Italy real estate — the rubbish tax

As well as the main utilities and the plethora of taxes, there are other charges you need to budget for. One of the multitude of annual charges that will beset your life in Italy. The tassa comunale dei rifuti (refuse tax) is levied for the disposal of rubbish (nettazza urbana, or ‘town cleaning’). You pay this in four instalments a year, or you can elect to pay all at the start of the year. As it’s a tax you have to join the queue at the post office — for some reason you can’t pay these by bank transfer. This is a pain but one of the many ways that Italian bureaucracy will swallow parts of your life. Don’t fight it, just take a good book. By the way, ‘bureaucracy’ comes from the Greek ‘bureau kratos’, literally ‘rule by the office’. Believe us, after a while in Italy you’ll begin to see the literal meaning in this.

The bigger your house, the more rubbish tax you pay. There are a couple of ways of looking at this. Either it’s an ecologically sound way of making people take responsibility for the results of their consumption. And after all, a villa housing six will generate more garbage than a singleton’s apartment. Or, it’s a sneaky additional tax on property and its value — the tax doesn’t depend on how much rubbish you throw out each week, so hardly rewards green awareness. Discuss.

Living in Italy — TV and satellite TV tax

No big deal for any Brits buying a house in Italy, but this one may cause an involuntary dropping of American jaws. ‘You pay a tax just to watch TV?’ At least in Britain the licence fee goes to fund the BBC which is (at least in part) a respected producer of quality programmes. In Italy the ‘pagamento canone RAI’ goes to fund RAI which isn’t the worst channel in Italy, but that’s not saying a great deal. Needless to say, just as it won’t wash in Britain to whine ‘But I never watch BBC’, the fact that you’re only watching Sky, CNN and The Movie Channel (and already paying handsomely for it) won’t excuse you from paying your telly tax.

If you’ve been raised on the relative riches of UK and US broadcasting you aren’t going to want to watch mainstream Italian TV, unless you have an overdeveloped love of kitsch. You may want to sign up for Tele+ or Stream, the conduits for pay TV. Buy a decoder box and you’ll get movie channels (beware that the Italians tend to dub rather than sub-title) and a wealth of soccer channels, shopping channels and so on. As well as these specialist channels broadcasting goes down to the regional and local level – you’ll find some 200 channels in all.

Technically of course, Sky TV (UK) doesn’t operate outside Britain, but many residents use a decoder to get UK and US broadcasting from the UK satellites. Speak to fellow Brits or Americans who are established in your area — they’ll be able to steer you to a friendly TV man.