For Antonio De Chiara, the distance between having a job and being able to live near it involved a ferry. When Reuters interviewed the 22-year-old child therapist in April 2024, he was waking at 5:20 a.m. near Naples to reach his work on Capri. Housing on the island was beyond his budget.
His experience offers a useful starting point for understanding young adulthood in Italy: finding employment does not necessarily mean gaining independence.
The familiar images of Italian life—busy piazzas, long meals, close families—leave important questions unanswered. Who can afford to live near those piazzas? Who finishes work early enough to meet friends? And how much financial help makes an apparently independent life possible?
Published interviews with young Italians reveal different responses: campaigning for affordable housing, building a career abroad, and hoping to bring professional skills home. Their experiences cannot represent an entire generation. Together, however, they show why rent, work, relationships, and ambition belong in the same conversation.
Reporting note: This feature draws on previously published interviews and official research. Ages and personal circumstances refer to the dates of the original reporting; Italia Mia did not conduct these interviews.
Rent Determines More Than Where You Live
In May 2023, Ilaria Lamera pitched a tent outside Milan’s Politecnico to protest the cost of student housing. Other students followed, turning a personal-looking gesture into a national housing debate.
In a 2026 interview with Il Giorno, Lamera, then 26, acknowledged progress in student accommodation but argued that provision remained inadequate. Her concern extended beyond the number of beds: housing needed to be affordable and connected to universities and city life. She also described changing direction herself, putting environmental engineering on hold and qualifying for work at sea.
Her story raises a question that university rankings rarely answer: can a student afford to participate fully in the place where they study?
A distant room may reduce the monthly bill while adding hours of travel. A cheaper arrangement can make an evening lecture, a group project, or an ordinary dinner with classmates harder to manage. Housing is therefore also a question of access—to education, friendships, and the informal encounters through which opportunities develop.
For visitors, our Bologna on a Budget guide explores an affordable weekend in a university city. Living there requires a different calculation: twelve months of housing, bills, transport, and an income that reliably covers them.
A Job Is Only Part of the Answer
Employment statistics cannot tell the whole story of working life. Hours, contract length, predictability, and opportunities to progress matter alongside the fact of being employed.
The OECD’s 2026 assessment of Italy identifies persistent difficulties for younger workers, including weak wage growth, insecure employment, and limited career progression. It reports that more than 39% of workers aged 15–29 have temporary contracts, compared with 33% across the EU. These figures describe workers in that age group, not all young people.
For someone considering a move, the practical questions are immediate. Will the contract last beyond the lease? Can the deposit be paid without borrowing? Is there enough left after essential expenses to save anything?
Those questions help explain why a promising job title may coexist with an uncertain personal life. Independence requires some confidence about next month and next year, as well as this week.
They also change how a salary should be discussed. A monthly amount means little without knowing the hours worked, whether it is take-home pay, and what housing costs where the job is located.
Leaving Italy Can Be a Professional Decision
In Reuters reporting published in November 2023, Sardinian chef Davide Sanna, then 25, described moving to New York after working in Italian kitchens. His account emphasized long hours in Italy and better pay and employment arrangements in his new job.
The same report interviewed Roberto Gentile, a Sicilian chef also aged 25 at the time, who was working in France. He wanted experience gained abroad to translate into an appropriate role and salary back home, but did not see a convincing route to that return. These are historical accounts, rather than verified descriptions of either man’s circumstances today.
Their stories broaden the discussion beyond the familiar image of the university graduate leaving for a laboratory or technology company. Practical skills and service professions also travel.
Leaving need not imply rejection of Italian culture, food, or family. Someone can value all three and still conclude that another country offers a better working life.
Equally, a larger foreign salary is not a complete comparison. Housing, working hours, healthcare arrangements, and the cost of returning home all deserve attention. The meaningful question is what kind of life the job makes possible.
Family Support Changes the Starting Point
Eurostat’s 2025 figures put the average age of leaving the parental home at 30.2 in Italy, compared with 26.3 across the EU. That national measure describes a broad pattern; it does not explain any individual household’s choices.
Living with parents can involve affection, practical cooperation, financial necessity, or several of these at once. Treating it as evidence of immaturity skips the most useful questions.
Does the arrangement allow someone to save? Are they contributing to household expenses or caring for a relative? Would moving out improve their life, or simply leave them financially exposed?
Family resources also complicate comparisons between apparently similar young adults. Two people earning the same salary can have very different options if one receives help with rent and the other supports a parent.
A spare room, a deposit, or access to a family-owned property can influence which opportunities are realistic. Any honest account of independence should ask what support sits behind it, without turning that support into a personal failing.
Friendships Need Time and Places to Grow
An account of young Italy built only around salaries would miss much of what makes a place worth staying in. Friendship, familiarity, and the pleasure of belonging also matter.
Yet the published interviews used here provide less detail about private social lives than about housing and employment. They do not justify a sweeping claim that young Italians are especially sociable, lonely, or dependent on childhood friends.
A more useful approach is to examine the conditions that make friendship possible. Can people meet without spending much? Do working hours overlap? Is the last train early? Does someone have a home where friends can gather?
These questions connect social life to the same practical pressures that shape work and housing. A room far from the center may be affordable but make spontaneous plans difficult. Moving for employment may open professional doors while requiring someone to rebuild their everyday relationships.
For readers navigating that experience, Making Friends in Italy explores language exchanges, clubs, and routines that create repeated contact.
Ambition Can Also Mean Coming Home
Departure is only one possible expression of ambition.
In October 2025, Reuters interviewed Raffaele Girlando, a 24-year-old building-engineering student from Ragusa studying in Milan. He hoped to return to Sicily and work on the proposed Strait of Messina bridge. The project itself was contested, but his stated ambition was clear: to apply his skills in his home region.
That aspiration deserves space alongside stories of emigration. Professional advancement and attachment to home do not have to point in opposite directions.
It also invites a more precise question than whether young people should stay or leave: what would make returning a credible choice?
For one person, the answer might be work that uses their qualifications. For another, reliable transport, suitable housing, or the chance to combine a career with caring responsibilities. There is no single incentive that can stand in for an entire workable life.
There Is More Than One Young Italy
These accounts cover a housing campaigner, a healthcare worker, chefs, and an engineering student. They still leave much unseen.
A fuller interview project should include young people outside higher education, people with migrant family backgrounds, disabled young adults, young parents, and residents of smaller towns. Their experiences should be heard directly rather than inferred from someone else’s story.
Even within this limited selection, the decisions differ. One person challenges housing conditions. Another accepts a demanding commute. Others move abroad or imagine returning with useful skills.
The question “What is it really like to be young in Italy?” therefore needs more than a verdict of optimism or decline. It needs attention to ordinary choices: where to live, which job to accept, whom to stay close to, and what can reasonably be planned.
A useful measure of opportunity is whether those choices become easier to make—and whether a young person can build a life they value without needing every part of it to depend on luck or family money.
External Sources
- Il Giorno: Ilaria Lamera reflects on the student housing protests and her changing career, 2026
- Reuters: Housing pressures and commuting on Capri, April 2024
- Reuters, republished by Dunya News: Young Italian chefs working abroad, November 2023
- Reuters: Work and hopes of returning to southern Italy, October 2025
- Eurostat: Young people and housing conditions
- OECD Economic Surveys: Italy 2026—Young people in the labour market
