Reddit user NPPraxis gave me permission to reprint a couple of post of theirs here that readers of this blog might find interesting. You can find more info about their travels over at adventureofours.com.

Can I make a suggestion to check out?

Southern Italy.

I’ve got a lot of experience with the Puglia region, the second poorest after Sicily (but Sicily has Mafia/crime problems). I’ve written some past rants about this, but long story short:

It’s currently dirt poor (30% unemployment) but doesn’t have most of the problems most poor regions have because taxes from the rich northern Italy give everyone free healthcare and subsidized housing and families help each other out culturally.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Brindisi (the third largest city in Puglia, a port town with an airport with direct flights to Rome/Milan). You can rent downtown apartments for $350-400/mo, and then go to open markets (it is all farmland) and get food for insanely cheap prices. Eating out is expensive by Thailand standards ($2-3 for a pizza, $10 for white tablecloth dining), but the open markets with the farmers are insane. I’ve purchased 20 lbs of food (fresh fruits and vegetables) for $5 with some negotiating help from a local, and it might’ve been $7 without the help. Wine and seafood are also insanely cheap ($2/liter local wines are very common in mom and pop shops), as well as local cheeses. The rent (and electricity/utilities) is the most expensive part.

Almost any city in Puglia is that cheap. Bari is only a little more expensive, but near tons of very nice beaches. Lecce is also beautiful and has nice architecture (though is not near water).

While it’s a little more expensive than a third world country, you have the safety and security and services of a first world country with the food prices of a third world. Plus you can take a train or flight to anywhere in Europe for dirt cheap. It’s like $30 to fly to Rome on RyanAir from Brindisi or Bari.

I’d love to get your experience on how it compares.

Side note: Puglia is bustling in summer and very quiet outside, so consider the time of year you go. Hit me up if you want any suggestions. I’m biased because I also speak fluent Italian so I get around easily, so I’m not sure how easy it is for a non-speaker.

Biggest issue: Italian paperwork and scheduling. It’s so hard to get people to do anything for you if you are, for example, working with contractors.

Currently, I only go for about two weeks a year. I have a family member, however, that is there just shy of about half the year, and I now technically own an inherited property there. (Currently, family members watch it, but I’d like to figure out a way to turn it in to an airbnb.) When I was young, we would spend roughly half our summers there (just shy of 90 days). Brindisi is also the main sea port to Greece and Albania, so you could technically look at making visa runs from there. My Italian friends tell me that they frequently take night boats to Albania as a cheap vacation because Albania is even cheaper! I personally have a US/EU dual citizenship so I don’t have to worry about Visa times.

For FI, you don’t need a car there. There’s a train line connecting the major cities (goes from Rome or Naples through Bari > Brindisi > Lecce). But, a car is rather handy to get around, because there’s tons of little towns and beaches (it’s like the rural parts of the US east coast- a small town every 15 minutes). Brindisi (where I have mainly stayed) has a lot of accessible beaches nearby, but the really nice world-class white-stand-crystal-blue-water beaches are about 30-60 minutes away (both north and southeast). We’d occasionally ride with a family member for “fun” things, but for daily life a car wasn’t necessary.

So if you go for vacation, rent a car, check out the beach towns. If you go to live cheaply, you don’t need the car, though it’s really nice if you want to tour the region (lots of wineries and farms that do open houses and stuff, lots of small towns or abandoned castles). A Vespa/motorbike might be a decent alternative, or even an electric bicycle!

Italian southern small towns are built very condensed. Brindisi, for example, has no suburbs- or rather, the suburbs are all apartment buildings. So while the population is roughly 100k, it’s like a third the size or less compared to what you’d imagine a 100k city in the US. It’s apartment buildings right up til town ends, then farmland. So if you rent an apartment in Brindisi, you can walk the whole city in ~30 minutes.

{EDIT: Important note! Brindisi is both the name of the province AND the capital city of that province. If you look at properties, rentals, or airbnbs, verify that it’s the city of Brindisi (which is a coastal city), and not “Ostuni, Brindisi” (a nearby town 30 minutes away). Brindisi looks like this (small portion of the downtown). with streets like this. When I’m in AirBnB I always use the map because it tries to put me in even cheaper small towns. That’s a note for FI though- you could technically live in an even cheaper place like Ostuniif you didn’t mind having nothing to do and being 30 minutes away from train lines and the ocean (i.e. you need a car to do anything). Also, if you don’t care about the ocean, and want to stay cheap, Lecce is similar in size and price to Brindisi, just more inland and with Florence-like architecture.}

There’s full LTE coverage and DSL internet is cheap (never looked in to cable). I was just there last month and the city was in the process of installing fiber (I heard conflicting stories of whether it would be gigabit or 100 mbit, but either way…).

I hype Brindisi because it’s where I have experience, but Bari is 3x the size, and only a little more expensive. I just know about Brindisi’s daily farmers markets and weekly open markets- I assume Bari has something similar because even smaller towns like Ostuni have similar setups. Literally, every time I go to Brindisi, I come with an empty suitcase and bring home a new wardrobe from the Thursday Morning market or the Chinese store (literally, that’s the name). Tons of $3 clothing, $50-100 suits from expensive brands, etc. It helps if you can haggle.

This is how much food I got for €5.30. There was some haggling- for example, it was near closing time (noon) for the market and we offered to buy the watermelon if they threw in some zucchini free, and we got all of that zucchini.

Puglia is a fascinating region. It has tons of history, but it doesn’t have the money to market itself. There’s lots of old ruins and castles, but they aren’t toured or maintained as well as up north. There’s no tour guides that can show you around them. The government maintains some of the historical stuff but doesn’t market it. All the marketing is for northern Italy.

For 2-3 months of the year, Puglia is bustling with northern Italian tourists who go south for the beaches and to avoid all the foreign tourists who flood the north. (In July/August, you can’t turn around in Rome without elbowing a tourist.) I say “bustling”, not flooded- all the businesses are out in full force to provide for the visitors, but they aren’t everywhere and the streets have lots of space. During the rest of the year, the cities are very quiet.

One other note: There is a siesta culture (“riposta”) in southern Italy! This was very hard for me to adjust to. Basically, everyone goes home for lunch at noon. Restaurants might stay open til 2:00 so people can get food to go, but by 2:00 everything will be closed. If you’re late for lunch you can’t get lunch anywhere in town. Even the grocery stores are closed. Everything reopens around 5-6 PM and stays open late (many restaurants til midnight or even 2 AM).

I wrote some older rants about Naples and Puglia (on the keto subreddit so focus is on food), and Puglia for FI as well.

Warning: One thing to be aware of if you are planning a longer-term stay- taxation. Italian taxation is a messy thing. Their tax rates are very high, but there’s a lot of benefits (free healthcare, for one- and healthcare is cheap even if you pay for it cash if you don’t have the healthcare). They’ll want to tax you on your US income IIRC (or the difference between the Italian tax rate and US tax rate). If you are leanFIRE you might be in a low enough tax bracket that this doesn’t matter, or maybe capital gains are different- talk to a tax attorney if you are thinking of getting residence.)

You have no taxes on your primary residence (bonus if you buy property!), which has positives (poor people never lose their houses, people just move back in with their parents) and negatives (tons of abandoned historical properties in the south with no owners that never get foreclosed on).

Let me know if you have any questions about it 🙂