For generations, Italian Americans have made their way back to Italy through brief, emotional pilgrimages that fit neatly within the calendar of American vacation time. A two-week summer trip, a rented car that always feels slightly smaller than promised, a dinner in the village your grandparents once left behind. The experience is moving, even transformative, but inevitably temporary. You come, you feel, you wonder, and then - almost abruptly - you leave, carrying back a sense of unfinished conversation with the place that made your family who they are.
Yet the question many Italian Americans have carried for decades has remained surprisingly consistent: “Could I actually live here?”. Not in theory, not in romance, not as in a reality show, but in real life-work, obligations, seasons, rhythms included.
Until recently, answering that question required a leap of faith that few could afford. There was no middle ground between being a tourist and being a resident. You either visited Italy or uprooted your life entirely to move there. The idea of a “trial period”-a season, a quarter, a year-simply didn’t fit into the old visa categories, nor into the traditional expectations of work.
And then the world changed. Remote work became not a luxury but a norm for millions of Americans (and Italians too); digital work infrastructure matured to the point of near invisibility; and Italy, after years of debate, introduced its long-anticipated Digital Nomad Visa - finally creating the legal framework for non-EU citizens to live in Italy while working for foreign employers.
Coinciding with these shifts, the 4° Rapporto sul Nomadismo Digitale in Italia, published by the Associazione Italiana Nomadi Digitali and Ca’ Foscari University, arrived with a message Italy had never articulated so clearly: remote workers are not just tourists with laptops; they are potential temporary residents. Their presence in small towns, especially when sustained over months rather than days, brings life, activity, and economic resilience to places facing demographic decline. And Italy, a country with more than four thousand municipalities at risk of long-term population loss, has entered a moment where it needs not more visitors, but more people - people who choose to live, however briefly, in its overlooked geographies.
This new alignment of work, law, and opportunity has opened an unprecedented doorway for Italian-Americans. Not the romantic doorway of nostalgia, nor the irreversible doorway of relocation, but a pathway made of time, routine, daily life - something infinitely more revealing than a vacation. Digital nomadism is not the only way to return to Italy, and certainly not the definitive one. But for many, it may be the most intelligent, gentle, and reversible way to understand, finally and concretely, whether Italy is simply a part of your past or could also become part of your future.
A new kind of return: from pilgrimage to participation
The Rapporto paints a far more nuanced picture of today’s digital nomads than the stereotypes that dominated the early 2010s. They are not twenty-something backpackers photographing cappuccinos from co-working spaces that suspiciously resemble hotel lobbies. The average profile is now older, more stable, more professionally established. Many are remote employees of American companies, others are consultants, academics, designers, programmers, or entrepreneurs. And they stay longer - months at a time, sometimes seasons, often returning year after year.
The most striking insight from the report comes from its decade-long analysis of more than 800,000 conversations on Twitter/X tracking global sentiment around digital nomadism. Before the pandemic, discussions revolved mainly around cities - Lisbon, Berlin, Barcelona, the usual suspects. After 2020, however, the conversation shifted dramatically. People were no longer fantasizing about metropolitan lifestyle upgrades; they were seeking quiet, authenticity, affordability, nature, and places with a human scale. Attention moved toward rural areas, small towns, coastal villages, and interior regions. In other words: toward exactly the kinds of places many Italian-Americans’ ancestors left behind.
This shift is profoundly relevant to Italy. Rural depopulation is one of the country’s most serious long-term challenges. Entire regions risk becoming demographic deserts. Schools consolidate or close; shops operate seasonally; local services weaken; and young people leave in search of opportunity. What these places lack is not charm, beauty, or heritage. They lack people - especially people who can bring income earned elsewhere, skills derived from global experience, and an openness to integrating into community life.
The report is explicit: the presence of even a handful of remote workers can serve as a stabilizing force in local economies that rely on fragile seasonal tourism. Long-term stays have a multiplying effect - one that is both economic and social. They sustain cafés in winter, not just in July; they revive housing stock; they generate local demand for services; they bring multilingualism and curiosity into towns that rarely experience either.
And this is where Italian Americans hold an unexpected advantage. You are not blank-slate foreigners encountering Italy for the first time. You arrive already aware of its cultural rhythms, its contradictions, its warmth, its beauty, and its maddening inefficiencies. You carry names, stories, memories transmitted across generations. You do not arrive as strangers; you arrive with a pre-existing social gravity that Italians instinctively respond to.
In the words of one mayor of a small Abruzzese town involved in a digital nomad pilot project: “Gli americani di origine italiana non devono imparare da zero. Devono solo ri-abituarsi.”
