Italy is the easiest country in this series to want and one of the harder ones to think clearly about. Two weeks of trains, piazzas, markets and long lunches can leave a Canadian half-convinced they should sell the house and move, and the brochure version of that decision is everywhere: cheap stone cottages, la dolce vita, a slower and richer life. I am not immune to it. I find the Italian case genuinely compelling, which is exactly why I want to be careful with it. The useful question for this series is not whether Italy is wonderful, because it plainly can be. The question is whether the Italy you fall for on holiday survives an ordinary Tuesday: the bureaucracy, the taxes, the slower institutions, the language, the regional inequality, and the gap between visiting a place and being administered by it.

The short version, which the rest of this piece will earn, is that Italy rewards one kind of Canadian and quietly punishes another, and the dividing line is almost entirely about where your money comes from and how much of Italian life you are actually willing to join. Bring your income with you, choose one region with real intent, treat Italian as non-optional, and Italy offers one of the deepest lifestyle returns in Europe. Arrive needing to earn locally, expecting effortless paperwork, planning to live in English, or hoping for a simple tax return, and it becomes one of the weaker choices in Western Europe. Italy is unusually good at being lived in slowly. It is unusually bad at being treated as a frictionless international product.