Where to live in Salento, Puglia: the towns of the Alto Salento, measured

Why the 7% does not decide for you

Since 7 April 2026, Italy’s 7% flat tax for people with a foreign pension covers southern towns of up to 30,000 inhabitants (Law no. 34 of 11 March 2026, article 26). It is a strong reason to look at this corner of Puglia, and the reason many people first type “7 percent tax towns in Italy” into Google.

But look at the table. In the Alto Salento the line rules out one town in twenty-two. Ostuni sits 57 residents under it, Manduria 335. Almost everywhere you might want to live here, the 7% is on the table.

Two things still matter, and both are for a tax adviser, not for us. A town qualifies on its Istat population at 1 January of the year before you opt in. And not every pension falls under the 7%: income that a tax treaty leaves taxable only abroad stays outside it. How it works, in five lines: manduriashire.it/seven-percent.

So the tax narrows the map very little. What narrows it is the rest of the year.

Manduria’s answers, measured

We can answer for one town honestly, because we live in it and measured everything from Piazza Garibaldi.

1. The hospital is in town. The Giannuzzi hospital, run by ASL Taranto, is three minutes from the old town by car, with an emergency department, intensive care, general surgery, general medicine, orthopaedics, nephrology and dialysis, and a cardiology ward presented in October 2025. More in our article on healthcare in Puglia.
2. Brindisi airport is 46 kilometres away, about fifty minutes by car. Bari is about 110 minutes.
3. A town of 29,528 people (Istat, 1 January 2026) that lives on wine, olives and greenhouses, not on visitors. Ten bank branches and hundreds of businesses within a quarter of an hour’s walk of the square. In August the marina fills and the old town stays quiet. In February the piazza is still in use.
4. The station is 650 metres from the piazza, nine minutes on foot, on the Sud Est line between Martina Franca and Lecce. To be straight with you: the line has been closed for reconstruction since June 2024 and replacement buses run. Completion is set for 2027, when Manduria becomes one of three interchange stations on its section.
5. 136 neighbours from western Europe and North America, 85% of them German, Swiss or Austrian. Fewer than in Ostuni, Carovigno and Ceglie Messapica, more than in the other eighteen towns. You would not be the first, but you would be early.
6. Long leases are scarce, because owners have tended to prefer short summer lets. Finding them is the first thing we work on with anyone who arrives.

And the sea: San Pietro in Bevagna, on Manduria’s own coast, is 12 kilometres and fifteen minutes away by car. It held the Blue Flag in 2024, 2025 and 2026.

Every distance, with the method: manduriashire.it/location. Who the 136 are: manduriashire.it/international-residents.

How we did this

Populations are Istat’s resident population by citizenship at 1 January 2025, the latest definitive figures, downloaded on 30 October 2026 from demo.istat.it. Manduria’s 29,528 at 1 January 2026 is Istat’s provisional figure. “Western residents” means people holding the citizenship of a western European country, the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, counted town by town in our study of September 2026; the 22 towns add up to the published 1,283. Distances are straight-line kilometres from Piazza Garibaldi, Manduria, from the same study. The six questions are ours.