Moving to Sicily: Practical Tips and Lessons Learned
Are you considering a move to Sicily? This post is just for you.
Living in Sicily certainly changed me, and I absolutely fell in love with the island. I recently returned for a visit, and it reaffirmed in my mind that Sicily is my favorite region of Italy. It’s where my heart is.
That being said, living there wasn’t without its challenges. And if my husband and I have the opportunity to move back to Italy in the future, I’d have to think long and hard about choosing Sicily as our home again. I say that with a heavy heart because I truly love it there!
Most of the challenges you face as a foreigner living in Sicily are not unique to the island, but are common in Italy in general. However, those challenges seem to be enhanced in Sicily.
Aspects of life in the far south of Italy can be wild and disorganized. And depending on your personality, you may find many things downright frustrating.
Whether you're planning to live in Sicily for a year or make it your forever home, here are a few practical tips to consider before packing your bags.
Know people
This is the best tip I have for getting set up and adjusting to life in Sicily: Move to an area where you know someone. Do you have a friend or acquaintance who lives in Sicily or has family living there? Use those connections to ask questions and get practical help.
Before you ever arrive, if you know someone on the ground in Sicily, they do some legwork for you. We moved to Catania because we had friends living there. They were able to help us find an apartment to rent that provided a contract (not something every landlord in Sicily is willing to do), which we needed to get our residency.
Our friends also helped us to communicate at the comune, the office you will need to frequent to obtain your residency. Those visits to the comune were brutal, but they would have been nightmares if we didn’t have locals with us to help translate and ask questions.
We also learned from our friends where to find great food and do our shopping, how much things should cost, and how the public transportation worked. These are things that we would have discovered on our own eventually, but we were super grateful to know the tips and tricks right away.
If you don’t know anyone in Sicily, ask around and try to make a connection there. This is particularly important if you don’t speak Italian. You will most definitely need someone to help you with translation at appointments in the beginning.
Get important documents before leaving your home country
Of course, you’ll want to have ALL your documents in order before you arrive in Sicily. That includes making sure your passport and driver’s license won’t need to be renewed soon, and you’ll need the long form of your birth certificate and marriage certificate.
But did you know that you can also obtain some important Italian documents before you leave home? You can do this by visiting the Italian embassy closest to you.
Before I moved to Sicily, I made an appointment at the Italian embassy near me to get my codice fiscale. This is an Italian tax code that you will need early on. It was easy to get it in my home country, and certainly would have been more of a headache to obtain in Sicily.
If you are married, you will probably need a copy of your marriage certificate translated into Italian. This is also easier to do in your home country.
The Italian embassy can give you a list of authorized translators in your country. After contacting one of the translators, they will have you send your documents by email to be translated. Once you receive the translated documents, take them to the embassy to be stamped for approval.
I am SO glad that I took these steps before arriving in Sicily. Whatever you can get done (document-wise) before moving to Sicily will save you time, money, and sanity once you’re there.
Visit and stay in the town you’re interested in
Even if you’ve visited Sicily in the past, I highly recommend making an extended trip there to spend time in the town or area you’re interested in living in. You’ll see the place with different eyes than you did when you were there on vacation.
If you could visit even for a month, it would go a long way in helping you decide if the place is right for you. Make sure you stay in an apartment or house, rather than a hotel or B&B. This will force you to get used to more practical aspects of daily life, like grocery shopping, cooking, and your Sicilian neighbors.
While you visit, see if you can find out from other expats or foreigners what the local comune is like. If I learned anything in my time in Sicily, it’s that how they do things in one town can be different from the next. Ask others what their experience has been like and see if there’s a common theme, whether positive or negative.
It might seem obvious to visit a place before you move there, but I give this tip as someone who hadn’t been to Catania before moving there. We had been to Sicily before, but not Catania.
Not visiting beforehand wasn’t as big of a deal for me as it was for my husband. I had read and watched everything I could find about Sicily, especially Catania. I didn’t experience culture shock or homesickness, but my husband did.
