you are in buying mode or planning to be in one:

I also wrote about amaro. This piece was sitting in my drafts for more than a month, and I almost forgot about it. The pitch: if you think Aperol or any of the spritzes are amaro, you are wrong. Read to learn the full story, also a little alcohol distilling history lesson there.

Last one, you’ve got it in your inbox, my personal story on how one small town (Ronciglione in Lazio) changed my entire view about Italy and about travel in general. It’s based on an experience that was more than half a decade ago, but the memory is still sharp.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.

Join free →

First and foremost, this is an origin story. Yes, you will find some insights on travel here, but this is, or will be, probably the most personal story on this publication. I’ll try writing the personal notes shorter and focus more on the travel documentary, but you know, zero promises.

As of today, we have been living in Tuscany for three years now. Before we decided to move our lives here permanently, we did a lot of long rides through Italy. Slow travel, as a travel journal would say. Not counting the 2-3 weeks-long regular holidays to Italy that most Europeans do anyway, the first long trip was after, or more like, during the pandemic in the summer of 2021.

We’ve spent nearly 3 months in Italy. A couple of weeks in Lerici, a couple of weeks in Florence, and more than a month in Rome, and some in-between days here and there. The goal of that trip was this: experience Italy without the masses of tourists (most foreign travel was banned that time, we’ve got our vaccines, so we were the few ones who could travel), and live in the two main tourist destinations for a longer time (Florence & Rome).

Also, we knew that we would get married at the end of August, a couple of days after we returned from this trip. So we kept the trip romantic, picked our wedding rings from an artisan in Florence, and had a pre-honeymoon weekend in a small villa for just the two of us. The latter will be important later in this article.

Long story short, we arrived from the North and made our way down to Rome. In Rome, I picked a place called Fonte Dell’Vsignolo, a perfectly designed farm estate turned villa, next to a town called Ronciglione. The villa was run by a wonderful German lady, by the way, and designed by her Italian husband. Not sure if it's still operational, though. It was 4 years ago, last time we were there. Anyhow, we ended up in Ronciglione for a romantic weekend.

Now, this story is not about what happened in the villa, because that’s private. But when we first left the villa for a dinner in the town. Ronciglione. Like you, we had probably never heard about this town before, and I am not even sure if we were able to pronounce it correctly at first. But that is where somehow something clicked. I don’t know, the universe was just in the right constellation, or we simply got drunk after dinner, or it was the summer evening, or the landlady in the villa spiked our drinks, but something was totally and completely in balance, and we, or at least I, got the idea.

Before this experience, when we traveled, we did what most people did. We went to the main city and spent some time there. We tried some “hidden things to see in X,” but mostly we just stayed in The City or In The Destination, and our hack was to stay longer than usual so something unusual could happen. Our hack was time, because we had time. We worked online, and there were no offices or schools we needed to get back to. I remember, one of the first “hmmm that is different” experiences I had was in Valencia. Finally, a Spanish city that is not Madrid, Barcelona, or Sevilla. Finally, a place which functions as a city, a place where you can live and pass time, without encountering masses of tourists. Or when I spent an unusually long time in Tel Aviv and only dedicated a few days to Jerusalem. Or when I was locked on Malta for a week, alone, doing pretty much nothing, just wandering around Mdina and Valletta. These were fundamentally different travel experiences compared to the usual “go to Cyprus, spend a week in a hotel in Ayia Napa, do a day trip to Nicosia” or “let’s just go to Athens for a week.”

Italy was even worse in this, because the country has so much to offer that everyone is ticking off the basics first. And even the basics take a lot of time. I have lived in Florence for two weeks, and since then I have been living sort of next to it for years now, and I am still unable to say that I’ve seen it all. So obviously, when we went to Italy, we did the basics. Even on this first longer trip, we did the basics: Florence, Rome. Ok, in Lerici, we got a taste of a bit of difference, but still, we went there to see the Cinque Terre without the armies of Jennifers. And, by the way, this longer trip was probably the, I don’t know, tenth trip total to Italy, twentieth if we combine both of our trips. Sophie did an entire road trip from Venice to Sicily before.

But in Ronciglione, something has changed. The best way to describe this is this:

I’ve realized that I want to visit these generic towns. I started to favor day trips to odd places, or towns which I knew nothing about. Our travel planner was Google Maps, randomly clicking around, rather than Tripadvisor or Wikipedia. The idea of Anywhere Italy wasn’t born there. But the mindset shift for Anywhere Italy happened there.

On our next trip, we didn’t even stop at any of the famous places. We went straight down to Calabria and Sicily. Then we ended up in Rome for a year, but that’s another story…

So, Ronciglione was our baptism into hidden Italian towns. The first time, we spent only a few days there. On our next trip, we ended up in Rome for a year. From there, we’ve visited the town and the area many times. It was our first patch on the Italian map, which we discovered only for ourselves. With time, we’ve learned that this patch is called Tuscia.

After a month in Rome, we wanted to spend two more weeks elsewhere on our way back home to Budapest. I can’t even remember which city it was. Probably Venice or Bologna, because they are halfway between Rome and Budapest, but I know that we canceled our plans. We booked two more weeks in the center of Ronciglione. Yes, we’ve got red-pilled so much that we changed our entire plan and booked more days in an almost meaningless, small town in the middle of nothing in Lazio.

Since it was a small town and there was nothing to do there, we quickly discovered everything around us. We quickly became friends with Paola, who was an Italian aristocrat who lived in New York as a socialite, poet, writer, filmmaker, everything, and returned a couple of years ago to her estate here in Ronciglione. We’ve spent a couple of days by her pool. She invited us to a pool party with local artists, which sadly we couldn’t attend as it was two days after our departure. Her place, Relais Villa Lina is bookable.

We also spent time in the local lake, Lago di Vico, which is the heart of the Tuscia region. We’ve learned that the area is a supplier for Ferrero, as most farmers are growing hazelnuts here. Sophie once forgot her purse at home and realized after ordering gelato at the local bar. Got waived and even got free coffee, just because she was “bellissima.” These experiences are small and indifferent, but they were our first in Italy, and they were as close as you can get to local life. Banality, I know, but why the hell am I still remembering this after years? It didn’t even happen with me.

This was the first place where we just sat at the local bar and watched the locals. The young ones are the best, the teenagers. I know it might sound creepy, but it was here where we named all of them Marcos and Francescas. They are like doves on the main piazza, always going around in groups, always separated, girls and boys, two groups. They dress up, they are loud, they are like parrots, always talking. Almost no one is checking their phones, and you see no one doing selfies. It’s like the pre-internet era, totally weird and amazing at the same time to see. Or the old people, the group of grandpas who sit at the coffee table from 9 AM till 12:30, doing absolutely nothing, drinking a coffee, a glass of wine, maybe smoking a cigarette, or a cigar, reading the local paper, maybe having a talk with a friend. Then at 12:30, promptly, they religiously stand up, and like a rocket ship they speed up home, because it’s lunchtime.

Again, banality of everyday things. But it was Ronciglione where we have not just started noticing these, but started enjoying them. We were the creepy foreigners who were sitting on the same piazza at the same coffee table for an hour or more, and watching other people doing their things. Sometimes we were even more creepy and took a photo of the evening street.

I remember the third time that we returned here. Almost a year had passed after our first visit. It was my birthday, so we spent a couple of days again in the villa. We went for the same walks. We went to the same bars. No one recognized us, of course. But it felt like we were returning home. Which is an extremely odd feeling to have, because even then, our home was not even in this country. Still, feelings.

Because of the banality of the experience, I can only write about it with meaningless words. I could say this is slow travel. Or I could say this is watching life happen. Or, maybe, I can quote the Nobel-prize-winning Hungarian writer, Laszlo Krasznahorkai:

_* “Csak nézni, hogy telik a kurva élet” - in Hungarian, from his work Sátántangó (Satan’s Tango). I have no clue how it is officially translated into English, but above is my own rough one.

