1. Introduction

This paper presents the results of research into an intra-Southern Europe migration flow: of Italians to Valencia (Spain). One effect of the recent long-lasting recession which has deeply affected Southern Europe since 2008 has been a steadily growing South-North migration flow within the EU. The individualized attempts to escape the lack of good jobs and a generalized situation of crisis, explains the intensity of this migration flow. The interest in this flow among social scientists has been relevant and has especially focused on high-skilled migration from Southern Europe to the North (Beltrame, 2007; Gjergji, 2015; Minneci, 2015; Tomei, 2017). Conversely, there has been no such interest in migration within Southern Europe, yet recent decades have witnessed a significant and growing migration of Italians to Spain.

According to data provided by Padron, the Spanish official demographic register, in 1998 there were fewer than 20,000 Italians in Spain. During the last positive economic cycle (2000-2007), this figure tripled, to more than 60,000. What is remarkable, however, is how strongly it continued to grow during the last downturn (2008-2016), from 80,000 to 120,000. This is the only European immigrant group to maintain a positive annual growth rate while all others (from Germany, Belgium, France, Portugal, Netherlands, or UK) were heavily re-emigrating or returning to their countries of origin. (INE, years 1998-2016) Furthermore, Spain was the most popular destination for Italians in the period 2006-2016, becoming in 2015 the country where Italian emigration grew most strongly (155%), surpassing traditional Italian migration destinations such as Brazil (151%), Argentina (94%) and the United Kingdom (76%) (Fondazione Migrante, 2018).

The most popular Spanish destinations for Italian migration were Madrid and Barcelona for young and working-aged people, and the Balearic and Canary Islands for retired people (Bruzzone et al., 2016). The city of Valencia represents an emerging alternative to the global cities of Madrid and Barcelona. In 2001 there were only 545 Italians born in Italy living in Valencia, which began to attract Italians only at the turn of the century, as pioneering migrants started to arrive without the support of a pre-existing Italian community. During the first seven years of economic expansion (2001-2007) the native Italian population of the city grew considerably, reaching 1,912 members in 2007. Surprisingly, during the severe downturn that followed, it continued to grow to a total of 4,353 (Padron, Statistical Office of the Valencia City Council, 2001-2016). Furthermore, the Italian immigrant community in Valencia has grown more strongly since 2008 (70%) than its Pakistani (59%) and Chinese (53%) counterparts (Ingellis & Esteban, 2018). The influx was considerable throughout the period 2001-2016, regardless of the economic cycle, supporting the reasonable supposition that migration was not motivated by economic factors. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out some changes in the characteristics of the migrant population arriving before and during the crisis. Before the crisis, the profile was predominantly of young men aged 20-39, with a masculinity index of 193%, the highest of all the migrant groups in the city of Valencia (against 112% on average), then after the crisis there was considerable growth in the number of children, women and men aged 40-50, suggesting that entire families were now arriving from Italy or being reunited.

There were undoubtedly contextual factors facilitating this migration flow. First, as Favell (2014) suggests, the creation of the European Union (EU) space boosts internal mobility, strengthening Europeans’ feeling of citizenship of a single country (Favell & Recchi, 2009). Second, there is an “affinity factor” (Pumares et al., 2017), grounded in the cultural and historical proximity between the two countries, in the relative ease of learning the language and in communalities of social relations. These factors shape the scenario in which Italian migrants have been moving in the period. They represented preconditions which make the decision to migrate to Valencia possible or at least easier to.

Our interest in Italian migration to Valencia is twofold. First, it represents an emerging flow within Southern Europe, thus, Italians constitute the largest immigrant population from another European country to the third most populous Spanish city. Second, the Spanish labour market is, generally speaking, not more inclusive than the Italian one. Italy enjoys more favourable economic and social conditions in terms of many indicators, including unemployment rate, average salary, GDP per capita, poverty rate and public expenditure on health and education (Ingellis & Ricard, 2015). Therefore, this migration flow can be explained by neither the consolidated economic theoretical approaches (Amin, 1974; Cardoso & Faletto, 1996; Piore, 1979; Wallerstein, 1974), nor the human capital theories (Becker, 1962, 1965; Blaug, 1976). Both perspectives take the search for a better job and the aspiration to better economic conditions as the main motivations for migration and assume that migration flows from less to more inclusive labour markets because of structural differences in economic development or individual opportunities. In contrast, Italians migrating to Valencia are moving to a socio-economic context hit by the downturn as deeply as Italy, or even more.

