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Alessandro Palombo

@thealepalombo

Jul 26

Everyone thinks Europe's cheapest livable coastline is in Greece, Portugal or the Balkans. It isn't.

It's in Southern Italy. Today it might be the most contrarian bet in Europe: seven real cities, prices starting at €600/sqm, the warmest sea in the country, and a 7% flat tax on foreign income for retirees in the towns around them.

Let me be clear: this is an extreme call, on a specific part of Italy. Not for many, but very much for a few. Under the right conditions, a real alternative to the coasts everyone else is bidding up.

I'm Italian, I know exactly why it's cheap, and this thread gives you both sides: the pros, the cons, and who should even consider it.

Thread 🧵

One framing point before the list.

Most people's mental map of "cheap Europe by the sea" is ten years old. Portugal got expensive. Spain's coast got expensive, if you consider the places you actually want to live in. Greece is getting there fast, and Eastern European capitals are overtaking them all. The map moved, and Southern Italy is the part that never got re-checked.

Then in April, Italy made it better: the 7% flat-tax cap for pensioners moved from towns of 20,000 people to 30,000. About 80 real towns became eligible overnight, some of them famous.

This is an early idea, not a universally applicable recommendation. It assumes foreign income, and it comes with serious cons, healthcare first. Two of my seven picks are objectively controversial, and I propose them exactly for that reason, as an element for reflection.

And you don't even need to move. For many people, the more balanced version of this play is considering the South of Italy for a second home.

As always, the longer version goes out in my weekly newsletter, where you are more than welcome to join: palombo.substack.com

The tax primer, in 60 seconds:

Move to a southern town of up to 30,000 people with a foreign pension, and Italy taxes ALL your foreign income at a flat 7% for nine years. Not just the pension: dividends, interest, capital gains.

And the names that came in with April's change tell you everything: Noto, Erice and Scicli were all off the map three months ago.

Ultimately, what this unlocks: you live in a beautiful small town 10-20 minutes from a real city, you keep the city's hospital, airport and life, and you keep most of your income.

For Americans, one important caveat: cross-check with a commercialista first. Between the treaty and US citizenship-based taxation, the real all-in usually lands in the teens, not at 7. Still a bargain, but run your number before you fall in love.

Remote workers: the Digital Nomad Visa works in all seven cities, no size limits. Of course, it's a totally different strategy, directionally, than Thailand and its €600/month studio in a skyscraper. But for many of you, this could be an option. It's a bet and, yes, it's early.

Read 27 tweets

Alessandro Palombo

@thealepalombo

Jul 24

I'm Italian, and every month someone tells me the same dream: quit everything, move to Italy, buy a farm. Olives, a donkey, some chickens.

Almost nobody knows how it actually works: below a certain size, Italy makes it absurdly simple. One step up, you're running a real business. And your visa decides which one you're allowed to be.

I didn't trust the paper rules, so I called two friends who live this: one keeps animals, one makes wine.

This is the honest explainer

🧵

First, let's start with the part that surprises everyone, especially American friends: you can buy it.

Italy has no farmland-specific restrictions on foreigners. Non-EU buyers just need "reciprocity": your country must let Italians buy the same. Americans easily pass. Meanwhile many US states restrict foreign ownership of theirs.

An American can own a Sicilian olive grove more easily than a Canadian can own an Iowa cornfield. A true story, from friends of mine.

And the land is cheap. Italian farmland averages about €22,400 per hectare, but it drastically changes north vs south: the North-East runs ~€47K a hectare, the islands average around €9K.

But before you smile: two traps.

Two traps in the purchase.

First, as a private buyer you pay 15% registration tax on farmland. Registered farmers pay a fixed €200 plus 1%. Same field, very different bill.

Second, prelazione agraria: neighboring registered farmers have a legal right to claim the sale at your price. Your dream farm can vanish at the notary's door, and with a botched notification they can even claw it back up to a year after the deed.

Both traps have the same escape: know them before you sign, not after.

Read 15 tweets

Alessandro Palombo

@thealepalombo

Jul 22

I'm Italian. My hidden cities of Italy thread is still one of my most shared ever.

Since then the same message keeps arriving: do more.

So here is Part 2, all North. 7 hidden cities where Italy's quality of life peaks and the prices don't.

This is how we celebrate the italianmaxing week.

Three of Italy's top 10 ranked cities for quality of life are on this list. Most foreigners have never heard of them.

No crowds. No Milan prices. Insane quality of life.