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I wrote about a specific story of an amaro, the Unicum. It has some Italian roots and is very popular in Italy, but it is actually a Hungarian spirit. Today I want to write about the amaro as a genre itself.

Because aside from wine, there is nothing more Italian than the amaro or bitter spirits.

Some nations have their own versions: Jagermeister in Germany, Becherovka in Czechia, Gammel Dansk in Denmark, Pelinkovac in the Balkans, Zoladkova in Poland, etc. Even gin is similar in the making, but its bitterness is “outsourced” to the tonic water.

But no other country does more versions of this than Italy. I haven’t counted it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of amari in Italy equals or exceeds the number of wine categories in Italy.

And, of course, everyone knows Aperol, and its cocktail version, the Aperol Spritz, which is… no, sonny, no, it’s not a bitter or an amaro. It’s a bitter cocktail, and it is at best a cousin of amaro, but in reality, it is closer to gin&tonic. So, if you want to know what amaro is and what it is for, read on.

The unavoidable history lesson for amaro

Regionality and geography made countless versions of amaro. But all of them have the same journey: alchemists → monks → pharmacies → distilleries.

We need to touch on the super quick history lesson of distilling anything, aka, humanity’s quest to make alcohol. For that, let’s make friends with Jimmy.

So. Bye Jimmy, we have arrived at the point where clever European Christians are able to distill alcohol. At first, believe it or not, this whole spiel had two routes.

One is making wine stronger, which later led to the long history of brandy-style drinks, which are part of another story. It was the route that later went into sprouts like the super minimalistic, we-just-distill-anything passes of vodka and whisky.

Two is putting any kind of weird but cheap herbs into the distillation. That’s the amaro, or bitter or medicinal alcohol, passage. It wasn’t a new method at all. Even pre-medieval Jimmy put herbs into the wine and fortified it. Wormwood was common for medicinal wine drinking, which was later named vermouth. Long story short: put some herbs in it, distill it, you get something bitter, nice.

And what tastes bitter but is good for you? Medicine. People connected wine with joy, so most monasteries made wine for the festivals and sacred events. When distillation arrived in Europe, monks started making bitter drinks for medicinal purposes. Herbs were the medicine, alcohol was the carrier.

Once Baby Jesus said OK to science (around the 17th- 18th century, it took him a couple of hundred years from semi-OK to fully-OK this thing…), pharmacies were the first to emerge. They started selling potions and remedies for the sick. And from where they got their first batches of distilled bitter alcohol? Of course, from monks.

From there, the route was as simple as the economic journey to capitalism. Somewhere, somehow, a pharmacist realized that this bitter stuff is not just for the sick. We can build a brand! And this is how any bitter drink got its baptism in and around the late 19th century. By the way, Americanos reading this, Coca-Cola was born the same way.

So what is amaro and what isn’t?

You know the story now, so you know what amaro is. It’s a bitter, hard-distilled alcoholic drink infused with herbs, with some medicinal uses, often connected to digestive issues. That is why it's most commonly called a digestive, or a drink you drink after the meal.

So amaro = distilled hard liquor + herbs + medicinal value + consumed after a meal.

It’s not part of the definition, but goes without saying that because of the herbs and medicinal values, you can’t drink too much of it. It’s one of the worst ideas you can have: getting drunk solely on amaro.

But what is not amaro? This might be a bit longer, but it's equally simple. Every word matters: a bitter drink infused with herbs. Gin is infused with herbs (juniper or modern versions are infused with anything really). But it’s not bitter. Bitterness is outsourced to the tonic water. Vermouth then? No, the carrier is not hard distilled alcohol. It’s wine. Grappa, vodka, whiskey—no, no herbs and botany at all. Those are pure distilled alcohols. Anything made for cocktails: Angostura or other bitters that are there only to infuse cocktail drinks with bitter flavor. Or everyone’s favorite Aperol, where the alcohol level is too low (Aperol is 11% or something?) so they are not meant to be consumed alone. Even Campari is borderline. These are more like cocktail bases than standalone drinks.

And there is the grey line. People think they are amaro, but... Limoncello, sambuca, amaretto, nocino, and all the others where the method of making amaro is there, but there is one slight thing that makes it less of an amaro. Sugar. In some cases, an absolute bonkers amount of sugar. Some of them are a bit bitter, yes, but sugar always overpowers the bitterness. As far as I know, there is also a law that says if you have x amount of sugar, you are technically a liquore, not an amaro. These are considered more like sweet digestives.

The digestive value and the hyperlocality

I think the digestive value is the one thing that defines the amaro in terms of how it is consumed. Because once we get this right, the only thing left is locality, which is purely driven by geography and makes this entire category interesting because you can discover new amari all the time during your travel.

Digestive value means it aids digestion. So it is supposed to be consumed after the meal or for weird digestive issues. In some cases, especially in Northern regions, amaro is consumed to treat seasickness. Amari made in the mountains are heavier because the meals were more meaty, fatty, heavy. Southern amaro, especially by the sea, is lighter, often made from citruses, not because citrus and the sea are there, but because the meals are lighter anyway.

Once you get that, the last thing you need to know is the ever-true thing about Italy: everything is hyperlocal.

Amaro is made from local herbs. Whatever it is favored, available, or part of the local patron saint festivities, or artisans, or whatever it is that is fully local there. There are amari known only in a few towns and made for a few towns. There are ones which are made into big-brand batches and are available on almost all bars’ shelves. And there are restaurants and local trattorias that pride themselves on having that bottle of amaro only, and they give you a look if you order the big-name Montenegro one.

Just an example: I have no idea what the name was, but I’ve had a chestnut-flavored one in Garfagnana. The most authentic amaro experience I have ever had was a bottle, not even labeled, sold by an old grandpa from his wine cellar in Equi Terme. He mentioned the herbs, but my Italian is not that deep. He made sure that even though we didn’t buy the whole bottle, at least we tasted his creation. It was a matter of pride, not a matter of transaction. It was great, a bit edgy, probably because it was 100% homegrown and homebrewed.

But I’m from Hungary, and we have a thing called palinka, which is pretty much brandy distilled from whatever fruit fell down from the trees. It is strong, definitely nothing mellow about it, and mostly homemade. Almost no one buys it from the shops, because everyone has someone who makes their version of this drink. Amaro is kinda the same in the making.

How amaro should be consumed

This will also be very straightforward. Amaro is a digestive, so you should drink it after the meal. You can drink it neat, with water separately, or with ice. This is kinda similar to whiskey drinking. Unrelated to your choices, it is almost always served room temperature. Some of them are served cold, even freezer cold (like the del Capo). Same amount as any shot, like a whiskey, again. Unlike whiskey, which is often served in a narrow-on-the-top glass to concentrate the fragrance of the drink, amaro is almost always served in a simple wide round glass. Smell is important, but taste is what you need to savor more. Some people buy a cantucci with it and dunk the cookie in the amaro as a form of dessert. I’ve seen some people dunk simply bread in it. It’s up to you.

The goal of the amaro is to prolong the evening conversation. It is by definition a slow drink. You are sipping it. Since it is often very bitter and the herbs also need some patience from you, you can’t just simply shoot it down. Professional amaro experts, like myself, drink an amaro for half an hour or more.

Some amari come in cocktails, or more like, some amari can be served as the base ingredient of a cocktail. But that’s an aperitif, not a digestive. It opens the evening, not closes it. All those versions of spritzes where some form of bitter is topped up by prosecco or simply soda. And also, some amari make into coffee. It’s called caffé corretto, corrected coffee. It’s an espresso shot mixed with a shot of alcohol. The three most popular options are amaro/bitters, sambuca, and grappa.

But when you say amaro, it’s most likely something that you get neat, after the meal, and you drink it slowly.

