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The Street

Samanda Dorger

Own a Home in a Gorgeous Italian Town for Less Than the U.S. Median Home Price

Italy United States Puglia Sicily EmiliaRomagna Tuscany

Imagine Italy: the beautiful landscapes, the history, the people, the food, the wine…now imagine living there.

Imagine living in your beachside villa with a pool. Sound impossible? In parts of southern Italy, you could buy a 5,500-square-foot villa with a pool or a charming farmhouse in Tuscany for $450,000, the median home price in the U.S. That’s according to an analysis of home prices by My Dolce Casa, a research blog about moving, living and retiring abroad.

Homes in the U.S. have become increasingly unaffordable, according to ATTOM real estate data, which found that median-priced single-family homes and condos remained less affordable in the third quarter of 2022 in 99% of counties across the nation. One year before, it was 69% of counties.

At the same time, the U.S. dollar is strong in Europe and more Americans are looking to live abroad.

To explore whether Italy is a good location for Americans to buy a home, researchers at My Dolce Casa looked at real estate listings there to see what you could buy in Italy’s top 50 largest cities for the same amount that you would spend on a median home in the U.S., then ranked the cities that offer the most living space for your money.

They found that for the median $450,000, you get an average of 2,000 square feet of living space in the U.S.

In Tuscany, the most desirable region in Italy, the median price will buy you a charming farmhouse about the same size. In the least expensive city, Reggio Calabria in southern Italy, you could get that big villa with a pool. The average price of a home in Reggio Calabria was $82 per square foot, meaning you could get a 2,000 square foot home for around $164,000. In Milan, Italy’s most expensive city, 2,000 square feet can cost nearly $900,000.

In about 80% of the Italian cities they looked at, $450,000 will buy you much more than 2,000 square feet, often more than double, the analysis found.

To compile this list of cities in Italy where you can get the most home for the $450,000 -- the median home price in the U.S., -- My Dolce Casa analyzed July 2022 average home price data from Italian real estate portal idealista.it by city and by region. The prices per square meter in euros were converted to prices per square foot in U.S. dollars, assuming dollar-to-euro parity. For U.S. home prices, they used Realtor.com and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and for home prices in Italy, they used data from idealista.it.

Check out these gorgeous Italian towns where you could live in the home of your dreams.