We analyse the hypothesis, which emerged from the first phase of the virtual participant observation and the first interviews of our research, that for Italians in Valencia this city represented the concrete opportunity for an improved lifestyle. On first contact, whether as tourists or students, they perceived the city as able to satisfy their aspiration for a better life. Hence, the main objective of the research was to determine to what extent Italians migrating to Valencia can be considered a lifestyle migration (LM) . The main questions leading the research were: What were the main motivations for migrating? What role and weight did the quest for a better life have in Italian migrants’ motivations? How do they define the concept of a better life and the factors improving its quality? What role did work play in their decision-making? What was the relationship between life and work in their discourse?

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on LM. Section 3 details the research methods used, and the sample observed. Section 4 presents the research results. The paper ends with a discussion and conclusions.

2. Theoretical framework

While it is recognised that the search for a “better way of life” broadly describes the aim of all migrants, factors that are neither economic nor strictly related to work appear increasingly relevant to a wide range of contemporary migrant flows. Over the last two decades, the sociological perspective on contemporary migration has been enriched by LM studies, seeking to highlight the attention which migrants pay to non-materialistic elements in defining that better life (Benson, O’Reilly, 2009; 2016; Benson & Osbaldiston, 2014; O’Reilly & Benson, 2009). Furthermore, the population of interest of this approach comprises people from the developed world migrating with the idea that by doing so it is possible to find a better way of life in a wider sense. In LM studies, work-related issues are not dominant because work is seen, even for migrants of working age, as an instrument to fulfil needs and desires outside the work: improving their quality of life and promoting their self-realization.

LM is predominantly driven by affluence (Stone & Stubbs, 2007), as reflected in the well-known definition of LM by Benson and O’Reilly (2016): “The spatial mobility of relatively affluent individuals of all ages, moving either part-time or full time to places that are meaningful because for various reason, they offer the potential of a better quality of life” (p. 2). Most empirical LM studies focus on affluent or retired people (Casado et al., 2004; Helset et al., 2005; King et al., 2000; Rodríguez et al., 2005; Simó-Noguera et al., 2013), or on professionals with international profiles working at a global level, none of them particularly interested in labour insertion in the destination country or motivated to migrate by economic or work-related factors. Aspects such as a more relaxed lifestyle, the reconstruction of self-identity, a better work-life balance or more clement weather acquire a relevance they lack in economic migration studies.

Research on LM pays particular attention to people “revealing the identity-making projects that are embedded in these migrations” (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016, p. 23), showing and confirming migrants’ choices as shaped by postmodernist values and ideals, and strongly influenced by the individualism conceptualized by Bauman (2013) as a trait of modern liquid society. Thus, lifestyle migrants insist on the positive role of mobility, conceived as a way of reconstructing of one’s identity, regaining control over one’s own life (Hoey, 2009), searching for a different and more fulfilling way of life (Benson, 2016) and realizing personal growth thanks to new experiences and situations (Hoey, 2009).

Nevertheless, scholars have insisted that the freedom of choice emphasized by migrants’ discourses does not refute the assertion that lifestyles of mobility are situated in changing contexts (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009) and can develop only under specific economic, social and structural conditions: “[…] the possession of assets and resources (e.g. financial capital from incomes, pensions, savings and property ownership), alongside the ease of movement resulting from relative privilege (e.g. the possession of passports from relatively powerful countries) provides opportunities to realise these motivations” (Benson & O’Reilly, 2016, p. 29). In this sense, structural components related to the place of migration play a key role in the migratory project, along with the strong connection between the social and individual imagery of a place, as imagined before migration (O’Reilly, 2014; Benson, 2012). An investigation of Britons in Berlin confirms the importance of the imagination in the choice of destination, Berlin being a city profoundly appreciated for its cultural attraction and the kind of lifestyle these “bourgeois bohemians” (Griffiths & Maile, 2014, p. 140) can enjoy in their new home. Migration value, according to Griffiths and Maile’s study, is associated with the opportunity to work less and dedicate more time to activities related to entertainment, health (such as physical exercise and mobility) and important structural features of Berlin. In any case, migration always implies the possession of some kind of resources: not only economic, but also of the knowledge and ability needed to fit the context, adapt to it and eventually act for change.