Some amazing amaro examples

I did some research, well, my AI did. I tried some of these personally (will mark it).

Braulio. Coming from Bormio in the Lombardian Valtellina valley. A 150-year-old recipe, aged in barrels in cellars dug under the town’s streets. The locals literally walked on their amaro cellars.

Cynar. It’s popular, and it is made from artichoke. It’s from Veneto and it got popular from the ad from the 50s post-war boom. A then-famous actor was sipping the amaro in the middle of the busy Milan traffic at a table, reading a paper, giving zero f. The slogan was “against the hustle of modern life.” I tried this, and it has this weird aftertaste of artichoke, which to me is a bit too much.

Amaro Lucano. Made by a pastry shop owner in Basilicata. It says on the bottle: work and honesty. Their slogan: what else do you want from life? Accurate. I tried it, and it is easy to fall in love with it for those who are rookies in amaro. It’s on the sweeter side (guess this is the pastry heritage).

Centerba. I have never tried it, but it has a legendary reputation. The name means hundreds of herbs, because, you’ve guessed it, it is made from around a hundred herbs in Mount Majella, Abruzzo, where it is a regional treasure. It comes in an easily recognizable green bottle. And it is 70% alcohol. It is advertised for its antiseptic properties. With 70%, you bet it’s antiseptic.

Montenegro. Named after Princess Elena di Montenegro, the wife of King Victor Emmanuel III. It’s one of the most popular amari in Italy, available in almost all places. Very forgiving, mild, mellow. No judgment here, but it is often ordered by old nonnas. I tried it. To me, it is almost like non-bitter. You put in more than one ice cube, and it’s almost a dessert drink.

The del Capo. Or fully written: Vecchio Amaro del Capo. One of my favorites. Best stuff to drink during summer. You have to ask for it or look it up on the menu because it is never out on the shelves. Why? It is the national consensus that it has to be served from the freezer, ice cold, like a vodka.

The China Elixir. The Elixir di China Clementi. Or simply just China on the bottle. Nothing to do with China. It means quinine, which is the base ingredient of this one. Comes from my turf, Fivizzano, in Lunigiana. Started as a malaria medicine because in the Versilia swamps, malaria was common. Made by the same family since 1884. I tried. It’s one of the most bitter ones. By the way, did you know that quinine is almost undrinkable in its purest form, so tonic water has to have so freakin’ much sugar that it has more sugar than a bottle of generic sweet soda? All because of quinine.

Ramazzotti. If Montenegro is a popular one, Ramazzotti is the rockstar of amari. It is the first industrial-made, mass-produced amaro, coming from Milan, of course. Mr. Ramazzotti opened his bar in the 1840s next to La Scala and tried to outsmart local bars on coffee, so he started the ammazzacaffé thing. He went to war with coffee and suggested that people should drink amaro (his amaro to be precise) instead of coffee. Nowadays, the ammazzacaffé stuck, and it is an amaro consumed after the coffee. Sort of like the caffé corretto, but instead of mixing the amaro in the coffee, it is served separately, as water would. I tried it, obviously, it is almost impossible to avoid it.

One last thing. Compared to other drinks like vodka, whiskey, or cognac, or rum, or whatever, it is not recommended to get drunk from amaro. Simply put, you shouldn’t have more than 2 glasses a day, or your stomach rebels. Because of this, amaro bottles tend to stay open for longer periods than other drinks. They live on the shelves, opened. I don’t know if it is because of the prolonged shelf life, or because in Italy anything that is artisanal tends to be beautifully designed, but amaro bottles are almost always amazing to look at. Seriously, they are a design marvel. Beautiful. They often carry their hundreds-of-years-old graphic style.

But, and I’ve said it before, the best experiences are coming from unmarked bottles. From a wine cellar. In a medieval small town. From an almost hundred-year-old grandpa. Who is proudly showing off his creation. His recipe. His amaro.

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“Buying a property in Italy” is a deep rabbit hole of guides written by people who probably never went through the process, but they (or their AI) did some research and wrote an article about it. These articles are filled with the 1 EUR houses and other “amazing deals” which almost always turn out to be the worst financial decision of your life.

This piece is not like those articles. For two reasons. One, I am talking about apartment buying only. Houses don’t have condo fees, and you don’t need to obey that many rules in renovation work either. Two, this piece is entirely based on my experiences, since I went through the buying process myself recently (a 2-bedroom apartment with a full attic and garage in Turin).

So. First of all, no one needs to panic. There is no endless Italian paperwork, no idiot rules of red tape, and no special cases. There are, however, some interesting, probably only-here kind of rules, which I will share. And, of course, the real estate business is full of scams and crap sold as gold with a markup, but that is everywhere, so obviously, don’t be stupid, never believe a single word from a real estate agent, and keep your eyes open. But that’s, I guess, the normal behavior.

My background

It counts a bit here because it forms my point of view in this article. It can also serve you as a reference point when I say anything below.

So, I am Hungarian by birth, which means I am a foreign immigrant in Italy. I have an official residency. I’m an EU citizen, which means I don’t need a visa to stay here, but I do need a residency to deal with daily life here. Residency is not needed to buy an apartment, by the way, but it makes it much easier. I have also lived in, well, duh, Hungary (Budapest), and in London for many years. I was a tenant in London but got inches close to becoming an owner, so I know everything about buying real estate in Britain. And I was a homeowner in Budapest. So I have two countries and their laws and processes to compare with the Italian one.

And since buying a property is not just a financial transaction, but a cultural process (as anything), I also think that I now have three very different cultures to compare with each other.

The Anglo-Saxon process is extremely straightforward and transparent, which is probably the same in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Eastern European process seems complicated until you realize that you are in Eastern Europe, and if you have money, you can do anything, and I mean anything. You can convert your attic into another penthouse without any legislative work or any single fucks given to others in the condo. You just need to know the right people at the local council and bribe the condo representative, and that’s it. You can even sell the on-paper attic as a penthouse with a huge markup, legally. It’s a libertarian’s wet dream.

The Italian Job

The Italian process is similar to anything in Southern Europe. Red tape is in extreme detail, and it is treated very seriously (on the surface), and everyone acts as if the government rules are similar to the Bible, which is, of course, written by God, no questions about that.

Also, everyone is extremely serious about this business. Selling real estate is an opera with a minimum of 5 acts. Everyone looks and behaves as if this is the most important decision of their entire life, which it is sometimes, so I get it. And since it is also the place where the most money is moved around, everyone is like a vulture who takes a cut.

So before I go into some details, I have two underlying tips or more like rules for everyone. It should define how you approach this entire thing.

Rule one: it is totally fine and actually recommended to question the words of God. Almost anything can be fluid, and almost everything can be ignored. Most things are up to a personal relationship or interpretation. So when someone says the rules, nod, acknowledge. Of course, it is very serious, it’s a rule, but try to find an alternative solution. In almost all cases, one exists. Also, it’s Italy. Look around. Does the place seem like it has any rules? Sorry, don’t want to offend anyone, I love Italy with all my heart, but the rules are here at best fluffy, to be honest. Or more like, the state treats itself super seriously, and locals on the surface play along, but personally, they are like nah, duh, meh. This kinda applies to a process like buying property.

Rule two: the real estate agent is actually your friend. Now, this is a mindset shift, because we, or at least I, was trained in one very persistent manner on how to handle real estate agents, or like salespeople in general. So, I’m a marketer by trade, by the way, so I had the opportunity (or curse?) to work with people in sales. Trust me: don't believe anything a salesperson tells you. The higher the price tag, the less you should trust that person. And no, there's no “oh, but he is such a nice fella” in this. Now, with all that said, the real estate agent in Italy is your friend who accompanies you on the journey and helps you with the transition. I will explain why later. But just have that mindset first.

The cost of the buying process

So, this is the very fundamental difference of the Italian buying experience compared to everything else I have experienced. Here, everyone takes a cut from you, the buyer. Maybe someone will comment on this post that this is the same process in their country, but to me, this was completely new.

