Milan is Italy’s wealthiest city, with a GDP per capita of around €52,800, yet it is also the city with the highest cost of living and the worst air quality among the country’s major metropolitan areas. Trento, rarely part of the debate on urban competitiveness, instead leads the national smartness ranking with 52.7 points out of 100, ahead of Milan, Rome, and Turin. This is the paradox at the heart of the new Smart City Index, developed in the report “Where and Why Do Italians Live Best? The Smart City Index”, which for the first time measures and compares twenty Italian regional capitals and major European capitals across six equally weighted dimensions (economy, governance, mobility, environment, people, and living), built on normalized Eurostat and OECD indicators on a 0-100 scale.
Published by Rome Business School’s Research Outreach Center, authored by Francesco Baldi, Lecturer at RBS’s International Master in Finance, and Valerio Mancini, Director of the Center and representative of the Rome Smart City Lab Advisory Board at the Municipality of Rome; the report pairs the index with a second interpretive lens, the “geography of happiness”: by cross-referencing the scores with data on income, cost of living, and real purchasing power, the study shows that household wellbeing does not always align with the wealth a territory produces.
“A high GDP is not enough if the cost of living reduces accessibility. Having quality universities is not enough if the labour market does not absorb their graduates’ skills. Infrastructure alone is not enough if mobility remains congested or the urban environment is fragile. A smart city is not defined by size, nor necessarily by wealth,“ says Baldi.
Milan remains the country’s main economic engine: total GDP above €228 billion, GDP per capita of around €52,800, unemployment at 4.3%, and the absolute lead in the Smart City Index’s economy dimension with 35.9 points, almost ten points above the second-ranked city. But it is also the Italian city with the highest cost of living, with property prices exceeding €7,000 per square metre in many areas, and a ratio between the average price of an 80 sqm home and average income of around 19.5 years’ salary.
Milan is also penalized by environmental data: in the environment dimension Milan drops to 21.2 points, with a PM2.5 concentration (the fine particulate matter that measures air quality) of around 19.5 µg/m³, worse only than Turin, which scores 19.2 points with PM2.5 at 18 µg/m³. In the living dimension, which most closely measures everyday wellbeing, Milan ranges between 56.9 and 59.8 points, far from the top positions. In other words, the salary gap with other Italian cities no longer automatically translates into a matching increase in wellbeing for resident households, starting with students, young professionals, and international workers — the very population driving the city’s growth.
If Milan shows the weak side of the metropolitan model, Trento, Bologna, and Padua tell a different story. According to the report, Trento leads the overall Smart City Index ranking with 52.7 points, ahead of all major Italian metropolitan areas, followed by Aosta with 51.0 and Bologna with 47.5. Trento’s lead stems from a balanced profile rather than a single strength: 46% urban green space, PM2.5 at just 12 µg/m³, life expectancy of around 85 years, and contained poverty risk. In the mobility dimension Trento soars to 58.5 points: a resident takes an average of 14.5 minutes to travel 10 km, compared with 31.6 minutes in Milan, 30.8 in Rome, and 32.1 in Turin.
Bologna clearly leads the people dimension with 49.6 points, supported by a graduate share of 39.6% and around 178 university students per thousand inhabitants, and is also first in Italy for governance with 72.1 points, driven by digital public administration services used by 59.3% of citizens. Padua benefits from one of the highest concentrations of human capital in the country, supported by one of Europe’s oldest and most prestigious universities.
With 45.2 points in the people dimension, the capital ranks second in Italy only to Bologna for human capital, thanks to major universities and high employment in knowledge-intensive sectors. It also holds its own economically, with total GDP above €163 billion and 28.7 points in the economy dimension, just below Trieste, Bologna, and Trento, penalized above all by a less efficient labour market compared with cities in the north.
Everyday life weighs on the overall assessment. In Rome, travelling 10 km takes an average of 30.8 minutes, and in a fifteen-minute trip a Roman covers just 4.9 km, only slightly more than Milan (4.8 km) and Turin (4.7 km), the three most congested major Italian metropolitan areas in the sample. Rome also stalls at around 44 points in governance, a result the report describes as “less brilliant than the city’s institutional, economic, and cultural weight would suggest”: for the capital, the issue to resolve is not a lack of resources but the ability to turn them into services that work every day.
