Anyone here who has moved to Italy?
Milan?
How you like it?
pretty bad. Italian culture is very hard to integrate if you’re an outsider, despite their fame for being warm and welcoming. They’re just not very used to much immigration from all over, and they were never a global empire with many colonies
depends on your ability to speak italian at the conversational level
Not ideal, language and org wise, not ok
Honestly, I hated Milan, more so than other parts of Italy.
All of Italy has:
- Awful bureaucracy
- Arbitrary business hours
- Disorganisation
- Poor service
- Dirty streets, poor driving standards
- Intense language barrier if you can’t speak Italian.
But at least it has good food, beautiful architecture, nice weather and good scenery. Milan has none of those. In addition, Milan has:
- No beautiful scenery. It’s in a flat basin at least a couple of hours drive from the mountains/lakes and another couple of hours to the coast
- Crap food compared to other parts of Italy. Polenta? Yuck. Cotoletta? Just Schnitzel with a posh name.
- Bad weather. Sweltering humidity in summer, cold gloomy and grey in winter and lots of rain year round.
- Crap architecture compared to other Italian cities. Sure the Duomo is ok and the central train station is cool but Milan has far more modern buildings than Rome, Florence etc. It’s basically a German city but without the German efficiency.
- Snobby locals. Milanese are the Parisians of the south.
Frankly it can’t compare to the rest of Italy. Even Naples, for all its faults has something Milan lacks. Character.
What do you mean by arbitrary business hours? Most shops these days follow standard hours (that are longer than elsewhere in Europe), certainly in big cities like Milan. Closing for lunch and randomly at other times is really only a thing in small family-run places in the villages.
I’m also curious about corruption; I mean, I’m sure there is corruption behind the scenes like in any country, but I’ve never witnessed overt corruption, like cops or civil workers taking bribes form the public.
I agree about the weather, architecture and locals in Milan. Food is great, though! Not so much the traditional Milanese (although there are some good dishes, and the cotoletta isn’t chicken), but everything else; you can find any Italian regional cuisine and lots of international cuisine, and the dining scene is brilliant. And the Po plain is depressing, but Milan is one hour away from lake Como, and while the high mountains are 1.5-2 hours away, they’re the central Alps, with easy access and world-class hiking and skiing, they’re mot some random range.
I imagine (possibly incorrectly) that South Tyrol would be better on those points.
as much as i agree with most, the scenery is untrue - it takes 30 mins to get to places like lecco or como which are gorgeous and outside the old town you have beautiful vistas onto the alps, The coast is also quite near, takes 1,5 hrs to go to genoa where i often go on weekend trips, also as an architect i must say that it is untrue, milan was the heart of the developments in architecture since 1800s till 1950s and the edifices are less touristy than idk vatican which is kinda a basic bitch place and this is a city of da vinci. Apart from all the others i agree, really great place for short vacations or great for living if you are rich but otherwise kinda a lot to stomach.
You need to speak Italian.
Also, as an Italian, anyone who is not from Milan or Lombardy will tell you that Milan is honestly the ugliest, most depressing city in Italy.
It’s the economic and industrial heart of Italy, so instead of having a relatively large and intact historical core, it has a small historical core and the rest is more recent (and thus far uglier).
As for people saying bureaucracy sucks, this is a very outdated view. My mother recently died in Italy, and all my encounters with Italian bureaucracy were quick, painless and mostly online. And there were a lot of them.
Here is the issue with the digitalization of bureocracy: in most cases, it depends on you having a SPID or at least an electronic ID card. However, as a non-EU citizen, getting any of those is not easy. In fact, you can’t get those without first getting your first residence permit, which can take several months.
The residence permit is the best example of slow, outdated bureocracy. The procedure involves sending a bunch of photocopies by mail all the way to Rome. Then, the response from the central office gets sent back to your local police station. Next, months later, you go to the police station to get your fingerprints registered. Then, you wait a few more months to get the confirmation that your permit is ready. Finally, you set an appointment (around a month later) to have them hand you your permit.
Agreed with the rest, you must speak Italian. But I don’t think this is really a strange thing, I mean it is Italy, you can’t expect any host country to make the effort with you in English and you not do the same.
I disagree that the bureaucracy is terrible, this to me feels like a stereotype that was once true and now just gets repeated by people who haven’t had to do anything official recently.
It can be slower than elsewhere, yes (although faster than France!), but in the last couple of years there’s been a massive digitisation of services and a lot of things can now be done online.
Even the things you need to do in person, in my personal experience, were painless (getting the electronic ID card, registering with the comune, converting drivers licence, etc)
Life in general, if you have a decent job you can live pretty well. Getting said decent job can be hard, but if you have some experience in your sector, speak the language play English, good jobs can be found. It’s shit for new graduates, which is why young Italians leave, but once you’ve got experience or skills to sell, it’s not bad. As with everywhere, depends on your sector, role, and qualifications.
Milan is a very “non-Italian” city, it’s pretty bland compared to elsewhere. It’s also very expensive, and cold in winter. Unfortunately that’s where a good percentage of the jobs are (but that doesn’t meant you can’t find something elsewhere, I’m in Rome)
Services for citizens or anyone with a SPID can be quite efficient nowadays. However, let’s not forget the slow and inefficient residence permit procedure that all non-EU citizens must endure yearly. That is and has always been like this. The only improvement in the last decade has been the addition of an appointment system for every step, and the creation of offices where you can ask for the status of your procedure.
There’s loads of places you can get by without speaking the local language well.
Here in Switzerland in the cities you can get by with just English comfortably. I do speak a bit, but I’m not great.
Do you have local friends?
Nope
I moved from California to Milan and love it. And I find bureaucracy more efficient.