12 Celebrities With Homes in Italy

Plenty of famous people buy houses in Italy, and a lot more are rumored to. When Jessica first put this list together she asked readers to help confirm or kill the rumors. Eighteen years later the picture is clearer: some of these homes are well documented, one of them is a hotel you can book, and a few of the stories never had anything behind them.

The rule is the same as it always was: no addresses. These are private homes, and the people in them came to Italy partly to be left alone. Where a place is open to the public, we say so. International names only; Italy's own celebrities would fill a much longer list.

Confirmed

George Clooney, Lake Como
The best-known celebrity house in Italy. Clooney has owned Villa Oleandra in Laglio, a village on the western shore of Lake Como, since 2002, and he still spends part of each year there. In 2026 he had the villa's facades repainted, and Laglio has made him an honorary citizen. His twins, he has said, speak Italian. You'll get a better look at the villa from a boat on the lake than from the road, where there is nothing to see but walls and security. Back in 2007, when Laglio's council floated new lakefront development near the house, Clooney said he would rather leave, and the plan went quiet.

Sting, Tuscany
Sting and Trudie Styler own the Villa Il Palagio estate in Figline Valdarno, in the hills southeast of Florence. He recorded a live album and concert film at the villa in 2001. It sits alongside his homes in Wiltshire and New York, so he is not there all year. He also has a soft spot for Italian audiences: in 2018 he sang an Italian version of "Mad About You", with words by Zucchero, at the Sanremo festival.

Helen Mirren, Puglia
Mirren fell for the Salento, the heel of Italy's boot, and owns a masseria (a fortified farmhouse) at Tiggiano, near the tip of the peninsula south of Lecce. She bought it as a crumbling fixer-upper. She speaks Italian, supports Lecce's football club, and in 2021 was named an ambassador for the University of Salento. Italians also loved her cameo in comedian Checco Zalone's 2021 vaccination song, "La Vacinada".

Frances Mayes, Cortona
Mayes bought Bramasole, an abandoned villa outside Cortona, in 1989, and her 1996 memoir about restoring it, Under the Tuscan Sun, spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. She and her husband Edward still divide their time between North Carolina and Cortona, and she now holds Italian citizenship. The book turned Cortona into a pilgrimage town; the house is private, and the walk up to it is mostly a lesson in how much tourism a small hill town can absorb. Jessica wrote about exactly that in The Genius of a Place.

Jim Kerr, Taormina
The Simple Minds singer first saw Taormina on tour in July 1982, fell for it, and never really left. He lives there with his partner and has Italian citizenship. He also owns a hotel you can book: the four-star Hotel Villa Angela, on the hillside above the town with views toward Etna. Of everything on this list, it's the one we'd actually spend money on.

Mick Hucknall, Sicily
The Simply Red singer, whose red curls gave the band its name, spends time around Catania, on the other side of Etna from Kerr, and makes wine from the volcano's slopes under the label Il Cantante, "the singer".

Debi Mazar, Tuscany
The actor from GoodFellas and Entourage is married to Florentine Gabriele Corcos. Her in-laws gave the couple a 15th-century house outside Florence as a wedding present. For years they split their time between it and the US, cooking Tuscan food on their web series Under the Tuscan Gun and then on the Cooking Channel's Extra Virgin. Just before the pandemic they moved the family to the Florence house full time, and Mazar has Italian citizenship.

The Versace family, Lake Como
Gianni Versace bought Villa Fontanelle at Moltrasio, on Lake Como's western shore, in 1977 and restored it. After his death in 1997 it stood empty for years, and in 2008 the Russian restaurateur Arkady Novikov bought it for 33 million euros. Donatella, who led Versace for almost three decades until stepping back in 2025, was long reported to have her own place on the lake. We could not confirm that she still does.

Reported, never confirmed

These came up in the original research and never firmed up. We've kept them because the rumors are still repeated.

Brad Pitt
Mostly a spin-off of Clooney: when Pitt and Angelina Jolie were rumored to be marrying at Villa Oleandra, stories followed that Pitt had bought his own villa nearby. There is no public record of it.

Woody Allen
Allen clearly loves Venice. He married Soon-Yi Previn there in 1997 and has premiered films at the Venice Film Festival. The story that he owns a palazzo on the Grand Canal has never been backed up.

Richard Branson
Reported to have a villa on Lake Como. His best-known retreat is Necker Island in the Caribbean; we found nothing reliable tying him to a house on Como.

Michael Schumacher
The seven-time champion spent his best years in a Ferrari, so rumors of a house on an Italian lake were inevitable. His family home is in Switzerland, and since his 2013 skiing accident the family has kept his life strictly private. Leave this one alone.

If you want to see the celebrity side of Italy

• Lake Como is where the density is highest. Take the public ferry up the western shore from Como and you pass Moltrasio and Laglio from the water, which is both the best view and the polite one.
• Taormina has drawn famous visitors since Goethe came through in 1787, and you can stay at Kerr's hotel.
• Cortona is worth a day for its own sake: Etruscan walls, a steep main street and views over the Val di Chiana. Bramasole is private.
• The Salento is quieter money: restored masserie, many now rented out as holiday houses, near the beaches at the tip of Puglia.

Know of other international names with homes in Italy? Tell us in the comments. Same rule as always: no addresses.