Mistakes & Myths

When Moving to Italy Is the Wrong Decision

This isn't for everyone. Some people move, realise they've made a mistake, and spend years trying to unwind it. Recognising that Italy might not be right for you isn't failure,it's good judgment. This guide covers the honest signs that you should reconsider, delay, or at least test longer before committing.

It's Not for Everyone

Most of what you read about moving to Italy is written by people who want you to do it. Property agents, relocation consultants, lifestyle bloggers, regional tourism boards. They all have reasons to encourage you. We do too, in a sense. We run retreats that help people make this decision. But we would rather you made the right decision than any decision, and for some people the right decision is not to move.

Moving abroad can be wonderful. It can open up a life you did not know was possible. It can also be isolating, expensive, stressful, and destructive to relationships, finances, and mental health. Whether it works depends on why you are doing it, what you expect to find, and whether your personality and circumstances are suited to what rural Italian life actually involves, which is quite different from what it looks like in photographs.

This page is not designed to discourage anyone who is genuinely suited to the challenge. It is designed to help you recognise if you are not, before you learn it the expensive way. If you read it and feel defensive, sit with that for a moment. Then decide whether the defensiveness comes from the concerns not applying to you, or from the concerns hitting closer to home than you would like.

Better to read this, feel uncomfortable, and realise the concerns do not apply to you, than to skip the difficult questions and discover they did after you have signed a purchase contract.

Wrong Reasons to Move

Some motivations predict failure with uncomfortable reliability. Not always, but often enough that they deserve honest examination. If your primary reason for considering a move to Abruzzo is any of the following, it is worth pausing before you proceed.

Running Away

From a situation that has become unbearable at home. A difficult relationship, a career that has stalled, family conflict, depression, a general sense that everything where you are has gone wrong. The logic feels compelling: if everything here is bad, somewhere else must be better. But geographic change does not solve internal problems. It relocates them. You will bring yourself to Italy, along with the anxiety, the dissatisfaction, the patterns, and the unresolved issues you are trying to leave behind. The difference is that you will now be dealing with them in a foreign language, without your support network, in a culture you do not yet understand. If you are running from something, address what you are running from first. Then, from a position of stability, consider whether Italy is genuinely where you want to run to.

Saving a Relationship

The idea is seductive: a fresh start, a new setting, a shared project that will bring you closer together. In practice, the opposite happens. International relocation is one of the most stressful experiences a couple can share. The bureaucracy, the financial pressure, the language barrier, the loss of familiar routines and separate social lives, the constant proximity without the escape valves that home provided. Weak relationships crack under this pressure. Even strong ones are tested. If your relationship needs fixing, fix it where you are, with access to your own language, your own support systems, and the option to walk away without selling a house in another country. If you cannot resolve problems in familiar territory, you will not resolve them in unfamiliar territory.

Proving Something

To parents who said you would never do it. To an ex who underestimated you. To yourself, to prove you are braver or more adventurous than your life so far suggests. Proving you can do something difficult is a poor foundation for actually sustaining it. The proof is achieved the moment you sign the contract and post about it. Then what? If the motivation was the gesture rather than the life, the motivation evaporates once the gesture has been made, and you are left standing in a village in Abruzzo with a house that needs work and no compelling reason to stay.

The Aesthetic Fantasy

Living the Italian dream as it appears on social media. Stone walls, olive groves, long lunches, golden light. Becoming the person who lives in Italy. If your motivation is how it looks rather than how it is, reality will disappoint you quickly. Real life in rural Abruzzo includes grey days in winter when the heating is inadequate and the nearest open shop is a 25-minute drive. It includes trying to explain a plumbing problem to a tradesperson who speaks only dialect. It includes bureaucratic appointments that consume entire mornings and achieve nothing. There is no audience for these moments, and they make up far more of the experience than the photogenic ones.

Cheap Property as the Entire Rationale

You cannot afford to buy where you currently live, but you have seen properties in Abruzzo for EUR30,000. The arithmetic is exciting. But if the only reason to move is that property is cheap, you have not thought it through. Cheap property exists because location has problems: depopulation, remoteness, limited services, difficult access. If you would not want to live in that village at any price, a low price does not change the fundamental issue. And as we explain elsewhere on this site, the purchase price is typically the smallest part of the total cost once renovation, transaction fees, and ongoing maintenance are factored in.

