Cheap-house renovator
Good
Based on everything that matters to them
Chasing price per square metre. Tolerates isolation, but a village that is emptying fast is a house that will never resell.
AQ · Abruzzo
Aielli
- Residents
- 1,370
- Elevation
- 1,021 m
- Area
- 37.5 km²
Photo Verdenex84 · CC BY-SA 4.0
The short version
Aielli is a village of about 1,400 people high in the mountains at 1,021 m in Abruzzo.
It has a shop, a pharmacy, a bar and a restaurant, but no doctor — for those you drive. The population is ageing: on births and deaths alone there would be about 250 people fewer here in twenty years. Internet is quick for somewhere this small — 387 Mbps measured.
We could measure 9 of the 9 things we look at in a village.
387Mbps
Average download
Measured across 206 tests · 17 ms latency
101days
Clear skies a year
July averages 21.9°C
68km
To the sea
On the map
Where this actually is
The village in Italy, then in its region with the nearest others we have measured.
- Celano0.9 km
- Cerchio2.3 km
- Collarmele5.1 km
- Pescina6.6 km
- San Benedetto dei Marsi6.7 km
- Gagliano Aterno8.7 km
Boundaries from ISTAT administrative limits via openpolis/geojson-italy, licensed CC BY 4.0, simplified for drawing. Position from Wikidata. Distances are straight-line.
Getting in and out
How you reach the rest of the world
Three ways out: the train, the motorway, the plane. Each one leads with how long it takes to reach it by car — ISTAT measures that for every comune in Italy — and then what it gets you once you are there.
By air
59 min
drive to the nearest airport
Rome Fiumicino FCO · 115 km
Flies to Spain, France, the USA, Germany and 47 more.
51 countries in all.
Rome Ciampino CIA · 88 km
Flies to the UK, Poland, Romania, Hungary and 17 more.
21 countries in all.
Pescara PSR · 63 km
Flies to the UK, Belgium, Germany, Romania and 5 more.
9 countries in all.
Countries with a scheduled route that carried real passengers in 2024, from Eurostat. Airlines add and drop routes; check before you book a life around one.
By road
5 min
drive to the motorway (Aielli - Celano)
By rail
1 h 1 min
drive to the nearest station
Milan
direct from Frosinone
5 h 23 min
54 km to that station
Naples
direct from Frosinone
1 h 10 min
54 km to that station
Bari
direct from Frosinone
5 h 27 min
54 km to that station
Fastest direct train in the published Trenitalia timetable — one train, no changes. A city missing from this list is one you can still reach, but only by changing. Italo is not in the open feed, so on Milan and Naples the real best may be quicker.
How it scores
How this village does, point by point
Each line is one question, answered from measured data and rated from poor to excellent. A low mark does not mean a bad village. It means you would have to drive, or wait, or put up with something.
Shops and everyday needs
Good
Daily needs in the village itself. Daily needs are covered inside the village
Getting anywhere else
Thin
How reachable the outside world is. Remote — the outside world is a commitment
Is the village emptying?
Fair
Is the population holding or draining away. Shrinking slowly, like most of rural Italy
Somewhere to eat or stay
Thin
Signs of life: bars, places to eat, places to stay. Very little open in the evening
The weather
Fair
Sun, winter, summer. Four real seasons, none of them extreme
Internet
Excellent
Fibre reach and measured speed. Fibre nearly everywhere, and fast where anyone has measured it
The air you breathe
Very good
Air quality against WHO guidelines. Clean air by WHO guidelines
Other foreigners here
Poor
Foreigners already living there. Few foreign residents already here
What a house costs
Excellent
What property actually costs. Cheap by any measure
Is Aielli the right one, though?
It is one of 5,664 villages measured the same way. Answer six questions and we will rank every one of them against what you actually want.
What it costs
About EUR 485 a square metre
Agenzia delle Entrate OMI valuation bands for the second half of 2025. These are official valuation ranges, not asking prices, and the courts treat them as indications of broad magnitude rather than an appraisal.
Aielli against every village we have priced
cheaper than 85% of the villages we have priced
EUR 200EUR 3,000
Kernel density over 5440 comuni. The long right tail is the ski and coastal market; most villages sit in the dense cluster on the left.
OMI range for residential
median across 3 zone(s)
EUR 390 – EUR 580
Rent
same source, same zones
EUR 1.9 / m² a month
The monthly five
Five villages under EUR 500 a square metre
We hold an OMI valuation for 5,440 Italian villages. 915 of them come in under EUR 500 a square metre — about EUR 50,000 for a 100 m² house. Once a month we send five of them, measured exactly the way Aielli is on this page.
One email a month. No listings, no agents, nothing sold, one click unsubscribes.
Who else is here
The people already from somewhere else
Resident foreigners by citizenship, from ISTAT's 1 January 2025 count. Residents, not holiday-home owners — someone who registered with the town hall.
