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QUALITY OF LIFE

Revealed: The best (and worst) Italian cities to live in for women

A new 2021 quality of life index has ranked Italian provinces based on their liveability for women. Find out how your favourite part of Italy scored.

Published: 14 December 2021 11:25 CET
What are the best places to live in Italy as a woman?
What are the best places to live in Italy as a woman? Miguel MEDINA / AFP

As with so many things in Italy, provinces, cities and regions show substantial variation when it comes to quality of life.

Job opportunities, quality of public transport networks, climate, and leisure activity options are some of the key factors usually taken into account by surveys examining the pros and cons of living in different parts of Italy.

But when it comes to the best and worst places to live in Italy, one survey has taken into account factors that may improve the standard of living for female residents.

On Monday, the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore released the 2021 edition of its annual quality of life survey; and for the first time this year, the survey looks specifically at quality of life indicators for women in different parts of the country.

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Metrics include life expectancy at birth, employment rates, the gender wage gap, rates of sexual violence, Olympic medals won by women and their overall performance in sports events, and percentages of female-run businesses and women in management roles across the public and private sectors.

Italy scores poorly in global rankings for equal opportunities at work and in politics, education and health, with high (and rising) rates of female unemployment and a persistently low percentage of women in top management roles.

The picture is not always the same across the country however, as the findings of Il Sole 24 Ore’s survey appear to illustrate.

Topping the list of best towns and cities for woman is the northeastern city of Treviso. It scores highest overall and for female infant life expectancy, and ranks among the top five Italian towns for female youth employment rates.

In second place is Prato in Tuscany, which has the lowest gender wage gap of any province in the country. Nearby Siena, which comes in third overall, is fifth for life expectancy and seventh for the percentage of company directorships held by women.

The top ten positions are predominantly occupied by provinces in the centre-north, with the regional capitals of Florence and Bologna coming in fifth and tenth place respectively.

Bigger cities like Milan and Rome did not make the top ten in this ranking – nor did any part of southern Italy.

The top ten Italian cities to live in as a woman.

The top ten Italian cities to live in as a woman. Source: Il Sole 24 Ore.

Here are the top five towns and cities to live in for women based on specific criteria:

Best female infant life expectancy rates at birth

  1. Treviso
  2. Perugia
  3. Prato
  4. Cagliari
  5. Siena

Lowest rates of (reported) sexual violence

  1. Treviso
  2. Perugia
  3. Prato
  4. Cagliari
  5. Siena

Highest female employment rates

  1. Bologna
  2. Trieste
  3. Bolzano
  4. Milan
  5. Aosta

Milan performs well when it comes to female employment rates.

Milan performs well when it comes to female employment rates. Miguel MEDINA / AFP

Highest female youth employment rates

  1. Bolzano
  2. Biella
  3. Ferrara
  4. Sondrio
  5. Cuneo

Smallest gender employment gap

  1. Aosta
  2. Cagliari
  3. Trieste
  4. Milan
  5. Nuoro

Smallest gender wage gap

  1. Prato
  2. Oristano
  3. Enna
  4. Rome
  5. Imperia

READ ALSO:

Highest percentage of women directors in companies

  1. Savona
  2. Imperia
  3. South Sardinia
  4. Aosta
  5. Terni

Highest percentage of woman city managers

  1. Ravenna
  2. Cagliari
  3. Prato
  4. Bologna
  5. Modena

The bottom thirty spots are all occupied by central-southern towns and regions, with Caltanissetta in Sicily in last place.

Overall, regional capitals tend to perform relatively poorly compared to smaller cities and towns. Turin, Rome and Milan come in 24th, 27th, and 33rd out of 107. Palermo ranks 86th, and Naples comes a dismal 105th place.  

Given that the centre-north does best overall, it’s perhaps surprising that it’s northern cities that score the worst in areas like percentages of female-run companies and women directorships.

READ ALSO: Rome and Milan ranked ‘worst’ cities to live in by foreign residents – again

Milan ranks at the very bottom in the first of those two categories, with only 17.2 percent of its companies run by women; while Bolzano comes 106th and Trento 105th. When it comes to the female directorships of companies, these positions are slightly shuffled: Bolzano comes last place, Trento 105th, and Milan 103rd.