Copenhagen leads the European ranking with 63.2 points, more than ten points above Trento, Italy’s best-performing city: digital service use above 94%, PM2.5 at just 7 µg/m³, GDP per capita of €73,700. It is followed by Munich (unemployment at 2.4%, R&D spending at 5.2% of GDP), Luxembourg, which boasts the highest GDP per capita in the sample at around €109,500, and Dublin, where GDP per capita exceeds €100,000.
The next tier includes Amsterdam (56.9 points, governance at 89.2), Vienna (57.2 points), and Berlin (56-57 points, environment at 77.6). London, with a total GDP of over one trillion euros, sees its quality-of-life performance collapse to just 36.9 points, crushed by the cost of housing. Paris is penalized by congestion and housing pressure despite a GDP per capita of around €61,200. Barcelona closes the ranking with 45.6 points.
Against this backdrop, Trento would place in the mid-tier of the European sample, close to Madrid, Paris, Brussels, and Lisbon. Bologna would remain below Barcelona and Zagreb. Milan, with just 43.3 points, would fall between Barcelona and Athens, below most of the European cities considered. Rome, Turin, and Florence are even further from the leading group. “Italy’s main limitation, then, is above all the difficulty of converting economic, academic, cultural, and institutional assets into integrated urban performance,” says Mancini.
Italy’s sharpest divide concerns governance: between Bologna, first in Italy with 72.1 points, and Potenza, last, the gap exceeds 66 points. Naples, Catanzaro, Palermo, Cagliari, and Potenza score below 18 points even in the economy dimension, penalized by lower GDP per capita and higher unemployment. Citing the most recent ISTAT data, the report notes that these are precisely the regions that lose thousands of young graduates every year to opportunities elsewhere, a phenomenon that further widens the gap in human capital and productivity.
But not all of southern Italy is falling behind in the same way. Potenza reaches 78.8 points in the environment dimension, with 39% urban green space and PM2.5 at around 8.5 µg/m³: better than Milan and Turin. Aosta remains the best performer overall on this dimension with 87.2 points. The signal, according to the authors, is that no territory is excluded a priori from the path toward urban smartness: on the environmental front, some areas of southern Italy are already competing on equal footing with the north.
The report links these figures to a structural shift: as the geographic tie between home and office progressively loosens, more and more professionals are choosing where to live based on quality of life, cost of housing, and services, no longer solely on proximity to their employer. Among the trends being monitored is South Working, skilled workers who relocate to southern Italy while keeping a job in the centre-north or abroad: still a niche phenomenon, but a growing one.
According to the European Commission’s Quality of Life Survey and Il Sole 24 Ore’s 2025 ranking, alongside Bologna and Trento, Bergamo, Udine, and Parma also stand out for resident satisfaction, confirming that urban wellbeing depends neither on population size nor on a territory’s overall wealth. **“People no longer choose only where to work, but also where to live better.** A truly smart city is not simply one with the most advanced technology, but one that manages to turn innovation, sustainability, and economic growth into concrete opportunities for its citizens,” says Baldi.
For the authors, the real challenge for Italian cities in the coming years will be translating economic growth into widespread wellbeing, without compromising accessibility and sustainability along the way. This, the report notes, is the ground on which territories will compete to attract talent, businesses, and investment, with mid-sized cities already ahead of major metropolitan areas.
The Smart City Index measures the relative, not absolute, positioning of the cities analyzed: 20 Italian regional capitals and a group of European cities selected for their economic, demographic, and administrative relevance. Each city is assessed across six equally weighted dimensions (economy, governance, mobility, environment, people, living), each built as a simple average of indicators normalized on a 0-100 scale using min-max transformation. The main sources are Eurostat and Urban Audit, supplemented by TomTom, EEA, QS Ranking, OECD PISA/INVALSI, and real estate sources (Idealista, Numbeo). Data on income and purchasing power are drawn from ISTAT, Eurostat, Numbeo, and Idealista sources, updated to 2025.