In Italy, you, as the buyer, pay the notary who handles the legal paperwork and state fees. It makes sense. We do the same in Hungary. It’s through a lawyer, and we pay the state fees on our own, but it’s the same. You also pay the seller for the asking price. That is, of course, makes sense. But in Italy, as a buyer, you also pay the real estate agent a fee.

Fucking why?! WHY?! He is selling me. The seller should pay the fee, of course, since the agency is doing them a favor. Listing the property, handling the appointments, keeping the contacts, etc. That’s a service worth paying for. But as a buyer? It’s the same if I walk into a store and tip the cashier for handing me the bag. The agency in Italy makes a fee on both the buyer and the seller. And as a buyer, you get nothing, by the way. Except your property. You walk into the agent’s office once, sign the papers of interest, make an official offer on the asking price, and bye. Everything else either happens at the notary later (if it’s a yes), or happens nothing at all (if it’s a no).

To me, this is mindblowing, and I have considered starting a real estate business for foreigners, because all I can see now is that selling properties in Italy is basically free money on the streets for agencies. I also understood why Italy has a real estate agency on literally every corner in every town. For real, it’s either a gelateria, a trattoria, or an immobiliare. Or insurance, that’s another scam that is everywhere. Funny, our new home’s condo has two offices on the streets, they pay rent to our condo, which is great for condo costs. Guess? Yes, a pizzeria and an insurance agency.

The process

I should have started with this, but the process matters only on paper. Remember rule one: question everything.

It looks straightforward, and I will write about all its steps:

1. You try to find a property. You either walk into an agency or look online.

2. You visit properties. 99% of the time with an agent.

3. You have the one. You make one offer to the agent.

4. The seller accepts your offer. You are legally bound to buy at that price.

5. Both of you and the agent go to the notary, sign papers, and it’s done.

Finding the property

Now, this part of the process is the one step that is totally up to you and your preferences. All I can give you are some tips.

The most important tip: remember that Italy is a country based on relationships and hyperlocality. And also, never forget the most important rule: everyone hates Rome, except Romans.

So, with that in mind, allow me to translate this to real estate.

Relationships. The best deals are done within families and friends. Since you are a foreigner, it’s an important thing to know and it is also a relief. You don’t need to chase the best deal, because you won’t be part of it. Doesn’t matter what those real estate agencies tell you about buying your dreamy house in Tuscany for pennies. It’s probably a scam anyway, but it is definitely not The Deal Of Your Lifetime. So don’t chase it. Accept it. It’s a relief if you ask me.

Hyperlocality. The local real estate agency office has more opportunities than the entire internet. The only place where internet search can serve you is the big-city option. The market is faster there, so the agencies make some (not full, some!) effort to put up some of their ads online.

The smaller the town you are buying in, the more likely you need to go into the local real estate agency office. If you are in a town with multiple areas, go to the area where you want to buy and find the agency there. Even if they belong to a big franchise like Tempocasa or Tecnocasa, the local office always knows better. Submit your search preferences there, and they will find you something. Even in cities, I personally walked into some of the local neighborhood agencies. Another personal experience: I was a tenant for years in Tuscany. I knew the area where I wanted to live, walked into like five agencies, submitted my details, and one of them presented me the solution. The apartment wasn’t on the internet, nor at any other agencies, except the one we ended up with. So yeah, keep that in mind when hunting, almost nothing is online and transparent.

Rome. Mention any city or town to an Italian, and they will find something to like about it. Mention Rome. Watch what happens. This translates into paying taxes, fees, and licenses to the government. This is the Bible. It’s a set of rules you have to follow. And it’s a set of rules you have to question. By the rules, you can’t negotiate much. IRL: you can. The part of this house is a storage space, not a living space. But don’t worry, no one does a checkup. If they do, what do they find? A couple of beds? No one can say you can’t store beds in your storage, right? Yes, on the floor map, there was a closed kitchen here. I know there is none here now, but do you bother? Of course not! It’s an open-plan dining room now. Look how spacious it is! I can go on, but I think you get the gist here. The rules say red. You say dark orange. If you look hard enough, it can still fly as red, no worries.

One important line here, before my own advice burns you. The flexibility is about how you use the space after the notary goes home. It is not about what's on the records the day you sign. At the rogito, the seller declares that the apartment matches the cadastral plans, and the notary takes that seriously, because this is the one place where the Bible is actually the Bible. Small mismatches, a moved kitchen, an opened wall, get fixed on paper by a geometra before signing for a few hundred euros. Make the seller pay for it. Big mismatches, rooms that don't exist on the plans, a storage space sold as a bedroom, are not quirks. They are the traps I mention later, the ones a good fixer smells from miles away. Buy the beds after. Not before.

So, don’t bother about chasing the best deal, it’s not for you. Go full local to find the best opportunities. And keep your eyes open because rules can be blurry, even if everyone pretends they are super serious. But some rules are still not meant to be broken.

The searching for the one

So this is generic advice and has nothing to do with Italy because property searching has the same rules everywhere. At this point, you know your options; all you need to do is see the properties and get a first-hand experience. So here is what I always do. Again, this is mostly for apartment buying, but kinda applies to houses as well.

1. Drive around the area. Twice: one by day, one after 8 PM. What kind of people do you see on the streets? What kind of shops? What kind of restaurants? What’s the feeling you have? Can you imagine yourself walking home there? Especially if it’s a big city, it’s important to know which areas are off limits for you. In my experience (Turin), I had to drive less than five minutes around the North side of the city, especially Barriere di Milano, to know that I want the South-West of the city.

2. Wait 10+ minutes for the agent in front of the house. If you are lucky, you are just on time, and the agent is late, which is pretty much all the time in Italy anyway. Look who’s coming in and out. Weird rules I have: Italians are big on dogs. What kind of dogs do you see coming in and out from the house? Pitbulls or Labradors? It’s Italy, people are usually dressed up better when they go out. Do you see this on people coming in and out? Do you imagine yourself talking to these people as your neighbors?

3. Ask in the local bar. I don't do it all the time, but most of the time. I go into the local bar. There is always one within 100 meters. I get something to drink and ask the bartender one question. No, not "how is it to live here, what kind of people live here?" That's offensive. Most bars and their owners are locals. The answer will always be positive. You are a foreigner who wants to open a restaurant there. Do they recommend it? The "who is living here" immediately becomes "how hard life is here," and the complain-tsunami starts. Filter it to your liking.

And here is the thing about asking questions in Italy. Ask directly. Is it safe here at night? Would you park your car on this street? Has this area gone up or down in the last ten years? Where does the trouble start, which corner, which piazza? In some countries these questions make people squirm. Here, nobody squirms. You get an answer, then three stories you didn’t ask for, then a spoken map of exactly which streets are fine after dark and which are not, with house numbers. Italians live hyperlocally, and they talk without a filter. Sometimes without any filter at all.

You don’t have to join in. But you also don’t have to dance around the only question that matters, which is whether you’d walk home on that street at 8 PM. Ask it straight. You’ll get the truth. With interest.

TLDR: no dance. Straight shooting. Ask the direct questions that would earn you side-eye in Canada or Germany. The answers are the cheapest due diligence you will ever get.

Making the offer

Remember when I told you that despite all the things you know about salespeople, go against that mindset and let the real estate agent be your friend? This is the time.

Once you find a property, you make an offer. The offer is official, and it is as official as it gets. You walk into the agency office and sign papers. You pay nothing here, but you sign that if the offer is accepted, you pay a deposit, sort of a booking fee. It’s usually around 10% of the asking price, so it’s multiple tens of thousands of euros. By paying this, you made sure that the apartment can’t be sold to anyone else but you. The deposit, the caparra, cuts both ways, and this is the part to memorize. If you back out, the seller keeps your deposit. All of it. If the seller backs out, they owe it back to you, doubled. Symmetric punishment, written into the civil code, and the reason both sides become very serious the moment an offer is accepted.

