The step-by-step plan for Italy

In this step you learn how you register in Italy, and in which order. Good news to start with: for EU citizens there's no permesso di soggiorno (residence permit) any more. Since 2007 the municipality is the gate.

If you stay longer than three months, you're obliged to do the iscrizione anagrafica. That's your registration with the anagrafe, the population register of your place of residence.

Around it lies a chain with a strict order:

• First the codice fiscale, the Italian tax number. Everything asks for it.
• Then a home with a registered rental contract.
• Then the declaration of your residenza, your official address with the municipality.
• Only after that the health card.

Each step is the ticket to the next. The plan keeps that order for you.

In this step you choose which part of Italy you'll live in. That choice determines your rent, your healthcare and your insurance requirements. So make it before the rest of the journey.

Nowhere on this site does the gap within one country run this deep:

• The North has the jobs and the infrastructure. But in Milan you pay rents of up to € 23 per square metre.
• The South has space, sun and rents of € 8 to 11. Against that stand fewer facilities, longer waiting times in healthcare and weaker public transport.

A quarter of the Italian housing stock stands empty, mostly in the South. If you're looking for a job, the North is the practical choice. If you work remotely or come retired, you can live spaciously in the South for half.

In this step you see what the move is going to cost you. The good news: the paperwork costs almost nothing here. The codice fiscale is free, the registration with the municipality too, and the ID card costs € 22.

Where the money does go:

• The home: a deposit of at most a legal three months, and service charges on top of the rent.
• The drive of well over a thousand kilometres.
• Re-registering the car on Italian plates, if it comes along.

Work it out with your own choices in the calculator.

With this step you decide together whether it's going to be Italy. You end up with a few conditions on paper that you both stand behind.

Going alone? Then have this conversation with the people you leave behind. The questions below work for them too.

Take three evenings. One conversation is too short for a decision like this. Agree on three evenings, with a week in between:

• Evening 1, why. What do we hope to find in Italy? What are we leaving behind here? Would that really be different there?
• Evening 2, what we give up. Who and what will we miss? What are we dreading most? What do we do if it disappoints?
• Evening 3, the conditions. What has to be arranged for each of us to say yes? When do we check together whether it's going well, for example after six and after twelve months? And what would be a reason for us to go back?

Write the conditions down. On the kitchen-table card it all fits on one A4 sheet.

Italy feels like a holiday, but two things need to be on the table:

• The wage level. Italian salaries are noticeably below Dutch ones, while the big cities ask Dutch rents. Work the household budget out honestly.
• The pace. The bureaucracy here is no myth. Whoever follows the order of this plan gets through it, but patience is a tool.

Divide the work. Agree who takes on which part of this plan: the papers, the house and the cancellations, the school, the move. That way not one of you carries everything. Invite your partner into your plan; then you can both see what's done.

Is one of you going without an income of your own? Whoever lives in Italy and doesn't work in the Netherlands usually no longer builds up AOW. For every year you're not insured, you later get 2 percent less AOW. From the moment you're no longer insured, you have one year to take out voluntary insurance with the SVB. Also discuss who carries the income in the first months, whether the partner without an income keeps an account and money of their own, and how you decide together on big expenses.

Married, registered or living together? It can make a difference for your partner's residence permit, for co-insurance in healthcare and for inheritance. If you're both Dutch, each of you lives in Italy in your own right. If your partner has a nationality from outside the EU, they live there as your family member. If they stay longer than three months, they get a residence card of their own. A spouse always counts as a family member, a registered partner if Italy treats that partnership as equivalent to marriage. If you live together unmarried, you prove a durable relationship and Italy assesses it itself. Check at your healthcare further on in your plan what else applies to you.

Are children coming? How you tell them depends on their age:

• Up to about four: tell them shortly before the move and keep fixed habits, like the bedtime ritual and the cuddly toy in the hand luggage.
• Primary school: tell them well in advance and let them look along: photos of the school, the neighbourhood and the house. Let them choose something, like their room.
• Teenagers: involve them in the decision itself. For them, saying goodbye to friends weighs heaviest. Agree how they keep in touch and when they see their friends again.

In Italy education is compulsory from six to sixteen. You enrol your child online, through the Unica portal. For the 2026-2027 school year that window ran from 13 January to 21 February.

Who learns the language, and when? Outside the international companies in Milan and Rome, Italian is the working language. Every counter works in Italian too. Often the partner without work needs the language most, and precisely that partner has no colleagues to practise with. Plan it together, preferably before you leave.

Choose below the date on which you want to be standing in Italy. The plan works out whether that's feasible with what still has to happen. If it gets tight, it says so honestly. A target date is yours: you can always move it, and moving it is a perfectly fine outcome.