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Press · The Need Index · ISTAT 2019–2025

Seven in ten Italian towns are shrinking. 2,344 of them meet the test for a 7% tax on foreign pensions.

We ranked all 7,896 Italian comuni by how fast they are losing people and how old they are getting, using ISTAT's own resident figures. The picture is not a handful of famous villages. It is most of the country — and it is concentrated in exactly the regions where Italy will tax a foreign pension at 7%.

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Free for news, research and teaching. Credit: Borgonova Need Index, from ISTAT data, with a link to borgonova.com.

72.1%
of Italy's comuni had fewer residents in 2025 than in 2019
873,315
fewer people living in them, net, over six years
636
comuni lost a tenth or more of their population
2,344
southern comuni meet the population test for a 7% tax on foreign pensions
“Everyone has read about the one-euro houses in a handful of villages. What the numbers show is that this is not a handful — it is most of the country, and the towns emptying fastest are largely the ones the newspapers have never named. The overlap with the 7% regime is the part that surprised us: Italy is effectively paying pensioners to move to the places that need them most, and very few people outside Italy know it exists.”
Sam Fowler, founder, Borgonova

Region by region

The south is emptying. The north is holding.

Change in resident population, 2019–2025, across each region's comuni. The bar is the change; the figure on the right is the share of that region's comuni that shrank.

Molise-5.3%95%
Basilicata-5.1%98%
Calabria-4%88%
Sardegna-3.7%92%
Campania-2.8%85%
Sicilia-2.6%82%
Puglia-2.5%89%
Umbria-2.5%91%
Valle d'Aosta-2.5%80%
Abruzzo-2.4%87%
Marche-2.4%86%
Piemonte-1.7%78%
Liguria-1.5%75%
Friuli-Venezia Giulia-1.4%84%
Toscana-1.2%74%
Lazio-1.1%72%
Veneto-0.6%64%
Emilia-Romagna0%48%
Lombardia+0.3%50%
Trentino-Alto Adige+1.2%33%

The 7% towns

2,344 comuni, in eight regions.

Since 2019 Italy has offered a flat 7% tax, for nine years, on the foreign income of pensioners who move their residence to a comune of 20,000 people or fewer in Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Puglia, Sardinia or Sicily. These are the comuni that meet that population and regional test — and they overlap almost entirely with the ones losing people fastest.

  • Campania483
  • Calabria394
  • Sardegna363
  • Sicilia337
  • Abruzzo292
  • Puglia213
  • Molise133
  • Basilicata129

Meeting the population and regional test is not the whole of eligibility: the pension must be foreign-sourced and the person must not have been tax-resident in Italy for the previous five years.

Steepest decline, 2019–2025

  1. 1Rocca de' Giorgi · Pavia, Lombardia-43.7% · 45 left
  2. 2Roccaforte del Greco · Reggio Calabria, Calabria-28.9% · 300 left
  3. 3Marcetelli · Rieti, Lazio-26.4% · 53 left
  4. 4Rosello · Chieti, Abruzzo-25.3% · 168 left
  5. 5Staiti · Reggio Calabria, Calabria-24.7% · 165 left
  6. 6San Biase · Campobasso, Molise-24.4% · 124 left
  7. 7Macra · Cuneo, Piemonte-23.6% · 42 left
  8. 8Castellino del Biferno · Campobasso, Molise-23.4% · 423 left
  9. 9Castroregio · Cosenza, Calabria-22.2% · 207 left
  10. 10Acciano · L'Aquila, Abruzzo-21.8% · 247 left

Oldest comuni by median age

  1. 1Villa Santa Lucia degli Abruzzi · Abruzzo69 · 83 people
  2. 2Gorreto · Liguria67 · 89 people
  3. 3Cerignale · Emilia-Romagna66 · 115 people
  4. 4Fascia · Liguria66 · 69 people
  5. 5Ortona dei Marsi · Abruzzo66 · 379 people
  6. 6San Benedetto in Perillis · Abruzzo66 · 100 people
  7. 7San Giovanni Lipioni · Abruzzo66 · 136 people
  8. 8Colledimacine · Abruzzo65 · 150 people
  9. 9Drenchia · Friuli-Venezia Giulia65 · 89 people
  10. 10Poggiodomo · Umbria65 · 84 people

2,023 comuni now have fewer than 1,000 residents, and 1,096 have a median age of 55 or more.

Method

Resident population on 1 January 2025 against 2019, from ISTAT, for every comune with comparable figures (7,859 of 7,896; the rest merged or split in the period). The Need Index combines the rate of decline with the median age into a 0–100 score. It measures how much a town needs people — not how pleasant it is to live in.

What we are

Borgonova is an English-language guide to Italy's emptying towns, for people thinking of buying or moving there: every comune has a page with its figures, its scheme status where it has one, and its neighbours. We are independent and take no commission on property.

Using it commercially?

The CSV here is for editorial use. If it is going into a product, a report you sell, or client work, that is the licensed datasetthe licensed dataset — it adds coordinates for every comune, scheme status, a JSON version, a documented schema and refreshes.

For a story

We can pull a region, a province or any list you need, the same day. Every town linked above has its own page with the full figures. hello@borgonova.com