The interaction between individual resources and motives and the structural features of contexts has been highlighted by literature about intra-European professionals’ “circular migration”. The impact of that migration for the migrants and at time for the destination and origin countries is a key element both for the “triple win perspective” and for the less optimistic analysis (Braun, 2010; Tomei, 2017; Wickramasekara, 2011)

Another relevant segment of LM literature tends to underline the blurred boundaries between the categories of travel, leisure, and migration (Cohen, Duncan & Thulemark, 2015), while seeking to clarify the links between migration and tourism. The growth of international mobility in postmodern society has in fact boosted both tourism and migration and, in a certain sense, mixed the two experiences. O’Reilly (2003) investigated British and north European migration to Fuengirola and Los Boliches (Malaga), showing how even when related to different categories (retired, entrepreneurial, or economically active migrants, second-home owners), mass tourism influences the forms and trajectories assumed by migrants. Spalding’s (2013) ethnographic study shows how the accounts of affluent people from the United States and Canada of their migration to Panama reflect the influence exerted by the tourist idealization of exotic places (Benson, 2015; Gustafson, 2009). This is certainly true in many cases for retirement migration, as shown by studies of collectives — generally middle-class Britons and North Europeans — moving to very popular destinations. O’Reilly (2013), comparing various groups from different places, remarks that even if the sociodemographic data are similar for the majority of these migrants (retired fairly young, without children, with secondary education), their reasons for moving can differ in some ways, but prior touristic experiences often underlie the choice of destination. In addition, research on retirement migration converges in presenting climate as a major factor, together with a more affordable cost of living than in the country of origin (Fournier, Rasmussen & Serow, 1988; King, Warnes & Williams, 2000; Gustafson, 2001; Casado-Díaz, Kaiser & Warnes, 2004; Simó-Noguera et al., 2013; Benson, 2016; O’Reilly & Benson, 2009). Furthermore, if the relocation in rural landscape represents an important corpus of literature inside LM Studies (Halfracree, 2014; Hoey, 2009; Korpela, 2009), migration to urban settings is a little-explored field and the data available are insufficient for a clear understanding of the phenomenon.

Some scholars have focused on the urban space as a locus of new mobilities, noting especially not only the difficulty of drawing clear boundaries between the different categories of mobility proposed within the field of migration studies, but also the great impact that the movement of people has on the urban space (Sequera & Nofre, 2018; Mantecón & Huete-Nieves, 2018; Jover & Díaz-Parra, 2020). Studies on this last aspect have clearly underlined the complexity of factors intervening on the process of spatial transformation, and its various aspects. The social injustice caused by the turistification and by the settlement of lifestyle migrants in Sevilla’s historic district (Jover & Díaz-Parra, 2020), for example, and the lifestyle migrants as protagonists but also victims of this phenomenon. The spatial fragmentation and the disparities between population and resources because of the lack of specific policies in the south of Spain has been analysed by Mantecón & Huete-Nieves (2018) Finally, the growing influence the cities and the economic factor can play in the project of migrants often second-home investors and in search of increasing their outcome through tourism has been studied by Montezuma and McGarrigle (2019).

The original contribution this paper seeks to make to LM studies is twofold. First, it aims to explore noneconomic factors motivating migration in a sample of a population significantly different from subjects of most empirical LM studies. Most Italians in Valencia are neither affluent nor retired, but are predominantly people of working age with children (Ingellis & Esteban, 2020). Observing this group provides the opportunity to test the conceptual analysis of migration motivations developed by LM scholars on a group of people for whom work is a key existential issue, distinguishing them from the majority of migration groups previously analysed by LM scholars, for whom work is incidental.

Second, the migration flow is not from Northern Europe, as is the case of Scandinavians migrating to coastal Spain (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009) or Britons to rural Southern France (Casado-Díaz, 2009) attracted by a Mediterranean lifestyle significantly different from their country of origin, as in the majority of LM studies (see; Casado-Díaz, 2006; Gustafson, 2001; Huber & O’Reilly, 2004; Helsen et al., 2005; Lilius & Balampanidis, 2020; Karisto, 2005; Oliver, 2007; O’Reilly, 2000; Rodríguez et al., 2005; Schriewer & García, 2005). Instead, it is a flow from one Mediterranean country to another, an intra-Southern Europe migration.

3. Methods and sample

The use of the ethnographic perspective to explore the phenomenon is based on evidence that the narration of personal biographies is of fundamental value in exploring the new mobility trends, given that the decision to relocate stimulates thoughts of a new, different, and more fulfilling life. The empirical research employed two ethnographic techniques: in-depth interviews and participant observation among the online and offline Italian communities in Valencia. The fieldwork began in February 2017 and stopped March 2019 because of the covid-19 pandemic. The ethnographers were an Italian immigrant researcher, member of the community as since 2010 and an Italian PhD student, who was in Valencia during the research fieldwork.

