Relocals, from expats to locals - and perhaps Italy’s most authentic storytellers

Italy has never lacked people willing to tell its story. There are guidebooks, tourism campaigns, television programmes, influencers and enough drone footage of Tuscan hills to last several lifetimes. Yet some of the most persuasive stories about Italy today are being produced by people who were never commissioned to promote it.

They came from elsewhere for work, love, retirement, a house, a business opportunity or simply a different life. At first, many would have called themselves expats. Then something happened. They stayed.

They dealt with the comune, found tradespeople, met neighbours and learnt the small things that come only from everyday life. They stopped merely living in Italy and began to live Italy.

We call them Relocals.

The word brings together relocation and local. A Relocal is not simply a foreigner with an Italian address, but someone who has chosen Italy as a place to live, built a genuine relationship with a territory and often started telling that experience to people elsewhere.

Some have large social-media followings, many do not. What matters is trust. Calling them “foreign influencers in Italy” would miss the point: the most valuable voice may belong to someone whose smaller community is genuinely considering a move. They do not necessarily influence clicks. They influence decisions.

Taken together, they may represent an extraordinary, decentralised and largely unsolicited instrument for promoting Italy abroad. Nobody recruited them or handed them a script. They chose Italy, tested it against everyday life and started talking.

Relocals is the brainchild of that observation, but also of years of practical experience.

The idea has grown out of the work of ITS ITALY, which in recent years has become a reference point for international people trying to turn an attraction to Italy into something tangible: a home, an investment, a relocation or a different way of living part or all of their lives here.

Working alongside people before, during and after that choice has made one thing obvious: the story does not end when somebody gets the keys or completes the move. In many ways, that is where it starts. When does somebody stop feeling like a visitor and begin to feel part of a place? What makes them stay? And what do they tell people back home?

That curiosity follows logically from another piece of work developed through NOMAG: a wider research into what international digital nomads and remote workers are looking for when they consider Italy. The two projects are different, but share a wider question: what happens between the international desire for Italy and the reality of choosing it?

NOMAG looks at people considering Italy. Relocals starts one step further along that journey. Its protagonists have already made the choice.

The project will be presented in Rome on 24 September 2026 with an initial study of 100 Relocals. Through questionnaires and interviews, that first group will help us draw a preliminary picture of who they are, why they chose Italy, what happened after they arrived and how they now describe the country to others.

It is not a definitive census. It is a starting point from which to ask better questions. And the 100 are only the beginning.

After Rome, Relocals will go on the road across Italy.

The road show will call Relocals together where they live: large cities, small towns, celebrated destinations and places that seldom appear in international coverage. We want to meet people of every nationality, listen to them and invite them to contribute.

The working language will be English, but Relocals is not an American or British project. English is simply the shared language that allows people from different countries to join the same conversation. The passport is not what connects them. The choice is.

At each stage we will return to some of the questions first asked of the original 100. Why Italy? Why this place? What surprised you? What helped you belong? What still makes life unnecessarily difficult? And when somebody abroad asks what it is really like to live here, what do you tell them?

But the questions themselves will also evolve. The road show will not simply take finished research around the country and repeat its conclusions. The road show will become part of the research.

Every stop will add new people, places, evidence and probably contradictions. Participants will not simply be an audience for Relocals. They will help build Relocals.

By the end of the journey, the ambition is not merely to update the findings presented in Rome, but to understand how the picture itself has changed. Which assumptions survived? Which disappeared? What differences emerged between parts of Italy and between recent and long-term arrivals?

We the Italians is the natural partner. Its international audience and relationship with communities that care about Italy beyond its borders make it the right platform not merely to report on Relocals, but to help find and involve them.

The intention is to develop the journey together: beginning in Rome, taking it around Italy, opening it to the We the Italians communities and seeing what people teach us along the way.

Relocals should never become another campaign telling people what they are supposed to say about Italy.

A tourism campaign can show the Italy a country wants foreigners to see. A guidebook can tell you where to go. But somebody who has spent years in a town, dealt with bureaucracy, neighbours and ordinary life, and still chooses to remain has another sort of authority.

Their account is often less polished, but more believable. A Relocal may say that the village is wonderful but public transport is hopeless, or that buying the house was easier than navigating the paperwork afterwards. That does not weaken the story. Often it makes the positive part credible.

Some of what Relocals say will be flattering; some may be uncomfortable. Both are useful. A country that wants to attract international residents, talent and investment needs to understand where the promise matches lived experience and where it does not.

“Expat” often describes somebody who has moved abroad while remaining slightly outside the place where they live. “Relocal” tries to describe what may happen next: becoming local enough that the place is no longer scenery.

Italy becomes the supermarket, the neighbour, the local festival, the town hall and the view from the kitchen window on an ordinary Tuesday.

Italy’s international image has traditionally been built around the exceptional: art, food, history, villas and sunsets. Relocals can add something different — the credibility of ordinary life, told by people who had other places to choose from and chose this one.

Collectively, they could become an extraordinary instrument of Italian promotion. Not because they are all Instagram influencers - many are nothing of the sort - but because they are credible storytellers of a choice they actually made.

Rome on 24 September is therefore not the destination. It is the first photograph.

From there, ITS ITALY and We the Italians will take that photograph around the country and invite the people inside it - and many who are not yet inside it - to redraw it with us.

By the end, we hope to understand not only who the Relocals are, but what Italy looks like through the eyes of people who arrived from elsewhere, decided to become part of it and now tell its story back to the world.

They may turn out to be one of the most powerful promotional networks Italy has ever had.

Not because anybody asked them to sell Italy.

Because they chose to live it.