For many visitors from England, one of the first impressions of Italy is space. Leave the city and, almost without warning, the land opens out: hills, fields, and mountains replace streets and traffic. The calm feels physical, something you step into rather than merely observe. It is a sensation increasingly rare at home. Italy’s population density is almost half of England’s, and the difference is felt not in numbers but in experience. Italy breathes more easily.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the mountains. In England and Wales, even comparatively modest peaks can draw long queues on a fine weekend. Snowdon, for all its grandeur, often feels shared by thousands. We were fortunate when we crossed Crib Goch — that narrow, vertiginous ridge leading to the summit of Yr Wyddfa — to find only a handful of others on the route. Such moments are memorable precisely because they are unusual.
In Italy, mountains are not special destinations but part of the everyday landscape. The Alps rise in the north, the Apennines run like a spine down the peninsula, and between them lie valleys, passes, and high plateaux. It is often possible to walk for hours without meeting anyone at all. When you do encounter another walker, there is an unspoken recognition: a shared understanding of why you are there. Conversations begin easily; friendships sometimes follow.
Even the Po Valley, that great industrial heartland, retains a surprising openness. Canals, fields, and farm tracks weave between towns and cities, softening their edges. Life does not end abruptly at the city boundary. By comparison, much of England feels tightly stitched together, each place pressing against the next. There are exceptions, of course. The Breckland forests near London offer an unexpected sense of scale and silence, though even these are largely planted landscapes, shaped by policy rather than geology or time.
This abundance of space is reflected in how people live. In England, especially in the south-east, housing has become a source of anxiety: too little of it, too expensive, too confined. In Italy, homes are more varied and often more generous. In hill towns such as San Romano, stone houses open onto courtyards warmed by the sun, their roofs looking out over olives and vines. In cities like Bologna or Parma, balconies and small gardens are common, modest extensions of private life into the open air. Beyond the towns, villages sit quietly amid fields, many houses shuttered not through neglect but because there is simply no pressure to occupy them.
Daily life unfolds differently too. Italian towns encourage movement on foot or by bicycle. Markets punctuate the week; errands become social encounters. A mother cycles to the baker with a child perched behind her; an older man lingers at a stall discussing tomatoes. In Lucca, children make their way to school along paved streets, pausing to greet neighbours or buy bread still warm from the oven. In the evening, families gather in piazzas and on church steps, children playing while adults sit and talk, watching the slow rhythm of the town.
In England, life is more tightly choreographed. The commute dominates the day. Cars and trains dictate movement; shopping is often displaced to the margins of towns. High streets thin out, parks feel less certain after dark, and even residential areas can seem tense, compressed by numbers and pace. Space exists, but it is rationed, scheduled, and increasingly contested.
These differences are deeply rooted in history. England’s post-war new towns — Stevenage, Welwyn Garden City, Basildon — were bold attempts to improve life through planning. At their best, they offered light, greenery, and a sense of order. Some of that vision remains, particularly in places like Welwyn, but much has been eroded by sprawl and repetition, until the ideal has faded into familiarity, and occasionally into parody.
Italy’s idea of the city was shaped much earlier. During the Renaissance, thinkers such as Leon Battista Alberti imagined towns as moral and social instruments: places where proportion, beauty, and civic life reinforced one another. The painted visions of ideal cities, now hanging in museums, show arcaded streets and balanced squares designed not to impress, but to civilise.
These ideas were built as well as painted. Palmanova, with its star-shaped plan, still reads as a diagram of Renaissance order. Sabbioneta, created by a cultured ruler of Mantua, contains within its walls a theatre, library, palace, churches, and a synagogue — a small town designed as a complete human world. Children grow up walking these streets, absorbing a sense of measure and continuity without being taught it. Pienza offers the same lesson, quietly and daily.
Later, these ideals travelled north, influencing England’s own garden cities. The belief that towns might improve human life did not originate in Britain, but it was taken seriously there for a time. What feels striking now is how far modern development, in both countries, has moved away from that ambition.
Modern Italian new towns were usually responses to specific needs rather than population pressure: the draining of the Pontine Marshes (Pomezia, Latina), the creation of mining communities in Sardinia (Carbonia – where my mother-in-law worked in her uncle’s hotel), post-war redistribution around Milan, Florence, and Rome. Sprawl exists, certainly, especially around industrial centres and popular coasts, but it remains contained. It has not yet become the dominant form.
Geography and geology play their part. Italy’s young, restless landscape brings landslides and instability;
England’s older ground is steadier but increasingly prone to flooding and coastal erosion. These forces shape how and where people build, and how densely they live.
To travel through Italy is to feel how these layers come together. Vineyards follow the road out of town; olive groves surround roundabouts. Bread is delivered to village squares; children walk to school unaccompanied. Evenings stretch gently as families stroll, talking, lingering. Such scenes still exist in England, but they feel harder won, more fragile, often curtailed by weather, distance, or sheer busyness.
Ultimately, what Italy offers is not perfection, but space — physical, social, and mental. Its population, similar in size to England’s, is spread across a much larger and more varied landscape. Towns retain their edges, countryside remains close, and daily life is still shaped by place.
For those attuned to history, to landscape, and to a slower, more humane rhythm, Italy continues to offer something England increasingly struggles to sustain: towns with character, cities scaled to people, and an enduring belief that the built environment should serve human well-being. Alberti’s ideal city was never meant to be utopian. It was meant to be livable — and in many parts of Italy, it still is.