People of Abruzzo
A different mix, what’s working in your comune?
Who lives across Abruzzo's 304 comuni, who has left, and who has come home. Abruzzo has always been Italy's land of migration, and the surest way to read whether a place is healthy is to read its people: the balance of Italian and foreign residents, the returnees, the new citizens, and whether a town is filling or emptying.
Slower
Resident figures are the latest ISTAT comune counts. 2025 figures are still provisional and not yet broken out for Abruzzo. The deeper profile for any comune, with its schools, markets, hazards and travel, is coming soon in our Pulse of Abruzzo.
Abruzzo at a Glance
Residents at January 2025; homecomers and new citizens over 2019 to 2024.
Ancestral Passports: Homecomers
People living in Abruzzo with an ancestral passport, such as Americans, Australians, Canadians, Venezuelans, and Argentinians who reclaimed Italian citizenship by descent, are not listed as foreigners in official resident statistics. Instead, they are grouped as Italian Homecomers, which includes Italian-born returnees.
Between 2019 and 2024, about 11,000 people arrived in Abruzzo from abroad this way. This figure includes both diaspora members reclaiming citizenship by descent and Italians born in Abruzzo returning after years overseas. Official statistics do not separate these two groups. If someone claims to know the exact number, be wary.
Where Family Migrants Settle, the Thinning Slows
Read against all that emptying, the foreign communities are the quiet good news. In comuni of more than a thousand people, a settled community slows the decline. In a village this small, everybody counts.
about a tenth
under four percent
What hollows them is an ageing population and too few births, not foreigners leaving. Migrants gather where there is still work and a pulse, and help keep it beating. Everywhere is declining; a settled community just softens the fall.
A Choice of Friends
You see it first in the school. Many rural schools now run a pluriclasse, several year groups in one room, for want of enough children for a class each. In a room that small a child can be the only one her age, stuck with a single possible friend. A few migrant families change that: another desk, another child the right age, a real choice of who to sit beside. We thank our new neighbours for the vegetables and the man who paints the shutters. Thank them too for the friend your daughter actually likes.
The Migration that Does Not Stop the Thinning
The Caregivers
Italy's care economy depends on migrant women, known as badanti. Many work into their sixties, often alone, and many have left their families to care for someone else's. This is why the foreign population in Abruzzo is mostly female, especially around Pescara.
The Labourers
The countryside draws single young men to work on farms or in construction as part of the system called caporalato, in which they are held together as gangs, often brought in illegally and held by gangmasters, the caporali.
Both keep a village running, but neither puts down the family roots that change a village's direction. We follow that harder story in our dossier on who works the land.
None of this work is new. A lifetime ago it was Abruzzese women who bent in these vineyards and held the households together. Their daughters have since moved into other jobs, or away altogether. The fields and the care have passed to migrants. The faces change; the work does not.
Spot the Difference
Two populations in one region, drawn to the same scale. See where one swells and the other pinches.
Weighted to the Working Years
More Grandparents than Grandchildren
The newcomers cluster in exactly the working years where the settled community thins. It is why a few young families putting down roots can shift a village's whole direction.
Where They Come From
Most of us look for our own first, so we will start there, then widen out to where the real weight lies.
Remember, these are counted by passport. Anyone who used an Italian one by descent has already moved into the Italian count, so these are the English speakers without ancestry. With New Zealand's ten, they number some 1,800 people, about one in fifty of all Abruzzo's foreign residents. And the count may hide the Americans most of all: the United States pays Social Security to nearly 26,000 people living in Italy, many of them dual citizens filed here as Italian, so the true American presence, in Abruzzo as everywhere, is very likely larger than the foreign rolls show. The real weight, the people who keep Abruzzo ticking along, sits below.
The 7% Tax Pensioners: Abruzzo Leads Italy
The pensioners who make headlines come for the 7% flat tax. It lets anyone with a foreign pension pay a flat 7% on all their overseas income for ten years. The one catch: they must settle in a small southern town. Abruzzo has led the country for it from the start.
The sting is real. Abruzzo's health system already runs deep in deficit, and every cent counts. A local pensioner pays regional and town tax on their pension. That money keeps Abruzzo's own hospitals standing. The 7% pensioner pays none of it.
Read the full story: what expats pay, what locals pay →
Source: Ministry of Economy replies to parliamentary questions, 2021 and 2024; 2025 US emigration estimates.
Of the 90,573 in all, the bulk is European. Romania alone is almost a quarter, and with Albania and Ukraine the old emigration routes now run in reverse.
Resident foreign nationals by citizenship, from ISTAT provisional figures for 1 January 2025. The bars show each nationality as a share of all 90,573 foreign residents, the total given in the citizenship table. The comune table, which feeds the search and the per-comune counts, comes to 90,570. These are two separate ISTAT tables, so in provisional data their totals differ by a few people.
By Province
The Leaderboard
Pick a lens. The five comuni that lead it.
In the smallest comuni a high foreign share can be just a few people, so the headcount sits beside it. The resident figures are a provisional ISTAT count for 1 January 2025. Each person is counted once, under the passport they hold now. The homecomer and new-citizen figures count a different thing: arrivals and new citizenships over the years 2019 to 2024. They are not part of the resident totals, and should not be added to them. These are registered residents only. People seeking asylum are counted here just if they are registered as resident, which many living in reception centres are not, so a comune with a centre can hold more recent arrivals than these figures show. © Abruzzo Insiders Club. Data compiled from ISTAT sources, the resident population by comune and the foreign residents by citizenship, both provisional for 1 January 2025. Not to be republished without permission.