Italy’s house price index, which measures changes in the market price of residential properties, increased by 1.9 percent in 2020 compared to the year before, provisional figures from national statistics office Istat show.

That’s the most the index has grown since Istat began tracking it in 2010. Since then, Italian house prices have fallen in seven years out of ten. Growth was fastest in the south of Italy and its islands, where prices rose by 3 percent in the last three months of 2020 compared to the same period a year earlier.