See: The Mistakes Foreigners Make →

Personality Mismatches

This is not about whether you are a "good" or "bad" person. It is about whether specific personality traits that serve you well at home become liabilities in the context of rural Italian expatriate life. Some of the qualities that make people successful in their careers and home environments are precisely the ones that make life in Abruzzo difficult.

High Need for Control

If you need things to work predictably, to happen when they are supposed to happen, and to follow logical processes, rural Italy will frustrate you daily. Tradespeople do not call back when they said they would. Bureaucratic offices close without warning. The rules as explained by one official contradict the rules as explained by another. The renovation that was going to take four months takes fourteen. None of this is dysfunction by Italian standards; it is simply how things work. If unpredictability causes you genuine distress rather than mild irritation, every day will feel like a battle you cannot win.

Dependent on Social Connection

Building meaningful social connections in a new country takes years, not months. In rural Abruzzo, where your neighbours may be elderly Italian speakers with no English, and the nearest expat community may be 40 minutes away, the early months and even years can be profoundly isolating. If you need frequent social interaction and feel low without it, this isolation can become psychologically damaging. Video calls with friends back home help but do not replace the casual, unplanned human contact that most people rely on without realising it: bumping into someone at the shop, chatting to a colleague, dropping in on a friend. Those opportunities are scarce until you have built relationships, and building relationships requires language skills that take time to develop.

Resistant to Language Learning

Outside the tourist areas of the coast and the cities, English is not widely spoken in Abruzzo. Your neighbours, your tradespeople, your doctor, the staff at the comune, the person serving you coffee will mostly speak Italian, and in inland areas, often dialect that even other Italians struggle with. If you genuinely dislike studying languages, find grammar tedious, and avoid practising because it feels embarrassing, you will remain isolated. Language-resistant expatriates either leave within a few years or settle into a constrained life where they depend on others for every interaction that requires more than pointing.

Low Tolerance for Ambiguity

Expatriate life is full of situations where you do not know the answer, cannot find it easily, and have to make decisions with incomplete information. Is this the right form? Did I understand what that official just said? Is this tradesperson quoting a fair price? Am I doing this process correctly? If ambiguity causes you anxiety rather than curiosity, the constant uncertainty of building a life in another country's systems is exhausting rather than energising.

Rigid About How Things Should Work

"This would never happen at home." "Why don't they just do it properly?" "In my country, we..." If these phrases come naturally to you, every day in Italy will feel like a confrontation with incompetence. Italy is not broken. It works differently. The bureaucracy has its own logic, even when that logic is invisible to outsiders. Social customs have reasons, even when those reasons seem arbitrary. People who cannot accept that different is not the same as wrong, that Italian ways are valid even when they are inefficient or frustrating, end up resenting the culture they chose to join. That resentment is corrosive, and the locals can see it clearly even when you think you are hiding it.

Life Stage Issues

Even if your motivations are sound and your personality is well-suited, the timing may not be right. Your life stage creates constraints that are easy to underestimate in the excitement of planning a new life. These are not reasons never to move. They are reasons to consider whether now is the right moment.

Potential Red Flags

Ageing parents. If your parents are entering a phase where they need increasing care, or where a health crisis could happen at any time, being a flight away rather than a drive away changes the equation dramatically. Emergency flights from regional Italian airports are expensive, infrequent, and logistically complicated. The guilt of being far away when something happens is real, and it compounds over time. People who move abroad with elderly parents at home often find themselves flying back and forth more than they expected, spending money they budgeted for their Italian life on trips back to their old one.

Children in school. Uprooting children, especially teenagers, is disruptive in ways that are easy to minimise when you are focused on your own excitement. Italian schools operate on a different curriculum, in a different language, with different social norms. Integration is hard for children too, and the consequences of a difficult transition are not just temporary. Consider honestly whether the timing serves your children or just you, and whether you are willing to reverse the decision if they are genuinely struggling.