Foreign residents
8.9% of Aielli
122
From northern and western Europe, or the anglosphere
0.0% of residents
0
Largest groups
Romania
44
Morocco
42
Dominican Republic
5
Egypt
5
Kosovo
5
Ukraine
5
A year here
What the calendar actually feels like
January averages 2.3°C and July 21.9°C.
16days
Above 30°C
64days
Of frost
101days
Clear days
The air
Measured against WHO guidelines
The line is the yearly limit the World Health Organization recommends staying under — not a line below which the air is safe. A bar that crosses it means the air here is above what the WHO advises.
PM2.5
7.9 µg/m³ · 1.58× guideline
Above the WHO annual guideline (marked)
PM10
11.8 µg/m³ · 0.79× guideline
Within the WHO annual guideline (marked)
NO₂
3.5 µg/m³ · 0.35× guideline
Within the WHO annual guideline (marked)
A note on the data
18 days a year exceed the WHO daily PM2.5 guideline. That is normal for central Italy and worth knowing anyway.
Daily life
What is actually in the village
Counted inside the municipal boundary, from OpenStreetMap.
2
Groceries
2
Bars & cafés
3
Restaurants
1
Pharmacies
1
Banks & ATMs
2
Post offices
1
Petrol stations
1
Places to stay
6
Sports grounds
Not in the village: a doctor, a school, a coworking space. For those, you drive.
What there is to do
Living there, not just arriving
Not how you leave — what is within reach on a free day. Every distance here is a straight line, and in the Apennines the road is much longer.
The sea
Well inland
68 km away
Measured to open water against the coastline itself — which is not the same as a beach you can park at.
The nearest lift
Skiing nearby
11 km away
Fontefredda. A lift or a marked downhill piste in OpenStreetMap. Small Apennine stations open and close with the snow.
Ski areas within reach
- Roccaraso - Rivisondoli31 lifts · 44 km
- Campo Imperatore2 lifts · 41 km
Named ski areas in OpenStreetMap, biggest first rather than nearest. Lift counts are aerialways mapped inside the area — drag lifts included, so a number in the single digits is a village station, not a resort.
A note on the data
No sagre yet. Italy has no national open dataset of village festivals — Lombardia publishes one, Abruzzo, Marche and Umbria do not, so for now the calendar of a 1021 m village is something you have to ask the comune for.
The honest part
Who lives here, and for how much longer
Counting births and deaths only, the population would change by -19.1% over twenty years. It assumes nobody moves in or out, so treat it as the direction of travel rather than a prediction.
Mean age
48.7
Over 65
30 %
Under 15
12 %
Who it fits
Three ways of wanting a village
The same village suits three people very differently, because they want different things from it. Where we are missing data that one of them cares about, we say so — a verdict built on less is worth less.
Remote worker
Good
Based on everything that matters to them
Needs bandwidth and an airport more than it needs a pharmacy. Will trade services for cheap space and a fast train.
Retiree / semi-retired
Fair
Based on everything that matters to them
Wants a doctor nearby, a hospital that exists, sun, a house that costs less than the flat back home, and other foreigners to talk to.
Nearby
The next villages along
Closest first, measured in a straight line. They may be over a regional border — a border is not a distance.
There are 5666 villages measured so far. Have them ranked for you, or search all of them.
Compare on one thing
Every number on this page came from somewhere
20 sources · last refreshed 2026-07-31
AGCOM — ultra-broadband coverage by municipality
geo.agcom.it
—
Agenzia Entrate - OMI
www.agenziaentrate.gov.it
2025-12-31
Eurostat air transport statistics, and OurAirports
ec.europa.eu
2024-12-31
ISTAT — municipal accessibility to transport infrastructure (2023)
www.istat.it
2022-12-31
ISTAT — resident population by citizenship
demo.istat.it
2025-01-01
ISTAT POSAS (residents by age and sex, per municipality)
demo.istat.it
2026
Italian Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
it.wikipedia.org
—
Model: cohort-component, no migration. ISTAT POSAS (residents by age and sex, per municipality) 2026 + Italian life table 2024 + ITF1 fertility 2024 (TFR 1.12)
ec.europa.eu
2026+20y
Ookla Open Data, fixed broadband tiles (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
github.com
2026Q1
Open-Meteo air quality (CAMS European reanalysis)
open-meteo.com
2024
Open-Meteo ERA5 archive (2015-2024 daily reanalysis)
open-meteo.com
2015/2024
OpenStreetMap (Overpass)
www.openstreetmap.org
—
OpenStreetMap (Overpass)
—
OpenStreetMap (Overpass)
www.openstreetmap.org
—
OSRM routing over OpenStreetMap
127.0.0.1
—
OSRM routing over OpenStreetMap
—
Trenitalia timetable via the Italian National Access Point (NeTEx)
www.cciss.it
—
Wikidata (P1082/P2046/P2044, sourced from ISTAT)
www.wikidata.org
2017-01-01
Wikidata (P1082/P2046/P2044, sourced from ISTAT)
it.wikipedia.org
—
Wikidata P18 / Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org
—
Field-by-field definitions and caveats live in the data dictionary.
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