Living in Italy

Italy steps down from the very top on pay while the cost of living stays stubbornly high, so the money is decent without going as far as it does in the wealthier north. What's left still covers a settled life, yet the harder wall is hiring, where the market is tough to enter cold and Italian is all but assumed. Tourism and care work are the fields most willing to take a newcomer, often the way in rather than the destination. It reads as a place chosen more for the life it offers than the ease of building a career inside it.

Italy is a major European destination, home to 6.6M foreign-born residents — the 12th-largest immigrant population in the world — a figure that grew 20% over the past decade. The arrivals lean heavily Eastern European and Mediterranean: Romania leads with 880.4K, followed by Albania and Morocco.