In Cavargna the average income is a third of the national figure. And the bottom of the ranking isn't in the south — it's in the Alps.
It isn't in Calabria. It's Cavargna, 88 taxpayers, a handful of houses a thousand metres above the western shore of the lake. The average declared income here in 2023 was €7,349 — a third of the national average, which stands at €21,985. While newspapers debate Italians leaving for Spain or Greece in search of higher pay, the country's widest income gap is entirely domestic.
On the Ligurian coast, Portofino declares €98,577 a head. Thirteen times Cavargna. Two towns, the same Italy.
Source: DatiItalia — based on Italian tax-return data (MEF, 2023)
The usual story puts the south at the bottom and the north on top. The edges of the data say otherwise. Calabria's poorest town is Dinami, at €11,497 — more than half above Cavargna. The low tail of the ranking isn't southern, it's Alpine. Gurro, in the high Piedmont, declares €8,582. San Nazzaro Val Cavargna and Val Rezzo, again in the Como mountains, keep it company.
These are tiny places, often a few dozen filers, where income measures the absence of salaried work more than real wealth. But the number is the number. And it turns the map everyone carries in their head upside down.
Source: DatiItalia — based on Italian tax-return data (MEF, 2023)
Source: DatiItalia — based on Italian tax-return data (MEF, 2023)
Cavargna didn't grow poor overnight. Average income was €6,678 in 2008: in fifteen years it gained less than seven hundred euros. Over the same period Milan went from €30,626 to €40,521. The gap didn't narrow. It widened.
The income the tax office records is taxable income, not net worth. That's why Lajatico, tenor Andrea Bocelli's home town near Pisa, ranks second in Italy at €61,361, and Basiglio, on Milan's edge, third at €52,147. High earners cluster where it pays to declare. Look at the richest towns and the logic runs the other way.
It's the same reason a city like Perugia, praised in the press as one of Italy's most digital provincial capitals, stops at €25,429 in average income: just above the national mean, far from the north's showcase towns. Cavargna and Portofino sit in the same income table, at opposite ends: €7,349 against €98,577.