The top 50 Italian towns and cities to live in for women overall, according to the 2021 Il Sole 24 Ore survey:

  1. Treviso
  2. Prato
  3. Siena
  4. Savona
  5. Firenze
  6. Varese
  7. Pisa
  8. Ferrara
  9. Aosta
  10. Bologna
  11. Macerata
  12. Perugia
  13. Ravenna
  14. Trieste
  15. Cagliari
  16. Monza and Brianza
  17. Udine
  18. Arezzo
  19. Livorno
  20. Modena
  21. Nuoro
  22. Forlì-Cesena
  23. Biella
  24. Turin
  25. Lecco
  26. Ancona
  27. Rome
  28. Fermo
  29. Cremona
  30. Grosseto
  31. Verbano-Cusio-Ossola
  32. Padua
  33. Milan
  34. Pordenone
  35. Cuneo
  36. Reggio Emilia
  37. Novara
  38. Venice
  39. Lucca
  40. Pistoia
  41. Verona
  42. Terni
  43. Bolzano
  44. Vicenza
  45. Asti
  46. Trento
  47. Rieti
  48. Isernia
  49. Pavia
  50. Pesaro and Urbino

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POLITICS

Can foreign residents in Italy vote in the European elections?

The year 2024 is a bumper one for elections, among them the European elections in June. Italy is of course a member of the EU - so can foreign residents vote in the elections that will almost certainly affect their daily lives?

Published: 3 May 2024 15:25 CEST
Can foreign residents in Italy vote in the European elections?

Across Europe, people will go to the polls in early June to select their representatives in the European Parliament, with 76 seats up for grabs in Italy. 

Although European elections usually see a much lower turnout than national elections, they are still seen as important by Italian politicians.

Giorgia Meloni will stand as a candidate this year, hoping use her personal popularity to give her Brothers of Italy party a boost and build on her success in Italy to “send the left into opposition” at the European level too.

When to vote

Across Italy, polling takes place on Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th June 2024.

Polling stations will be set up in the same places as for national and local elections – usually town halls, leisure centres and other public buildings.

You have to vote at the polling station for the municipality in which you are registered as a resident, which should be indicated on your electoral card.

Polling stations open at 8am and mostly close at 6pm, although some stay open later.

Unlike in presidential or local elections, there is only a single round of voting in European elections.

Who can vote? 

Italian citizens – including dual nationals – can vote in European elections, even if they don’t live in Italy. As is common for Italian domestic elections, polling booths will be set up in Italian consulates around the world to allow Italians living overseas to vote.

Non-Italian citizens who are living in Italy can only vote if they have citizenship of an EU country. So for example Irish citizens living in Italy can vote in European elections but Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. cannot.

Brits in Italy used to be able to vote before Brexit, but now cannot – even if they have the post-Brexit carta di soggiorno.

If you have previously voted in an election in Italy – either local or European – you should still be on the electoral roll.

If not, in order to vote you need to send an application more than 90 days before the election date.

How does the election work?

The system for European elections differs from most countries’ domestic polls. MEPs are elected once every five years.

Each country is given an allocation of MEPs roughly based on population size. At present there are 705 MEPs: Germany – the country in the bloc with the largest population – has the most while the smallest number belong to Malta with just six.

Italy, like most of its EU neighbours, elects its MEPs through direct proportional representation via the ‘list’ system, so that parties gain the number of MEPs equivalent to their share of the overall vote.

So, for example, if Meloni’s party won 50 percent of the vote they would get 38 out of the total of 76 Italian seats.

Exactly who gets to be an MEP is decided in advance by the parties who publish their candidate lists in priority order. So let’s say that Meloni’s party does get that 50 percent of the vote – then the people named from 1 to 38 on their list get to be MEPs, and the people lower down on the list do not, unless a candidate (for example, Meloni) declines the seat and passes it on to the next person on the list.

In the run up to the election, the parties decide on who will be their lead candidates and these people will almost certainly be elected (though Meloni would almost definitely not take up her seat as an MEP, as this would mean resigning from office in Italy).

The further down the list a name appears, the less likely that person is to be heading to parliament.

Once in parliament, parties usually seek to maximise their influence by joining one of the ‘blocks’ made up of parties from neighbouring countries that broadly share their interests and values eg centre-left, far-right, green.

The parliament alternates between Strasbourg and Brussels. 

Find out more about voting in the European elections from Italy on the European Parliament’s website or the Italian interior ministry’s website.

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