Thread 🧵

First, what I evaluated for each city:

- Property price per sqm (and what €200-300K actually gets you) - yes I run a macro-search on this. Let's make the agents work.
- Nearest airport and travel time
- Population and year-round livability
- Who it's actually for: retirees, remote workers, families, or founders
- The honest downsides nobody mentions, including the one word the North never says out loud: air
- Taste and preferences, based on my own network

These aren't villages betting on charm. They're real cities where Northern Italians live their best lives, outside the radar.

If your way into Italy is the Investor Visa, I'm running a free live webinar on exactly that: the four routes, the real costs, the timeline.

Save your seat: italy.alepalombo.com

The North's open secret:

Everyone assumes Northern Italy means Milan money. Milan runs €5,000+ per square meter and climbing.

Meanwhile, an hour or two away, cities that beat Milan on nearly every quality-of-life metric trade at €1,500-2,600.

Faster trains than most of Europe. Hospitals that work. Airports 15 minutes from the centro.

7 cities I'd personally consider based on my own tastes, with the data to back it up.

Plus, I'll soon be in Tuscany and Umbria, but I plan to spend time around Milan too. I have many friends near Milan. It is not a coincidence.

Read 27 tweets

Alessandro Palombo

@thealepalombo

Jul 14

The largest American community abroad isn't in Paris, Lisbon or Rome.

It's Mexico. 1.6 million Americans, more than anywhere else on Earth. The move nobody writes guides about is the one most people actually make.

Last month I mapped where Americans thrive in Europe. It became my most-read piece ever on Substack, and the comments kept asking the same question: what about everywhere else?

So here's the other half of the map. And it plays by opposite rules. In Europe you hunt for treaties and fight for 7% regimes. Out here, entire countries tax your foreign income at exactly zero. The price is paid in a different currency: distance, time zones, and a few risks the brochures skip.

10 places across Latin America and Asia where Americans actually thrive, each tagged with who it's for. Plus the traps everyone walks into.

🧵

Before we start: I've met or chatted with Americans all around the world, and this list is built also on my personal contacts and hearsay. So yes, partly subjective. But a few reminders hold for all of you.

- The IRS follows you everywhere. Still, the first $132,900 you earn in 2026 is excluded, per person: $265,800 for a couple. Put that in a country that taxes foreign income at zero, most of this list, and you legally pay almost nothing.

- Time zones, for example: of everything on this map, this is what my acquaintances mention most often as the key factor. LatAm keeps your 9am standup. Asia turns your US job into a night shift, permanently.

- Distance. Mexico City to Houston, 2 hours. Bangkok to anywhere in America, 20. What actually sends people home from Asia is rarely taxes: it's parents getting older on the other side of the world.

- LatAm sells permanence, Asia rents you the stay. Panama gives retirees permanent residency on day one, Argentina sells a passport in two years. In Asia you renew forever and almost never get citizenship.

Lastly, my personal interpretative framework: LatAm vs Asia is two models clashing, with their own pros and cons. In my experience, whoever loves one would rarely opt into the other, and vice versa. You tell me which side you belong to.

This is the short version, 7 of the 10 places. The other three, the gray pins on the map (Uruguay, Malaysia, Da Nang), live in the full one on my newsletter:

→ palombo.substack.com

Let's go.

1/ Mérida and Lake Chapala, Mexico 🇲🇽

$800–1,400/mo for a good 1BR in Mérida; Chapala less. Temporary residency wants about $4,400/mo of income or ~$74K in savings (the 2026 rules tightened, and consulates vary). Flights from MID or GDL, 2 hours to the US.

Best for: first-timers who want abroad without the leap.

Mexico is the largest American community on Earth for reasons that hold: your time zone, your continent, your Amazon deliveries. Mérida is the answer to the safety question, consistently ranked among the safest cities in the Americas, colonial center, Gulf beaches an hour out, real hospitals. Lake Chapala and Ajijic are the veteran retiree play: eternal-spring climate at 1,500m and a US community so established it predates the internet.

I know plenty of Americans who moved here, and just as many Mexicans who went the other way, a few of them now neighbors of mine in Portugal. The traffic runs both directions.

The honest math: Mexico taxes residents on worldwide income on paper, but the treaty with the US, foreign tax credits, and how pensions are treated in practice keep most retirees whole. Get one cross-border accountant and sleep fine.

The catches: the residency bar roughly doubled in recent years, so qualify before you fall in love. Pick your city the way you'd pick a neighborhood at night, the country is a patchwork and the difference between Mérida and the wrong suburb of a border city is the difference between Vermont and somewhere you don't go. And the self-employed note: the US-Mexico social security agreement was signed decades ago and never switched on, so freelancers keep paying US self-employment tax.