And here comes the problem.

What if you like more than one property? You can’t make multiple offers, because, if accepted, you are legally bound to pay the booking fee. Let’s say you want to make an offer to three apartments. All of them accept. You can’t cherry-pick one that you like the most and ignore the rest. If you have deep pockets, of course, you can. But that means that you pay 2x the 10% booking fee on two places you won’t buy. Because if you back out from an offer, you lose the fee. Sometimes they even double it, so you pay 2x more if you back out. Usually it’s for the seller, not the buyer, but I’ve seen this option for buyers at some places too.

Since you can’t just make multiple offers, you have to put all your eggs into one basket and make a very good offer on one. Obviously, have a plan B and C, if the offer won’t get accepted, so you can make offers to others. Oh, yes, you can’t make two offers on one place. One offer, one place. No negotiation via offers. I don’t even want to describe how this works in my home country in Hungary, but let’s just say it mostly involves a nylon bag of cash, some shots of alcohol, loud screaming, and counting rolls of cash by hand, standing around a table. So compared to that, it’s a kinda rigid process, I have to say.

How do you know that you made a very good offer?

Your friend, your amico, your BFF, the agent will tell you. Since in this process everyone is making money (except you, the buyer, you pay everyone), everyone is happy with a certain cut. No need to get super hungry here. The agent will tell you what a good offer is. When they sign the seller, they know what the minimum asking price is. They add the fees, and anything above that sum is an award. Depending on your agent or agency, the offer price is set either via direct negotiation with the agent or by simply telling you the price.

In Eastern Europe, negotiation is about the total annihilation of the other. I might be oversimplifying it, but it is a battle. If there is an asking price, it is more like a guiding price. Negotiation starts at the minimum of 50% of the asking price. From there, every penny that is negotiated in is an inch won on the battlefield. At the end of the negotiations, people are usually pointing at dusty curtains and looking under sinks for mold so they can negotiate a bit more down on the price. It’s a long process. If there is an agency involved, they are more like the referee in the ring who sometimes gets an accidental punch.

In Italy, it’s more like two friends talking over coffee about something inconvenient. You know I can’t pay this price in full. Yeah, I know. But we have to make an offer. Yeah, I know. How about 20% less than the asking price? I don’t know… this is a very nice neighborhood, and the apartment is very big. Yeah, I know… Ok, how about 10%? Let’s make an offer at this price! Absolutely, this is a very good idea. Which means you are still probably 20-30% above the minimum asking price, but you kept everyone happy. Seller got their money, agent got their cut, you made some savings, it’s all kumbaya.

But you can do this only if you respect your friend and their needs. This is not a war. It’s a friendly conversation.

The buying process

If the seller doesn’t accept the offer, you go to your plan B or C. If you made the agent your friend, the asking price was good, and the acceptance is almost guaranteed. Well, people sometimes have no freakin’ idea where they are, how they live, and what they do, so they can back down from anything, even selling a house. But if the offer itself is accepted and you paid the booking fee, you can expect that you either got a property (95% of the time), or you will get back your booking fee with some damage money added to it, which is nice (5% of the time). I personally know someone who made offer, the deal went through, but weeks before signing, the seller backed off because of some internal family issue. My friends who made the offer got the offer money back twice, from it, they bought an even bigger house later. It was free cash added to their account, just because the seller wasn’t sure about their life.

But let’s say all goes well. The buying process is simple, and it is rigid. So whatever I have said about keeping the game flexible, you can’t do it at the notary. It’s merely a paperwork opera. There are papers to sign, and there are fees to pay. You will get a fully detailed paper on the fees. All that matters is this: count around 10% on top of the asking price of the property. That covers all the fees: state, notary, agency, everything. This is why 10% negotiation is accepted. You literally negotiate down the sum of the fees you have to pay to buy.

Important note, since most of you are foreigners reading this. One fork in the fees that decides your final number: prima casa or seconda casa. If this will be your main home and you register residency in that comune within 18 months, the registration tax is as low as 2%. If it’s a holiday flat and your life stays in Toronto, it’s 9%. Both are calculated on the cadastral value, a bureaucratic fiction usually well below the real price, so the bite is smaller than it sounds, but the gap between 2 and 9 is real money. Buying new from a developer swaps this for VAT, 4% versus 10%, charged on the actual price, which hurts more. And the 18 months is not a suggestion. Miss the deadline and the taxman recalculates you at 9% and adds a fine on top. I buy as a resident, and this is my first home (in Italy), where I live full-time. Buying a second home from abroad, budget a few points more and have the fixer run your exact number before you fall in love with anything. Of all the silly fees and markups, this is the one where I agree with Italy. Favor the ones who actually live here.

Tips from my personal experience

These are tips entirely based on my personal experience. I am a foreigner, and though I speak baby Italian, I am definitely not a pro. I also have neither the time nor the will to deal with fixing appointments, speaking with agents more than I should, or spending more time on the buying process than I need to.

First tip, which was the most useful one: hire an assistant. We had one. They are a real estate company, an accountant, a translator, and all of those together. Let’s just say: fixer. Look around in expat groups, peers, wherever, I’m sure you can find the fixer that has solutions specifically to your nationality and needs. Ours asked for a % cut. Every penny was worth it because they fixed all the appointments, dealt with the agencies, reviewed all the documents, and checked all the papers. You know Italians, they love to talk. Salespeople? Multiply that amount of talk by 10X. I don’t know about you, but one of the last things I want to do in my free time is talk to salespeople more than 10 minutes a day. And that 10 minutes is only because I am in the buying process, so it is 10 minutes more than the healthy amount.

Checking all the documents by the fixer should not be underestimated either. I didn’t even go into the details here… Some deals are rotten. The property is not even the seller’s. It’s just bare ownership, not full ownership. It’s in a building that is waiting to be demolished. It’s 2 rooms on the floor plan, but on the official records it’s one room only, so it’s either not legally renovated or something is off. All in all, there can be traps. Only a small percentage of the deals are like this and for the right nose, they smell miles away. The fixer can check these documents for you and highlight anything off.

Second tip: be familiar with the Italian real estate situation. This needs a bit of an explanation. This can be a separate article, but let me just give you the TLDR version:

Italy had 4 big building phases that are affecting the current real estate market. Well, 5, but the medieval palaces are not in our focus for today, sorry.

• Anything before or around the turn of the century (1890-1910). Either it is a stone house in Tuscany, or it is a converted palazzo in the city, these properties are almost all the same. Thick stone walls. Questionable electricity and plumbing work. Most of them are under protective heritage rules, which means, you can’t just convert or renovate them however you want. Even installing A/C (which alone is almost a sacrilege in Italy, but that’s another story) is equal to a successful D-Day. These properties are either renovation projects or, if they are already renovated, are almost equal to option 5, which are for palaces. They are on the heavy side of the pricing table. Even as renovation projects, by the way, you will spend either your time or your money to make them borderline habitable. I know some people who do well with this, and even I sometimes play with the thought that I will renovate my own stone house somewhere. But this is more like a commitment, rather than a buying decision.

• Post-war building phase. It’s actually two phases: one pre-war, some of the Mussolini-era building projects, and some of the post-war era 50s and 60s projects. These are huge, monolithic, sometimes brutalist buildings. Almost like little villages under one roof. If you have lived in Eastern Europe, the closest resemblance is the Soviet-era housing projects around factories and the outskirts of cities. Today, these are cheap properties. Either because the quality is as you would expect or because the area has neighbors that you don’t want to be friends with. Some of them are still lived in by old pensioners. These are mostly your nonna flats, in various sizes and levels of quality. I would consider these options only for two reasons: you are very young and just need a place to start, or you are buying for investment. Both of those options have caveats: you don’t want to start your life in an area that has safety problems, and you don’t want to invest in a declining area. So, it’s a case-by-case option, but in almost all cases, this is not an option for a foreigner to buy.

