Residents of Italy still reeling from recent spikes in the cost of living have a reason to breathe a sigh of relief: rental prices appear to be stabilising this autumn — though some regions are still seeing major increases.
Inflation in Italy is still below the rest of Europe, with ISTAT’s cost of living index up just 1.5 percent on this time last year.
But the same can’t be said for rental prices in some Italian cities.
According to the latest report from Idealista, rents are up an average of 5 percent on last year across Italy. Here’s where those rental increases are hitting hardest.
Cities to watch
Among Italy’s largest cities, the increasingly popular Pugliese capital of Bari has seen the biggest average rent increase on this time last year, with prices rising by 13 percent.
Rome was not far behind, with prices up nearly 11 percent on last year.
Other popular destinations also saw increases. Florence’s rents rose by nearly 10 percent on average, Venice by nearly 9 percent, and Genoa and Turin by 8 percent and 7 percent respectively.
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By comparison, year-over-year average increases of around 2 percent in Bologna, Naples and Milan look tiny by comparison.
The dubious honour of highest average rent increase in Italy goes to the town of Grosseto in Tuscany, where rents rose by an average of nearly 30 percent in just one year. Ouch.
Other notable communities with higher-than-average increases include the Venetian university town of Padova, where prices rose by more than 10 percent; the Lombardese city of Bergamo, where they soared 12.7 percent; the Tuscan port town of Livorno, where rents increased 13.2 percent; and Bolzano, where prices rose by nearly 15 percent.
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Rents didn’t rise everywhere, though. Just north of one of Italy’s most heated rental regions — the province of Forlì-Cesena, where prices rose more than 25 percent — the port city of Ravenna saw its rental prices drop by 8.6 percent.
But even that couldn’t rival the drop in the town of Potenza, in Italy’s south-central Basilicata region. There, prices dropped 16 percent in just one year.
Regional changes
Zooming out, most of Italy’s regions kept step with the average Italian increase of 5 percent — with some exceptions.
The central region of Umbria saw a higher-than-average increase of 8.6 percent. Meanwhile, Trentino, frequently lauded for its high quality of living, saw rents increase by just over 10 percent.
But the biggest increases were in the northern border regions of Val d’Aosta, where rents jumped by 16.8 percent this year. In Friuli-Venezia Giulia, they went up by 14.2 percent — driven in large part by a massive increase in the mountain-hugging province of Gorizio, Italy’s biggest outlier, where average prices increased by 60.5 percent.
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