You can, and it's less complicated than it looks: who is allowed to buy, which documents you need, what it really costs beyond the price, and what buying a home in Italy does not give you.
Every year thousands of foreigners buy a home in Sicily. Almost all of them start from the same three questions: can I really buy? what does it cost me on top of the price? do I have to move here? This guide answers with real figures, including the things nobody says willingly — such as the fact that buying a house does not give you the right to live in Italy.
The rules apply throughout Italy. The examples are from Sicily, and in particular from the inland area around Caltanissetta: it is where we work and, not by chance, one of the most affordable parts of the country.
You do not need to be Italian, or to live in Italy, in order to buy property here. The only thing that changes the picture is your nationality:
You do need a codice fiscale. It is the Italian tax identification number that identifies you in every legal document: without it, the notaio cannot draw up the deed. The good news: it is free and it never expires. There are three ways to get one: in person at an office of the Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian revenue agency; through an authorised representative in Italy, which is the normal route for buyers abroad, who give the mandate to the estate agent or to the notaio; or at an Italian consulate in your own country, although that route has narrowed in recent years.
An Italian bank account is NOT required. This is one of the most widespread misconceptions: no Italian law requires one in order to buy a house. You can pay by international transfer or with Italian banker's drafts. Having an account is convenient afterwards, for utilities and local taxes, but it is not a condition for signing.
What is compulsory is traceability: at the final deed you declare in front of the notaio how the price was paid, by what means, and how much the estate agent was paid. A false declaration, or hiding part of the price, carries a penalty of €500 to €10,000 and costs you the tax reliefs. Put simply: everything above board, always.
In Italy you do not sign once. The route is this:
Anyone buying a second home — which means almost every foreign buyer, since they do not move their residence — pays 9% registration tax, plus €50 mortgage tax and €50 cadastral tax. The 2% rate is available only to buyers who undertake, in the deed itself, to move their official residence to the municipality where the house is within 18 months — moving to Italy in general is not enough — and the relief does not apply to luxury homes (cadastral categories A/1, A/8, A/9).
But there is a detail that changes the arithmetic, and in Sicily it changes it considerably: that 9% is not calculated on the price you pay. If you are buying from a private seller and you are a private individual, you can use the mechanism known as prezzo-valore, price-versus-value: the taxes are calculated on the cadastral value, which is almost always far below the market price. You obtain it by multiplying the property's cadastral income, the rendita catastale, × 1.05 × 120 (× 110 for a main home).
One thing to know: prezzo-valore is not automatic. You have to ask the notaio for it expressly and have it written into the deed — there is no way of claiming it afterwards. In return, as well as reducing the tax, it limits any challenge to the declared value and it also cuts the notaio's own fee by 30%.
To that you add the notaio (there is no longer a fixed scale of fees: on a house in this bracket you would normally budget a couple of thousand euros, VAT included — always ask for a written quote first) and the estate agent's commission, which in Italy is paid by the buyer as well and falls due when the deal is concluded.
Registration tax has a statutory minimum: €1,000. It does not go below that figure, however little the house costs.
That means that on a house at €25,000 or €30,000 the taxes are not proportionally small, as you might expect: in percentage terms they weigh far more than on a €200,000 house. It is a calculation the general guides never make, because they always work with big-city figures. If you are looking at the cheap houses of inland Sicily, budget for it from the outset: it is not a nasty surprise if you are expecting it.
Yes. Not with an electronic signature — for property there is no such thing as signing the deed remotely, someone has to be physically in front of the notaio — but with a procura speciale, a special power of attorney: you appoint someone you trust to sign on your behalf.
The power of attorney is signed before a notary in your own country, then it needs an apostille (if your country is party to the Hague Convention) or consular legalisation, and finally a sworn translation into Italian. It must identify the property precisely, with its cadastral details, and state the maximum price you authorise. Put like that it sounds complicated; in practice it is an ordinary procedure that takes a few weeks.
Notarial deeds are written in Italian. If the buyer declares that they do not speak Italian, Italian notarial law — which dates from 1913 and is still the law in force — requires an interpreter, who is sworn in before the notaio and signs every page, and witnesses who speak your language.
This is not a formality you can get around: without it, the deed cannot be signed. It has to be arranged in good time and it costs money. It is also one of the reasons why, buying from abroad, it helps to have someone alongside you who prepares these things in advance, instead of your discovering them on the day of signing.
On a second home you pay IMU, the municipal property tax: it is calculated on the cadastral value and each municipality sets its own rate. On the earlier example — a house with a rendita catastale of €300, in Caltanissetta — that comes to roughly €530 a year. Owners who are officially resident in the property, by contrast, pay no IMU at all on their main home.
Then there is TARI, the waste collection charge, any building service charges, and the utilities. In inland Sicily these are modest sums, but they have to be counted in: a house left empty for eleven months a year still costs something.
This is something we say at once, even when it loses us a sale: in Italy there is no residence permit that you obtain by buying a property. The “investor visa” provided for by Italian law covers government bonds, companies and startups — not houses. If you read the opposite on some property portal, you are being told something that is not true.
EU citizens can of course settle in Italy whenever they wish. Anyone from outside the EU who wants to move here has to follow a route of its own — the elective residence visa for people with stable unearned income, the self-employment visa, and so on — each with its own requirements, and entirely independent of the purchase. A house is a house: a pleasant thing to own, but not a pass.
Anyone who draws a pension from abroad, who has not been tax resident in Italy in the previous five years, and who moves their residence to a small town in the South can pay a substitute tax of 7% on all income produced abroad, for nine years. It applies in Sicily, Calabria, Sardinia, Campania, Basilicata, Abruzzo, Molise and Puglia.
If you have read the articles about €1 houses, they are about towns that are right here: Mussomeli and Sutera are in the province of Caltanissetta, half an hour from us. Those houses do exist, but the symbolic price almost always comes with an obligation to renovate that costs tens of thousands of euros, with a security deposit and with long timescales.
The alternative, in the same area, is to buy a house that is already habitable for twenty or thirty thousand euros: no building site, no obligations, you can sleep there from the first night. This is not the coast — the sea is an hour away — and that is the reason it costs so little. What you get instead are real towns, where you can live on very little and where in summer you are a resident, not a visitor.
Buying at a distance means trusting someone who is there. Here is what we do, concretely: video calls from inside the house, where you can say “open that cupboard for me, show me the ceiling”; complete photographs and floor plans before you even ask for them; checking the property's paperwork before the offer goes in; help with the codice fiscale and with organising the power of attorney; and being present at the final deed with the interpreter already arranged.
And we also tell you when a house is not right for you. We are a small-town agency: here a reputation is worth more than any single sale.
A guide by the team at Danesi Immobiliare — FIAIP-certified estate agents, in Caltanissetta since 2008.