Episode #30: Moving to Turin on Italy's Digital Nomad Visa

Most people dreaming of moving to Italy land on the obvious cities. Molly Bossardt went somewhere else entirely: Turin, and seven months in, she has no regrets. She's Kathy McCabe's guest on this episode of the Dream of Italy Podcast. Molly is an American digital marketer and small business owner who spent a decade in New York City, moved back to Virginia during the pandemic, and eventually realized that suburban life just was not going to cut it. With no European ancestry and no easy path to citizenship, she spent years watching Italy from a distance until Italy announced its Digital Nomad Visa in 2024. Over a year and a half later, she landed in Turin with two cats, a signed lease, and a city she had never once set foot in. Molly walks Kathy through the full arc of making it happen: navigating the notoriously unresponsive Philadelphia consulate, changing her permanent residency to Florida just to get an appointment through Miami, assembling a packet thick enough to have a table of contents, and getting approved in two weeks when she had braced herself for six months. She also gets into the realities of finding an apartment in Turin before having a visa in hand, the upfront costs that catch people off guard, and why the lease registration process became its own small ordeal. The conversation goes well beyond paperwork. Molly shares what daily life in Turin actually looks like: the affordable rents that embarrass comparable American cities, the thriving expat community she found through the International Women's Club, the co-working spaces scattered across a city that turns out to be far more entrepreneurial than its reputation suggests, and the honest emotional arc of those first months including the loneliness, the illness, the brief relationship that combusted too fast, and the slow realization that this is real life now, not a vacation. She also makes a genuine case for why Turin keeps getting overlooked and why everyone who lives there seems to love it without reservation. Turin keeps coming up as one of Italy's best-kept secrets. If you've been sleeping on it, this episode might change that. Find show notes for this podcast episode at https://dreamofitaly.com/30