• The Italian Miracle Era. In the 80s, Italy had a bull run. This run is still visible on the housing market. Most of the apartment blocks in most of the cities were built during this era. I don’t have any tips here aside from the fact that if you are into buying an apartment in Italy, you will probably end up buying one built in this era. The best ones are built in the mid-to-late 90s, when the bull run peaked. But even the 80s ones can be nice if well-maintained. Condos in this era have solid electricity and plumbing, and double-glazed, proper windows. No one will crucify you for A/C because some of them even have it built-in. For real, most of these places are worth their money. My suggestion: buy something with 4 to 6 floors, a garage block, and some shops on the street level. It means only 10-20 apartments but endless cash flow for the condo for renovations. My apartment is exactly in a condo like that.

• The newly built. No tips here. These are projects that are built now or planned today. Two things to know. One, since Italy is an open-air museum, building new projects is not possible in the central areas, literally anywhere, in any town. So most of these newly built projects are on the outskirts or in the sleeping towns. Two, it’s a newly built project. So if it looks amazing on paper or in plans, it will be 10X worse in real life. Also, most of these projects are for young professional families with small kids. There is always a school, a playground, or something nearby. If you have kids, that’s a good thing. I don’t have kids, well, maybe don’t move next to a loud playground. My only tip: if you are buying a newly built one, buy something that was built 5-10 years ago. The perfect young professional family has already divorced, moved to a country house, or decided that they want to live inside a real city. You can buy their pad, and all the problems that weren’t visible from the floor plan alone when it was built are all there in front of you now, priced in.

So TLDR: the best bet is something built between 1980-2000, with an energy rating around or better than D, kinda renovated, middle-class family moves to their old parents' closer to the countryside. Or an older couple moves out of the city to the countryside. Perfect situations.

Third tip: do the basics of Italian groundwork. I know this is read by complete foreigners who have never set foot in Italy yet. Hire an agency or a service provider and do the very basics nevertheless: getting a tax number (codice fiscale) and opening an Italian bank account.

• The tax number is pretty straightforward to get, and almost any accountant or lawyer can get it for you. Or you can get it for yourself, it’s not even that complicated. It will be used everywhere on every document.

• The bank account is needed to deal with payments. Big sums of money are not transferred but handled within banks on their own, and you, as the customer, just get a paper from the bank that it is handled. You show that official paper to the notary, and everyone is happy that the payment is done. It’s basically a cheque system.

Yes, you can do this without a tax number or without a local bank. But it's much easier to do it this way.

For the bank, I personally recommend opening a bank account in Italy, keeping it open to handle basic Italian things, like this one, but never use it for anything else. We have one account, which is the maximum number of accounts I want to keep open in Italy, and we use it basically to pay taxes, fees, and some super-Italian services that accept only Italian banks with a physical location. Everything else: either keep your local bank or use Revolut (not affiliated, just a happy user). It gives you an Italian IBAN, which tends to be important for some services, and you can pay cheques, bills, fines, everything that is special to Italy, solely through their mobile app, which works like a banking app should work in the 2020s.

Last note on banking: you are a foreigner, so it is borderline impossible to get a mortgage or a loan for buying a property. Maybe it can be done technically for a business. I haven’t tried, and I would be surprised if they would give you one. But for a person? Don’t even bother. It’s hard even for Italians to get one. But even if it can be done and could be available for you, you still have to deal with an Italian bank. And, to be honest, I am 100X more looking forward to going to a dentist for a filling without any anesthesia than to an Italian bank.

Fourth tip: know what you want precisely. The worst thing that can happen in a buying situation is a hesitant buyer. If you are in a new country as a foreigner, this multiplies since you already have things that make you unbalanced.

I knew I wanted at least 2 bedrooms and the highest floor possible, ideally a penthouse. I also knew I needed a garage and I wanted to be 15 minutes from the city center. From my price range, I knew that good flooring, probably good windows, a balcony, and an elevator would be included, so I didn’t even look for those. I was ready to be flexible on some smaller things, but the big ones were fixed.

However, I didn’t know the city. Normally, I would suggest renting where you want to buy for a year. In my case, I went straight into it. I knew the city enough to get around, but it’s different to know a city as a visitor than as a local. So 80% of my time was spent on research. I drove around areas. I asked locals, friends, AI, and the internet about where to live. I spent days walking in areas which I ended up preferring. Because in an apartment, at the end of the day, yes, you buy the place itself, but more importantly, you buy the location. And no matter how fancy your apartment is, if it’s in an area where you don’t fancy walking calmly after 8 pm. And in a city with more than a million people in it, there are plenty of areas like that. So, do your research.

Once you know what you want and have done the research, the visiting, the looking, the searching, the actual buying process is simple and fast.

Last tip: respect and know the local needs for housing. You’ve probably heard about the Italian divide of North vs South. As a foreigner, the cultural divide is more like an interesting story, so for property buying reasons, it’s almost totally irrelevant. But geography and economic power aren’t irrelevant. Without going into details, you just have to know that in the South, insulation and heating are not the top priorities. Even if an apartment has heating units, double-check if they work at all. I am not joking… I’ve seen miracles in Palermo. Also check how the windows are closing. Again, in Sicily and in Calabria, I’ve stayed in places where you could close the window and still get your fingers out. And these were all fully renovated, spot-on Airbnbs. Long story short: double-check build quality in the South. Not because those areas are “poor” but because they only have a few weeks of cold weather. Insulating and heating their places is simply not important there. Meanwhile, in the North, where winters are real, especially in Friuli, Veneto, Lombardy, and Piedmont, almost all condos come with proper double-glazing windows and working heating units. For me, it was no question that I would live in the North. But maybe some of you want a place in Sicily.

With all that said, I did my process within 2 weeks. But for that, you need the basic rules, and let me repeat them again as a closure to this piece:

1. Know what you want, where you want it, and for how much you want it. Knowing these three pieces will save you thousands of euros and weeks of looking. Buying is 80% planning, 20% action.

2. The smaller your destination town, the more local you should go. For small towns, forget the internet, go to the actual agency’s office.

3. Don’t chase the perfect deal. It doesn’t exist. At least not for you. Find just a good deal.

4. Some rules are guides, some are Bible. Know which one is which, and you can make the process smoother.

5. The real estate agent is your friend when you make an offer on the price. Still negotiate as much as you can.

6. Have a fixer, and even with a fixer, get familiar with the Italian reality in terms of the real estate market and banking.

7. Know that location is more important than apartment quality. In a small city, it’s immediately visible if you want to live there. In a city, you need to ask around. Be as direct as you want.

8. Know the costs of buying. Rounded up, it’s usually 10% of the asking price that covers all the fees. That is also the % you need to negotiate down from the property.

9. Housing built between 1910 and 1980 is usually a waste of money. Century-old housing is a renovation project. Only for those who are willing to commit. Newly built ones are honeytraps or overpriced. Keep all your eyes open.

10. The best bet for apartments: anything built between 1980 and 2000. I haven’t checked, but my gut tells me the same is true for houses as well.

There you have it. My fully honest monster-essay on buying an apartment in Italy, mostly based on my own experience. Before you ask, or if it wasn’t clear enough until now, I’m here to tell you that I am not a real estate agent. I don’t offer real estate or any type of consulting services. I am not a fixer, investment advisor, or a real estate expert of any kind, and I can’t recommend anyone for you. I’m not even a journalist (it’s a profession, OK?!!) who writes about these topics daily.