In hindsight, we definitely should have visited Catania before moving there. It’s a different beast than the surrounding towns and countryside. The noise, garbage, and general chaos of that city were a lot for my husband to get used to. Eventually, he saw that there was a lot to love about Catania, but the initial culture shock put a damper on his first few months there.
Start learning Italian
Learning Italian is particularly important if you want to live in southern Italy. Far fewer people speak English in the south than in central and northern Italy.
As I mentioned earlier, appointments to obtain important documents related to your residency in Sicily can be very frustrating if you cannot communicate in Italian. Getting home internet or utilities connected can also be quite difficult and confusing if you cannot speak Italian.
This doesn’t mean you need to master Italian before you move to Sicily. But if you’re serious about living in Sicily, start taking some Italian lessons and listen to music, podcasts, and videos in slow Italian. Knowing some basics before you move will go a long way once you’re there.
You may already know that Sicily has its own dialect. Even if you start learning Italian before you move there, you might have a hard time understanding Sicilians when you arrive. This was my experience.
I had been casually learning Italian for a couple of years before I moved to Sicily. But when I arrived, I couldn’t understand anything that was said to me. I could say what I needed to get by, but I couldn’t understand anything coming at me.
Most Catanesi, people from Catania, speak very fast with strong accents. I couldn’t tell you if they speak in dialect or not. It’s just all hard for me to understand.
In my first couple of months in Sicily, I started to feel like I actually couldn’t understand anything in Italian. It wasn’t until we took our first trip off the island and visited Umbria that I realized I wasn’t a complete failure in the language. I could understand Italians in Umbria!
I mentioned at the outset that I’d have to think long and hard about making Sicily my home again, even though it’s my favorite part of Italy. One of the main reasons for that is the language. Personally, I understand Italians from other parts of Italy much more than Sicilians. It adds an extra layer of complexity to daily life in Sicily.
Your experience with the language may be completely different than mine. So don’t let it stop you from considering Sicily as your home.
Whether you end up in Sicily or another region of Italy, make it a priority to start learning the language. You’ll feel a greater connection to the place and a sense of satisfaction if you’re able to communicate with locals in your daily life.
Practice patience
If you’ve been interested in moving to Italy for a while, you’ve probably heard that the bureaucracy is complicated. Multiply that by 10 in Sicily.
By far, the hardest part of living in Sicily is the amount of time and effort it takes to get important things done. It can be incredibly confusing and random.
I did so much research beforehand and thought I knew the process to arrive and set up life in Italy, but there were SO many curveballs. Numerous strange and unexpected requests were made of me. Nothing went the way I thought it would when it came to getting my residency… and I have European citizenship.
I won’t bore and confuse you with the details of the struggles I had in this area. The takeaway is that if you really want to live in Sicily, prepare yourself for potential complications. This isn’t meant to scare you, but to encourage you to develop patience.
Accepting that things are done differently in Sicily than where you come from is so important. There’s no point in fighting the system. Just do your best to be laid-back and patient. Expect things to take longer to accomplish than they should, and you won’t be disappointed.
I feel that the benefits of living in Sicily outweigh the bureaucratic challenges. But the headache is real, and it can be lessened in other regions of Italy. You have to really love Sicily to choose it as your home over other places in Italy.
I’ll also mention that some spots in Sicily are more challenging than others when it comes to getting documents/residency. The big cities tend to be overwhelmed with immigration requests, so the system is very bogged down. Outside of the cities, it can be “easier” to get some things done.
The comune (administration office) that you deal with in Sicily depends on where you live. You cannot just go to any office. It has to be the one that looks after your municipality. So even if it’s particularly difficult to get what you need at your local comune, you cannot go to another one.
I hope these tips will help make your move to Sicily a little easier! The beauty, laid-back lifestyle, and food in Sicily will alleviate a lot of the initial stresses. I’m genuinely thrilled for anyone who can make the move and enjoy all that the island has to offer.
If you have any questions about moving to Sicily, leave a comment below or feel free to contact me personally.