CH · Abruzzo
Photo Mark.murphy · Public domain
The short version
Palombaro is a village of about 900 people in the hills at 536 m in Abruzzo.
It has a restaurant, but no shop, pharmacy, doctor or bar — for those you drive. The population is ageing: on births and deaths alone there would be about 200 people fewer here in twenty years. Internet is quick for somewhere this small — 186 Mbps measured.
We could measure 7 of the 9 things we look at in a village. We have nothing yet on the weather and air quality, so those are left out of every score below rather than counted as zero.
186Mbps
Average download
Measured across 36 tests · 21 ms latency
28km
To the sea
On the map
The village in Italy, then in its region with the nearest others we have measured.
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
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
55 min
drive to the nearest airport
Rome Ciampino CIA · 139 km
Flies to the UK, Poland, Romania, Hungary and 17 more.
21 countries in all.
Naples NAP · 138 km
Flies to the UK, France, Spain, Germany and 15 more.
19 countries in all.
Pescara PSR · 34 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
50 min
drive to the motorway (unnamed toll gate)
By rail
52 min
drive to the nearest station
Milan
direct from Pescara
4 h 13 min
38 km to that station
Naples
direct from Isernia
1 h 40 min
59 km to that station
Bari
direct from Vasto S.Salvo
2 h 6 min
44 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
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.
Poor
Daily needs in the village itself. Most daily errands mean leaving the village
Poor
How reachable the outside world is. Remote — the outside world is a commitment
Fair
Is the population holding or draining away. Shrinking slowly, like most of rural Italy
Poor
Signs of life: bars, places to eat, places to stay. Very little open in the evening
Very good
Fibre reach and measured speed. Fibre nearly everywhere, and fast where anyone has measured it
Excellent
Foreigners already living there. An established foreign community
Excellent
What property actually costs. Cheap by any measure
Is Palombaro 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
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.
Palombaro against every village we have priced
cheaper than 82% of the villages we have priced
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 2 zone(s)
EUR 405 – EUR 605
Rent
same source, same zones
EUR 2.0 / 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 Palombaro is on this page.
One email a month. No listings, no agents, nothing sold, one click unsubscribes.
Who else is here
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
15.5% of Palombaro
146
From northern and western Europe, or the anglosphere
7.4% of residents
70
Largest groups
United Kingdom
62
Romania
16
Ukraine
11
Ivory Coast
9
Bangladesh
7
Moldova
7
Daily life
Counted inside the municipal boundary, from OpenStreetMap.
1
Restaurants
1
Petrol stations
2
Places to stay
13
Sports grounds
Not in the village: a grocery, a bar, a pharmacy, a doctor, a bank or cash machine, a post office, a school, a coworking space. For those, you drive.
What there is to do
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
Coast within reach
28 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
7.8 km away
Del Rifugio. A lift or a marked downhill piste in OpenStreetMap. Small Apennine stations open and close with the snow.
Ski areas within reach
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 536 m village is something you have to ask the comune for.
The honest part
Counting births and deaths only, the population would change by -22.1% over twenty years. It assumes nobody moves in or out, so treat it as the direction of travel rather than a prediction.
Mean age
50.4
Over 65
32 %
Under 15
9 %
Who it fits
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.
Fair
Based on 87% of what matters to them
Chasing price per square metre. Tolerates isolation, but a village that is emptying fast is a house that will never resell.
We have not measured air quality and the weather in this village, so this verdict leaves them out.
Fair
Based on 87% of what matters to them
Needs bandwidth and an airport more than it needs a pharmacy. Will trade services for cheap space and a fast train.
We have not measured air quality and the weather in this village, so this verdict leaves them out.
Fair
Based on 83% of what 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.
We have not measured air quality and the weather in this village, so this verdict leaves them out.
Nearby
Closest first, measured in a straight line. They may be over a regional border — a border is not a distance.
Pennapiedimonte
3.8 km away · CH
Civitella Messer Raimondo
4.7 km away · CH
Fara San Martino
6.0 km away · CH
There are 5666 villages measured so far. Have them ranked for you, or search all of them.
Compare on one thing
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
OpenStreetMap (Overpass)
www.openstreetmap.org
—
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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