I like to think I can make good deals, and I am street smart. I am also fully honest and very direct, almost to an extreme, uncomfortable extent, which kinda helps with buying situations like these (not the best approach in office situations). I also grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, lived in London for many years, and I picked Italy as my home because I love it, so I’m pretty sure you can’t name anything that would surprise me, and I don’t need to get lessons on bravery, irony, or flexible life choices either. But at the end of the day: I’m just a bloke on the internet who has some experience in buying an apartment in Italy.

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On a more personal note, I’ve spent my last week in Turin. I am moving here and was looking for an apartment. Now, the buying process, or more like the experience with real estate agencies in general, is a whole other story, and I will write it up as more like a manual for those who are also looking to buy their property here. But for now, I wanted to talk about Turin. Or not even about Turin, but about the ingredients of a perfect Italian city.

This is a bit of a clickbait topic, I admit, so let me clarify what I mean exactly. Certain factors make a city perfect for both locals and slow travelers. I will use Turin as an example, because Turin has it all, clearly. One quick clarification, again, before. I put locals and slow travelers in the same group, pretty confidently.

First, ego, sorry, they are my two main target groups: I write either for those who want to dive deep into Italy, slowly, avoiding fast, mass tourism targets, and for those who want to stay like a local by either moving here entirely, or having some sort of an established base here.

Second, I believe these two groups are the same because it was the same for me, personally. Certain people enjoy road trips, and I am not one of them. The perpetual travel makes me tired, and I am lazy and convenient, sorry. So picking a hub where I slowly spread out is much more appealing than being constantly on the road. To me, this is slow travel. It is also the same as living somewhere as a local. So, again, these two groups are the same, I think. For both of them, the perfect city looks somewhat similar.

Lastly, a tourist looks for an entirely different experience. They want things that can be captured instantly and shared with everyone who immediately gets the experience, without spending a minute there. A tourist wants instant, pre-packaged fun, compressed into short periods of time. 10 things to see in <insert city name> under 2 days.

So, let’s talk about the perfection. Five categories.

1

Absence of landmarks. I wrote about this when I wrote about Lucca, a city you can’t photograph. The perfect Italian city has nothing to offer for the camera. Therefore, almost no one comes only for pictures (a surface-level experience). If you shoot a picture in this perfect city, people might recognize that it's Italian, but they have a hard time pinpointing which one without some context.

Turin has almost no landmarks. Maybe the Mole Antonelliana. Maybe some of the Savoy palaces. But honestly, none of them are recognizable without context for most people.

2

Surrounded by alternatives. I’ve found this true when I was writing the piece about Lerici. And it is also the most important reason why Anywhere Italy exists. When you have a peak destination, the alternatives in the immediate vicinity are totally overlooked and overshadowed by the Big Thing next to them. Venice vs Chioggia. Verona vs Vicenza. Pisa vs Lucca. Lerici vs Cinque Terre. Rapallo vs Chiavari. The list is endless. Just take Lucca. You have almost the same experience as you have in Pisa, same vibe, same food, same streets, much fewer people. But no tower.

Turin is similar. It is surrounded by the Ligurian coast on the South and Milan from the East. Most people want the sea, so Liguria. The few who do trips to cities pick Milan, because of Milan and the lakes, Como, and others. Turin sits between them, as the 3rd and 4th alternative.

3

Off-branded. Yeah, sorry, I can’t help my inner marketer. If we don’t know a place, we simply prefer a callout about it. This <insert city> is the city of <insert value or perception>, and it is famous for <insert ‘stuff’>. Philadelphia is a cheaper and smaller alternative to the New York lifestyle, and it is famous for its sandwich. Florence is the city of the Renaissance, and it has amazing art and culture. Obviously, reality isn't that simple. But the perfect city isn’t that simple, so it doesn’t draw much attention. Either its branding is confusing, or the branding itself isn't very appealing.

Turin has both. It’s not very appealing, because for most people, it is still the industrial capital of Italy. Rome: capital of religion and government. Florence: capital of art and culture. Milano: capital of economy and fashion. Turin: capital of industrial factories.

Even if you look deeper, it gets confusing. Turin is the birthplace of Italian unification, the center for both fascist and antifascist politics, and the home of the most prominent intellectual movements in Italy. Basically: it’s the political and intellectual capital of Italy, or it was. Turin is also home to the Savoy monarchs, who led Italy's unification and were the country's first and last kings. It’s a royal city, built for and entirely around the royal family and its castles and palaces. Therefore, the city is a decadent, Art Nouveau, Baroque masterpiece, with insane avenues, huge piazzas and more palaces than you can find in France. And on some of these avenues, it also houses huge factories, and it is home to Italian industrial innovation and engineering.

In short, the city is hard to decode. So it's perfect to spend more time there. Time helps to unfold the secrets.

4

It’s connected. The fact that it has alternatives means not just that it is overlooked or overshadowed, but also that it is connected to other prominent hubs. From Chioggia, it’s much more convenient to reach Venice’s main islands than doing it with all the masses from the grand station. It’s also better to retreat to Chioggia’s old town after a day trip in Venice than staying in the center of Venice for the night. It’s so much better to live in Lucca and do the day trips to Florence, rather than living in Florence and doing the other way around. The best hubs connect to prime destinations with quiet, convenience, and easy access.

Turin’s best thing is that it takes a couple of hours by car or train to reach Milan, the famous lakes, the Ligurian coast, the Alps, and one of Italy’s best wine regions. Make it more than 3 hours and you are either already in Tuscany or on the French Riviera. Turin also has an international airport, so reach is truly limitless.

5

It’s interesting on its own. So, this is tricky and highly personal for everyone. First, I think almost every city with at least a million people can be interesting. If there is population and economic power to spend, services will follow so the city stays interesting. Second, the city has to have some history. By history, I mean it has to be hundreds of years old or older. With time, the city itself becomes interesting. With time, stories become layers upon layers of history.

Turin was the home of the Savoy monarchs for hundreds of years, which still marks a big chunk of the city's history today. The center of Turin really looks like a royal city with palaces, castles, and royal residences. Then, industrialism came. It’s the HQ of FIAT and home to a long list of other major brands across a wide range of industries. It left its mark on the city through economic growth and housing, and it expanded the city limits to their current size. It also gave the city a reliable, modern public transport system that is rare in Italy. Now, the city is transforming from an industrial hub into an innovation and creative capital. It is also a home for intellectualism and food, rebranding itself as Italy’s smart city. We’ll see about that, but it's definitely getting more interesting over time.

The perfect Italian city has almost nothing you can photograph or anything that you can’t get elsewhere. It probably either has a bad rep, is confusing, or is simply unknown. Yet, it is the perfect place to live or spend a sizeable chunk of time because it is standalone interesting, giving you everything that any Italian city can give you but without the overpriced services due to mass tourism. It is also the best hub option because it connects to famous destinations you can visit day by day, saving money, time, and energy by returning to your less-interesting hub each time.

If you come to Turin, you will have a hard time finding fridge magnets. Some shops sell them, and there are some souvenir places in the center. A few maybe. But compared to Florence, Rome, Venice, or Pisa, you literally have to be on alert to find anything touristy to buy.

The fridge magnet-per-shop ratio is pretty low here. If you ask me, that’s the best ever sign for a perfect city in Italy…

Peter

Torino, 25 July 2026

What’s new on the page

Guide on the Riviera di Levante

As promised, I made the posts about the Riviera di Levante region into a guide. That’s the part of Liguria that is East of Genova, basically anything between Genova and the Western border of Tuscany, which is Versilia, and it has its own guide since (for now), we are living there.

The Cinque Terre, the Tigullio, the Magra Delta, and Genova, all-in-one. The plan is to extend this guide with the Western part of Liguria, but we will do those trips once we move fully to Torino. San Remo is just closer from there.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.

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Read more

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.

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I write about Italy and the towns and experiences most people skip. Mine is one point of view. Others have theirs, and I love to read them all. So most weeks, I find a few pieces from other writers worth passing on.

