Why more and more Americans are choosing Southern Italy over Paris?

2025, the mental map of international tourism changes. In 2025, more and more U.S. travelers are leaving aside the big European capitals, such as Paris, in favor of less conventional, more intimate and authentic destinations: the hidden gems of southern Italy. Why?

If Paris is still the epitome of elegance, romance, and urban sophistication, Southern Italy is now the destination that wins over those seeking a real, living, immersive experience. This is not a passing fad, but a cultural trend: a return to what is human, accessible, surprising in its simplicity. 

The shift in the desires of American travelers is not just about costs or crowding. It is a search for truth, for experiences rooted in the everyday, for the beauty of the extraordinarily ordinary.

In the age of social media, the routes of tourism are traced by a new compass, the algorithm. Hunger for exploration does not move nouveau travelers: what drives travel is a bulimic tourism summed up in a check list of places to tick off as virtual trophies. 

The revival of Southern Italy is a real response to this social plague: it is a return to the unspoiled, to the real. It is a reconnection to what should be the very essence of travel: the connection with the place, the understanding of its stories, the love for its people.

Those who choose Puglia, Naples, or Sicily in 2025 do so out of a growing need for real connection to place. The popular neighborhoods, the living squares, the village festivals, the markets at dawn. Things that Paris, today, struggles to offer because of over-tourism, globalization, commodification of its more traditional customs.

Paris has it all: the museums, the lights, the good food and wine. But many travelers are realizing that behind that iconic beauty lies the risk of homogenization. The city's romantic and cultural aura is in danger of being crushed by tourist overexposure, by the transformation of iconic places into static sets. Paris-like many major European capitals-is becoming, for many travelers, less an experience and more an image to be replicated. The boulevards, bistros, and museums are often overwhelmed by crowds, queues, advance reservations, and offers designed more for flows than for people.

Against this backdrop, those seeking a trip that still knows how to surprise choose less traveled paths. Southern Italy, with its rough spontaneity, becomes a refuge for those tired of glossy destinations and looking for something more evocative of real life. The life you breathe in the perched villages, in the squares that vibrate with dialects and scents, in the silences among the olive trees and in the laughter by the sea. Southern Italy is a place that doesn't just show off, but manages to engage. Here there are no set itineraries, but paths to be built step by step, through real encounters and daily gestures. It is a south that has not sold out, that preserves its imperfections as part of its charm.

In Naples, people eat in the streets, converse with strangers, suspend coffees and get lost and find each other in the voices of the small streets. In Puglia, the sunset is reflected on the walls of masserias. In Sicily, every market is a theater, every dish a narrative. And all this without the “touristified” experience that now often accompanies the most beaten destinations.

Of course, the economic aspect takes its toll. Paris has long been one of the most expensive cities in Europe: from hotels to museum admissions, from dining to public transportation, every experience is often prohibitively priced for the budget-conscious traveler. Southern Italy, in contrast, offers very high value for money. 

Sleeping in a masseria among olive trees, eating in a family-run trattoria or having a coffee in the historic center of a Baroque city costs far less than in the big capitals. And it is not a matter of sacrificing quality: on the contrary, it is often in the simplest places that the most authentic and valuable experiences can be found. 

Moreover, new direct routes from New York, Boston, Miami, and Chicago to Naples, Bari, Palermo, and Catania make the South more accessible than it has ever been. With just a few domestic trips, multiple regions can be combined into one trip, with little economic or environmental impact.

Southern Italy attracts not only for its beauty and low cost, but for its pace. Time is different here. You eat more slowly, you stop to talk and listen to those you meet, you get involved in the customs of the place.
 It is a tourism that does not consume, but participates. That does not photograph and run away, but stops, listens, tastes.
 And that, today, is what many Americans are really looking for: a trip that doesn't feel like a set and doesn't compulsively follow a bucket list imported directly from TikTok, but a story that you write as you experience it.

Paris, now, represents a spasmodic standardization of desires that, when realized, become a collection of empty fragments. And so it is that the tourist boom becomes a modern parable about the inability to live in the present. People no longer explore the roads to get lost and find themselves, but to leave digital footprints.

Southern Italy has the power to combat this now internalized dynamic. Its contagious rhythm can make people slow down, can reconnect with reality. Perhaps there is still hope for those who really want to see the different, not just through a screen, but with eyes “wide open to the world like blotting papers” (Guccini). And perhaps the South, if protected from this plague, can continue to be precisely that: a place to be experienced, not performed.

- Amalfi Coast: It's easy to think of the Coast as a perfect photographic set, but just stop for a moment to realize that it is so much more. Its vertical villages, lemon-smelling terraces, and curves overlooking the sea are the backdrop to a pulsating life of fishermen, elders in the piazza, and artisans working pottery as they once did.

- Matera: not a recent discovery, but a necessary return. The Sassi are not postcards: they are living history, houses carved in stone, silences that tell centuries of resilient humanity. Walking around Matera is not just looking: it is listening to a past that still speaks, if you do not cover it with a zoom.

- Calabria: the most authentic, the least domesticated. It is for those who know how to slow down, for those who seek raw, unpackaged beauty. Depopulated villages, wild coastlines, food that tells the story of the land. Calabria does not let itself be filtered: either you really meet it, or it rejects you.

Paris is Paris, it will always be. But in 2025, Southern Italy is a guarantee of authenticity. It welcomes you as it is: imperfect, vivid, authentic. It is a destination fully aware of its value, and it does not need to shout to be noticed. It welcomes you with a beauty that is lived, not showcased. 

At a time in history when tourism is changing face, the South offers itself as a possible answer: less consumption, more relationship. For American travelers, it is an opportunity: not only to get to know another Italy, but to experience another way of traveling. One that looks a little more like life.