Italian Americans do not need to start from scratch - they simply need to re-acclimate.
The soft landing that never existed before
If the past model of return was tourism and the next step was full relocation, the new possibility unlocked by digital nomadism sits in a middle space that previously did not exist. It allows you to spend three months, six months, or a full year in Italy, while maintaining your job, your income, and your life in the United States. It is neither a renunciation of your American identity nor a binding commitment to an Italian one.
It is, in essence, a trial version of Italian life. A way to test everyday routines, to observe how you feel in a place across a season, to notice whether your days expand or contract, whether your stress dissipates or intensifies, whether you work better, sleep better, live better. These are questions no vacation can ever answer. They require time, repetition, and the accumulation of seemingly small experiences that reveal how a place aligns (or does not align) with who you are.
A year in Italy is long enough to understand how a community breathes, how weather shapes life, how people interact, how bureaucracy actually works, and whether the rhythms of the country complement your own. It is long enough to rediscover the Italian language not as an obligation or a guilty inheritance, but as a living tool. It is long enough to transform a genealogy search into real relationships. And it is long enough to determine-honestly-whether a permanent return is viable or whether this chapter belongs instead to the realm of beautiful possibilities.
Housing: the missing puzzle piece Italy has finally started addressing
If the visa is the legal doorway into Italian life, housing is the physical one. And here, the Rapporto is refreshingly candid: most Italian small towns have an abundance of houses, but a shortage of usable homes. Many properties are aging, under-maintained, or held by owners who are reluctant to rent; others are structured for tourists rather than residents, with nightly rates or seasonal availability that make medium-term stays impractical.
This mismatch between supply and real, everyday habitability is one of the biggest obstacles preventing remote workers from choosing lesser-known Italian territories. Yet it is also where some of the most innovative responses are emerging.
Organizations like ITS Italy have begun intervening precisely where the market does not. Instead of focusing on short-term rentals or speculative purchases, they acquire or co-invest in properties within small towns and renovate them into high-quality, fully furnished, internet-ready homes designed for people who intend to live rather than vacation. These homes are intentionally structured for affordability, often costing only slightly more than traditional long-term leases, and they are available to remote professionals, couples, or families who want medium-term stability without committing to ownership.
This kind of housing ecosystem is the missing infrastructure that has long prevented Italian Americans from staying longer than a holiday. Instead of navigating opaque rental markets or accepting accommodations designed for tourists, you can move into a functional, comfortable home that allows you to experience daily life. And daily life - more than cuisine or landscape - is what reveals whether Italy resonates with the person you actually are, not merely with the emotions you inherited.
Why this moment matters more than any before
One of the most compelling insights of the Rapporto is that Italy stands at a demographic and cultural turning point. The country knows it must reimagine its internal areas, not as relics to be admired nostalgically, but as territories capable of welcoming new people and new forms of work. Remote workers, including members of the Italian diaspora, represent a bridge between Italy’s past and its future - a way to bring life into places that risk fading from the national map.
For Italian-Americans, this moment is an invitation not to make a permanent choice, but to make a temporary one. To try living in Italy without renouncing your American life. To explore the rhythms of a place season by season, without pressure or permanence. To listen, observe, learn, and experience. To approach Italy not as a fantasy, but as a reality.
Digital nomadism is not the solution to every question about identity, belonging, or relocation. But it is a tool - a practical, flexible, and surprisingly humane one - that allows you to step inside Italian life in a way that is both meaningful and reversible.
You don’t need to move forever to understand whether Italy could be home.
You just need enough time to let the place speak.
A season is enough
Italy has always captured the imagination of its diaspora, but imagination - beautiful as it is - cannot answer the question that truly matters: “Could I actually live here?”. For that, you need time, routine, and everyday life. You need mornings and evenings, conversations and errands, good days and frustrating ones. You need to experience the Italy that exists between the postcards.
The Digital Nomad Visa gives you the structure. Remote work gives you the freedom. And a new generation of housing initiatives gives you the landing place.
What remains is the simplest decision of all: to give yourself a season. A season long enough to understand whether Italy is only a chapter of your family’s past, or perhaps a future you could inhabit.
Italy is not asking for a promise. It is merely offering a chance.
A chance to try living here, gently and temporarily, and to discover - without pressure - whether the country that once sent your grandparents across the ocean might now welcome you back, not as a tourist, but as a participant in its unfolding story.
Follow up:
Nomag - (Not a magazine for digital nomads)
ITS Journal - The journey of thousands of ‘new Italians’