This is Anywhere Italy’s Reading Table. Here are the latest articles from writers who made my days better.

on Gianni Versace

Everyone files Versace under Milan. This piece files him under Reggio Calabria, where he was born in 1946 and where Greek temples and Roman baths are not museum exhibits but the ground you walk on. His mother ran an atelier that brought Paris to southern society, sewing her name in gold thread on black into every dress.

What stayed with me is the habit he carried out of all that: buying run-down buildings and written-off people and spending absurd sums to prove the world wrong about them. A man trained from childhood to see value where everyone else had stopped looking. I run a publication on that exact premise, so I read this one with both eyes open.

Read the article on Italy Untold →

on Enrico Bertoz

I’m kinda hooked on Robert’s articles and his very personal stories. This one is about Enrico Bertoz, who left Friuli in 1998 because the Italy of the nineties felt hollow to him, and Kerouac did not. He washed dishes at Valentino in Los Angeles. The restaurant’s wine cellar rerouted his whole life, and he ended up a Sonoma winemaker with his own label, Arbe Garbe, championing Malvasia Bianca of all grapes.

Robert wrote this after visiting him in 2024. Enrico died of cancer not long after. I read plenty about foreigners moving to Italy to find themselves. The reverse migration, an Italian going west for the same reason, gets written far less, and almost never this well. It’s a tribute, and it earns the word.

Read this article on Robert’s Substack →

on how to know you are in Umbria

Michelle walks into a bar in Spello wearing a Roma jersey, a stranger starts talking, and the stranger turns out to be the father of a friend she and her husband made by returning to the same wine bar enough times. That’s the whole plot, and it’s enough, because the piece is really about how small towns work: you become known by showing up again, and then again, and at some point the town starts introducing you to itself.

I wrote a Sunday Espresso arguing that the second visit beats the first. She makes the same case in one conversation that crosses language and two generations.

Read the article on Michelle’s blog →

on the wild side of Rome

Not that wild… Wild boars on the sidewalks in daylight, acid-green parrots descended from escaped pets, and a writer who meets all of it from a bike instead of a car window.

I lived in Rome for a year, and the boars were already treating the northern edge of the city as their own. What I like is the vantage: this is the fauna of someone actually moving through the city, not a news item about an invasion. Rome’s fringes blur into open country faster than any capital I know, and the animals worked that out before the urban planners did.

Read the piece on Sara’s blog →

on Salento

Negroamaro is the grape that made Salento’s name long before anyone bottled it seriously, and this piece points to where that history is being reworked: Moros, a 1950s cooperative winery turned contemporary cultural space, hosting exhibitions and concerts alongside the harvest.

It’s a pointer more than a story, but the pointer is a good one. The Salento in it is the working interior, not the beach postcard, and a cooperative cellar reborn as a cultural venue is the kind of place worth planning a detour around.

Read the article on Flavia’s Substack →

on the air conditioning situation in Italy

Anyone who has lived in Italy has fought the war of the correnti, the drafts Italians are raised from infancy to fear. Frances traces how a country practically phobic about air conditioning came to install it in half its homes by 2024, while Rome’s electric buses retreat to the depot when their batteries run low and tourists in short-term rentals run the AC all day toward a blackout.

The ending is the best thing I read this week: a woman on a cooled bus, delighted by the air conditioning, pulls a scarf from her handbag anyway… I will write my own piece on this topic soon, because there is also a new angle- the foreigner’s angle on this.

Read the article on Frances’ Substack →

That was this week’s Reading Table. If you read something I missed, send it my way: ciao (at) anywhereitaly (dot) com.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.

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I have a confession to open with: I had to do research for this piece, actual sit-down research, about a flatbread. This is embarrassing because focaccia is not obscure. It is one of the most famous foods Italy exports, and, after years of living here, it is also the food that has most consistently refused to mean one thing. Tuscan bread, I learned in a season. It is white, hard-crusted, salted, or defiantly not. It belongs to certain dishes and certain jobs, and once you have seen it at work a dozen times, you have its number. Focaccia: I have now eaten it across three regions, and each region has given me a different version with the same name. So I was quite unsure what it actually is…

Like most people, I arrived in Italy with an idea of focaccia already installed. In Hungary, bakeries sell something called focaccia, which I have eaten, and I can now report that it has approximately the same relationship to the Italian article that a poster of the sea has to swimming.

The first real one I ate was in Lerici, in Liguria, which, as birthplaces of first impressions go, is close to the source. That version worked more or less like a pizza dough with ambitions: toppings on it, many variations, served mostly hot, drunk against a beer or something cold with bubbles. It was very oily, very salty, very heavy, and I want to be clear that this is not a complaint, I liked it enormously. I filed focaccia away as loaded, hot, and slightly dangerous, and considered the matter learned.

Then we moved to Versilia, and the matter unlearned itself. Almost every shop here sells focaccia, and the Tuscans make a different thing of it: less salty, less oily, drier, lighter, a bread that has been to confession. Its job is different, too. Here it gets cut in half and filled with Tuscan salumi, or cubed and scattered on those platters of cured meat that this region considers a food group, focaccia as the delivery mechanism for finocchiona, for prosciutto, for porchetta if you’re lucky. The Tuscans half admit it’s another bread altogether: much of what fills their counters answers just as readily to schiacciata, the crushed one, a name that quietly declines to compete with Liguria at all. Same idea, different animal, and a completely different afternoon.

Then we started driving to Genova, and Genova retired my remaining theories. In Genova, focaccia is not lunch, and it is not a vehicle for anything. It is a staple of the cafés, and it is breakfast. The fugassa there is eaten plain, no topping, no filling, no cheese, and the Genovesi dunk it in their morning coffee the way the rest of the world dunks biscuits: into a long coffee, into a cappuccino, into, if that is what’s on the counter, an espresso. The first time I ordered focaccia with an espresso and watched the espresso arrive in a wide cappuccino glass, I thought the bar had made a mistake. It had not. The glass was the accommodation: the coffee came in the wrong cup on purpose, so the bread would fit. Nobody announced this. It was simply anticipated, the way a hardware store anticipates that you will need screws with the hinges. A salty, oiled bread, dipped in coffee, at eight in the morning, and an entire port city in silent agreement that this is the correct order of things.

It helps to know who invented the agreement. And here comes the research part. The old forni of Genova cluster near the port because the fugassa was the breakfast of the camalli, the dockers, men who started before dawn and needed something cheap, fast, salted, and already in hand. The bakers worked the dough at night so it would be hot when the shift began, and they still do; the name itself goes back to the hearth, a focus, a bread as old as the fire it sat on. What I met at that café counter was not a quirk. It was the last living gesture of a working port’s morning, performed daily by pensioners and office workers in a city that has otherwise moved its cranes ten kilometers west.

So here is everything I can actually tell you about focaccia, the entire yield of my research, and my three regional educations. First, it is one of the cheapest, fastest breads in Italy. Flour, water, oil, salt, and not much patience. The peninsula’s answer to the tortilla, the naan, the pita. Which is exactly why it was the food of dockers and not of dukes. And second, because it is cheap, fast, and neutral, it takes the shape of whatever town is holding it. Liguria’s coast loads it and serves it hot with beer. Tuscany dries it out and puts a butcher’s counter inside it. Genova strips it back to nothing and dips it in coffee at dawn. There is no The Focaccia, and every region will tell you, with total confidence, that theirs is it.

I have stopped adjudicating. But I will say that of the three educations, the one that stays with me is the Genova counter: the wide glass, the wrong cup on purpose, the salt and the oil meeting the coffee, an old dockers’ breakfast outliving the dockers one dunk at a time.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.

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Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.

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Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.

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Both of those prices are telling the truth about something. Just not about pesto.

Here is the thing about Italian sauces that nobody explains to you, because to an Italian, it does not need explaining. They are machines for eating carbohydrates, and they are small m…

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Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. Come along for free, or pay if you want to keep us on the road.

Join free →

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