In Anacapri the square metre beats Forte dei Marmi, yet resident income is nearly half. On the coast the price measures who buys, not who stays.
On Ponza, an island of barely three thousand residents off the coast of Lazio, a home sells for an average of €3,650 per square metre. That is the price of a sought-after seaside spot. Yet the people who live on Ponza all year round declare an average income of €17,424 — below the national average of €21,985. The two figures do not talk to each other. The square metre is paid for by Romans and Milanese buying a second home; the income is earned by fishermen and seasonal workers. In seaside villages the property market measures the spending power of those who arrive in July, not of those who stay in December.
Take Anacapri. A home costs €6,237 per square metre, more than in Forte dei Marmi, where you pay €5,285. Yet in Anacapri the average income is €25,509, in Forte dei Marmi €42,639: for the same price per metre, nearly seventeen thousand euros separate the people who live there. The same gap runs the length of the coast. In Positano a home costs €3,681 per square metre, the same as on Ponza. But in Positano those who stay declare €39,762 — more than double the residents of Ponza.
In Amalfi the square metre reaches €4,475 against a resident income of €26,547. In Golfo Aranci, in Sardinia, homes run at around €3,787 per metre and income stops at €23,916, barely above the Italian average. The thread linking Anacapri, Amalfi and Golfo Aranci is the same: prices from the wealthy North, incomes from a South that works three months a year. On the coast, the price of a home tells you what the view is worth. Not what the neighbour earns.
Average declared income per municipality — Source: DatiItalia, based on MEF 2023 data
There is one place where the sky-high price and the sky-high income coincide. It is Portofino. A home costs €10,767 per square metre, the highest figure in Italy, and its residents declare an average of €98,577 — the highest income of any Italian municipality. In Portofino the wealthy don't just arrive by boat: they are registered there. The same holds, in part, for Cortina d'Ampezzo, where the square metre reaches €9,419 and average income climbs to €38,975, and for Forte dei Marmi. These are the few towns where house prices and the richest municipalities draw the same map. On the southern coast that map splits in two: the houses from Portofino, the incomes from the inland.
Every municipality coloured by average declared income (2023)
Average declared income — Source: DatiItalia based on MEF 2023 data
The price per square metre does not tell apart the person buying to live there from the one buying for two weeks in August. In seaside villages the share of second homes can exceed that of first homes, but the figure separating the two does not exist municipality by municipality. We know the price, not who pays it. So the square metre of Ponza or Golfo Aranci ends up measuring the demand of those who do not live there.
The lowest average income in Italy, among towns above one thousand residents, is not on an expensive coast anyway. It is in Dinami, in Calabria, at €11,497, followed by Goro, on the Po delta, at €11,542. Goro lives on fishing and the lagoon, not on luxury tourism, and there homes are cheap. The difference between a poor village and an expensive-but-poor one lies entirely here: in the first the price follows income, in the second it betrays it.