Read 14 tweets

Alessandro Palombo

@thealepalombo

Jul 11

30 million people visited Portugal last year. Most of them left thinking the same thing: could I live here?

My honest answer, after weeks on this thread, surprised even us. I live near Lisbon, and my wife has run a development company here for ten years, over a hundred residential and commercial units delivered.

I tried to do for Portugal what I did for Italy and Greece: find the interior areas where you'd buy a rural house.

We couldn't. We wouldn't live in the Portuguese interior ourselves, and I never advise what I wouldn't do myself.

Portugal, for us, is the coast: 11 places where you can buy an incredible house, live quietly, and keep the ocean at your door. Every one passes the same test: we would buy there ourselves. Where you'd overpay, including the most famous name in the country, I say it plainly.

Thread 🧵

How the 11 made the list. Four tests:

1. The ocean at your door.

2. Quiet. Places to live, not party destinations. One urban exception earns its spot.

3. Alive in February. Real town, real services, year-round life. Two entries bend or fail this; I flag them and tell you why they're here anyway.

4. Above everything: would we buy there ourselves? Everything below is a yes, at the right price. Others will see it differently, and the replies are open for that.

Here's the map. The three gray pins, the quietest of the 11, go in full to my newsletter readers: palombo.substack.com

Let's go, north first.

By the way, some context before we start.

A lot has changed here lately: the golden visa lost real estate, the old tax regime is gone, citizenship takes longer, prices kept climbing. None of it killed the interest. I've had this exact conversation at least 20 times in the last six months, and the pros keep outweighing the cons.

Two warnings on real estate though:

- Prices are inflated, by lack of supply, not investor money. The famous names carry a story premium; one town over, same ocean, prices drop by half. Compare before pulling the trigger.

- Construction is the hidden battle. Humidity tests every build, and timelines slip: a friend got his apartment three years late, and there are plenty of these stories.

In our family we also build houses, so the flags below come from delivering buildings. Strong criteria, strong biases: a subjective list from direct experience, shared unfiltered. Open to other takes, and we read the comments.

Read 25 tweets

Alessandro Palombo

@thealepalombo

Jul 7

1 in 9 Canadians lives abroad.

4 million people. For comparison, Americans leave at 1.7%, and yet every "move abroad" guide out there is written for them. You leave at five times their rate and get nothing.

I have three Canadian friends in Lisbon. None of them left for the weather, I'd say. They simply stopped agreeing with where the country is going, politically and economically, and houses cost 10 times a salary now. At a certain point, they did the math.

Most Canadians who leave go to the US, or Hong Kong, or the UK. Europe barely registers. I think that's changing. I keep getting asked for a Canadian version of my Europe guides, so here it is.

One warning before we start: the places where Canadians actually do well here are not the ones you'd guess. One of them taxes your stock gains at zero. And some of you already hold an EU passport without knowing it.

Where Canadians thrive in Europe (and where they don't): 8 places, each tagged with who it's for.

🧵

Before the list, how I built it.

Every place had to pass four tests:

1. Canadian approved. My Canadian friends are very different from my American ones. I built this list on conversations with them, and on their taste.
2. The Canadian fine print. Canadian tax isn't my specialty, so I went deep on the rules that hit Canadians specifically. As always, none of this is professional advice: consult your own.
3. Real prices. Many ideas people hold about European cities are simply outdated.
4. The honest catches. There's always a trade-off to consider, and I name it every time.

The rest comes from years of watching North Americans land in Europe and a practitioner network across these jurisdictions. This is my job: my company does European investor visas.

This is the map:

Before starting, the 60-second briefing no one hands Canadians.

The one bill: the exit toll. The day you leave, Canada pretends you sold everything you own and taxes the gains. Sounds brutal, mostly isn't: RRSPs, TFSAs, pensions and Canadian real estate are excluded, and a form defers the rest until you actually sell.

Founders, read that twice: shares of your own company are NOT excluded. Plan the exit with an accountant the year before the flight, not after. The step-by-step playbook is in the essay.

The one string: pensions. CPP follows you anywhere (Canada keeps a cut at source, treaties trim it), and OAS only travels if you lived in Canada 20 years as an adult.

And the big one: unlike Americans, you are not taxed by citizenship. Leave properly and Canada's claim on your income ends. That single fact changes everything below: Europe's tax deals are real numbers in your hands, and even opening a bank account is easier. No FATCA follows you here.

The full deep-dive, as always, will go to my newsletter. Subscribe at palombo.substack.com.

Let's go.

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