FM · Marche
Photo unknown · CC0
The short version
Grottazzolina is a village of about 3,200 people 227 m up, 18 km from the sea in Marche.
It has a bar, but no shop, pharmacy, doctor or restaurant — for those you drive. The population is ageing: on births and deaths alone there would be about 500 people fewer here in twenty years. Internet is quick — 245 Mbps measured.
We could measure 6 of the 9 things we look at in a village. We have nothing yet on the weather, air quality and house prices, so those are left out of every score below rather than counted as zero.
245Mbps
Average download
Measured across 402 tests · 25 ms latency
18km
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
Pescara PSR · 90 km
Flies to the UK, Belgium, Germany, Romania and 5 more.
9 countries in all.
Perugia PEG · 88 km
Flies to the UK, Albania, Belgium, Malta and 3 more.
7 countries in all.
Ancona Falconara AOI · 59 km
Flies to Albania, Germany, the UK, Belgium and 2 more.
6 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
23 min
drive to the motorway (Fermo - Porto San Giorgio)
By rail
23 min
drive to the nearest station
Milan
direct from Ancona
2 h 57 min
55 km to that station
Bari
direct from Giulianova
3 h 2 min
50 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.
By sea
56 km
to Ancona, the nearest port with a scheduled crossing
Ancona 56 km
Sails to Patras, Split and Zadar.
Ancona 56 km
Sails to Patras, Split and Zadar.
Ancona 57 km
Sails to Patras, Split and Zadar.
Crossings as mapped in OpenStreetMap. Seasonal routes are listed the same as year-round ones, so check the operator before counting on a winter sailing.
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
Good
How reachable the outside world is. Well connected for a village this size
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
Fair
Foreigners already living there. A small foreign contingent
Is Grottazzolina 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.
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
13.9% of Grottazzolina
451
From northern and western Europe, or the anglosphere
0.3% of residents
11
Largest groups
China
96
Morocco
59
Romania
55
Pakistan
43
Albania
25
North Macedonia
22
Daily life
Counted inside the municipal boundary, from OpenStreetMap.
1
Bars & cafés
1
Post offices
2
Petrol stations
2
Schools
6
Sports grounds
Not in the village: a grocery, a restaurant, a pharmacy, a doctor, a bank or cash machine, anywhere to stay, 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
Near the coast
18 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
Lifts within reach
19 km away
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 227 m village is something you have to ask the comune for.
The honest part
Counting births and deaths only, the population would change by -15.1% over twenty years. It assumes nobody moves in or out, so treat it as the direction of travel rather than a prediction.
Mean age
46.9
Over 65
25 %
Under 15
11 %
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 73% 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, the weather and house prices in this village, so this verdict leaves them out.
Thin
Based on 65% 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, the weather and house prices in this village, so this verdict leaves them out.
Thin
Based on 51% 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, the weather and house prices 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.
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
—
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 + ITI3 fertility 2024 (TFR 1.11)
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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