Career dependency. If your income depends on a specific location, credentials that do not transfer internationally, or a professional network you would lose by leaving, the financial sacrifice may be larger than you anticipate. Remote work helps, but it requires reliable internet (not a given in rural Abruzzo), manageable time zone differences with your employer or clients, and the discipline to work productively from a home that may be undergoing renovation around you.

Health needs. If you or your partner has ongoing medical conditions that require specialist care, continuity of treatment, or regular access to specific medications, research Italian healthcare access carefully before committing. The SSN (national health system) provides good general coverage, but specialist services in rural areas often involve long waiting lists and significant travel to larger cities. Transferring medical records, finding equivalent medications under Italian brand names, and navigating the system in Italian adds friction at a time when you least want it.

Financial instability. If your income is uncertain, your savings are thin, or you are hoping that Italy will somehow cost less than home, reconsider. The cost of living in Abruzzo is lower than in many parts of the UK or US, but it is not negligible, and the startup costs of establishing a life (property purchase, renovation, furnishing, vehicle, bureaucratic fees, health insurance during the transition period) are front-loaded and often larger than expected. Financial stress is worse in a foreign country where you do not fully understand the banking system, the tax obligations, or the cost of fixing things that go wrong.

Honest Questions to Ask

Answer these honestly. Not what you want to be true. Not what sounds good when you say it to friends. What is actually, uncomfortably true.

→If I could not leave Italy for three years, would I be okay with that?

→If my partner hated it after a year, what would I do?

→If I could not make a single local friend in the first two years, how would I cope?

→If my Italian never got past ordering coffee and asking for directions, what would that mean for my daily life?

→What am I hoping Italy will fix in my life that I cannot fix where I am now?

→If I had to sell the property and return home within two years, could I financially survive that?

→Am I moving toward something, or away from something?

→Have I seriously considered the worst realistic outcome, not just the best?

If any of these questions made you uncomfortable, that is the point. The discomfort is not a reason not to move. It is a reason to think more carefully before you do. The people who succeed at international relocation are not the ones who never had doubts. They are the ones who examined their doubts honestly and addressed them rather than burying them under enthusiasm.

Knowing When to Stop

If you are already in the process, there is no shame in pausing, slowing down, or reversing course. At every stage, you have options, and the cost of stopping is almost always lower than the cost of continuing down a path that is not right.

Before Purchase

If your doubts are serious and persistent, do not buy. Enthusiasm is not the same as readiness, and the pressure of having told everyone about your plans is not a reason to follow through with a decision you are no longer sure about. Renting in Abruzzo for six months to a year costs more in the short term but costs far less than buying, discovering it is wrong, and selling at a loss. There is nothing wrong with extensive visits, thorough research, and a conclusion that this is not for you, or not for you right now.

After Purchase, Before Moving

You own a property but have not relocated your life. This is a more common situation than most people admit. Consider whether keeping the property as a holiday home makes more sense than full relocation. It can be used for personal visits, rented for income, or gradually improved over years while you decide. Owning property in Italy does not oblige you to live there. The sunk cost of the purchase is not a reason to compound it with the much larger costs of a relocation that does not feel right.

After Moving

Leaving is not failure. Many people attempt international moves and return. Some come back within months. Others give it a year or two. What you learned has value. What you experienced has value. The ability to say "I tried this and it was not right for me" is a sign of self-awareness, not weakness. Refusing to admit a mistake and enduring years of unhappiness because admitting it feels like defeat is the real failure. Your life is not a performance for other people's expectations.

The goal is not to move to Italy. The goal is to live a good life. If Italy is the path to that, wonderful. If it is not, finding that out is valuable information, not a defeat.

The Bottom Line

Moving to Italy can be genuinely life-changing. It can also be genuinely damaging. The difference depends on honest self-assessment: why you are going, whether your personality is suited to the challenges, and whether your life stage and circumstances support the decision. If reading this page has strengthened your resolve because the concerns do not apply to you, that is a good sign. If it has raised questions you had been avoiding, those questions deserve your attention before you proceed. We would rather help you make a clear-eyed decision not to move than watch you make an enthusiastic decision you regret.