The work began with multisite virtual ethnography on the social networking site Facebook and in one WhatsApp group. Following Spradley’s (1980) classification, our observation was at degree 2 (passive observation) being covert during the first four to five months, rising to degree 3 (moderate participation) for the remainder of the time. The researchers used the covert phase to accurately formulate the research problem, considering the main issues emerging from the online community by adopting a bottom-up perspective. Observation was also useful as a way of verifying the information obtained in the in-depth interviews to check its quality and to see at what extent were shared in the community.

According to the ethical guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers (2012), such use of covert observation presents no ethical problems in this case, for two major reasons, the first related to the issue of consent and the second to the public/private nature of the contents. First, after the short covert phase, the subjects were able to withhold their consent to participating in the overt phase, lasting more than 2 years. Secondly, according to Jones (1997), one of the prerequisites for an online community is the existence of a common public place where members can meet and interact. The material from which our data was extracted was produced to be shared and discussed among more than 20,000 members of such a community. McKee and Porter (2009) offer a heuristic which is useful when making decisions about informed consent. They connect the issue of public/private distinction to the degree of interaction with the researcher and to the vulnerability of the subjects regarding the issues being analysed. In our case the degree of interaction was very low, we analysed no-sensitive issues, and no harm was done to subjects by making public the discussions that had appeared in the Facebook groups. The anonymity of the subjects was strictly respected. According to Lester (2020), it is possible when doing online observation to collect data either by reading texts or by interacting online. Here , the majority of the material was collected by taking extracts of texts produced by the subjects as they discussed and interacted among themselves, without regard to the purposes of the research. Thus, the influence of the researcher as participant was very limited and the texts are not reactive to the research process.

The Facebook groups are heterogeneous, including an active population aged 16-64 years with very diverse migratory projects. Furthermore, some people have lived in Valencia for more than 15 years, some have arrived recently and others still live in Italy, planning to move to Valencia and using the groups to acquire as much information as possible to facilitate their migration decisions. This inclusion of people resident in both Valencia and Italy has been very useful for research purposes because the dialogue, debate and exchange of information include comparative narratives about push and pull factors, the contexts of origin and destination, and migratory motivations, generally making explicit individuals’ perceptions of the quality of life and lifestyle in the two contexts. WhatsApp group was composed more from people living in Valencia and actively searching for opportunity to meet other Italians and organize activity together, 16-45 y.o. and more recently arrived.

The majority of the 42 in-depth interviews were conducted between spring 2017 and spring 2018, while a few were added later to resolve interpretative doubts arising during the analysis or to elicit the views of migrants with different profiles. The real-life participant observation began at the same time as the interviews and is still in progress.

Interviewees were selected by starting with people actively commenting, in the virtual communities, on issues related to our research questions, taking into account their ability to self-represent and to reflect on their migration choices (Valles, 1999). Having contacted the first interviewees, we used the snowball sampling technique. The main selection criteria were: gender balance according to statistical data on the Italian community in Valencia; a certain variety in the length of residence in Valencia at the time of interview; differing areas of origin (north-central or southern Italy) and a variety of population sizes in towns of origin. Particular attention was paid to achieving a heterogeneous sample with respect to profession, age and marital/family status. The potential sampling bias of excluding people not belonging to virtual communities was reduced using snowball sampling, asking the first interviewees to identify others. In addition, it is worth underlining that social media has become an almost indispensable means for migrants to obtain advance information on a destination city or to maintain relations with their relatives and friends at home, so that almost all are in some social network or another.

The interview sample comprised 27 males and 15 females, aged between 27 and 50 years. The great majority were highly educated, 30 having completed tertiary education, five having worked for 3-5 years since graduating and four having completed no more than two years of university study; five others had completed secondary education and the remaining two, only compulsory education. The sample was composed of people from all parts of the country, both the relatively rich and developed north-central region (19) and the south (23). They came principally from urban areas, whether large cities such as Rome, Naples and Milan or medium-sized towns, whereas only seven interviewees were from villages.

As for employment, nine were in traditional professions (lawyer, architect, translator etc.) and eight were new-generation professionals with jobs related to the digital media. Many were self-employed or small entrepreneurs in wellness and beauty (physiotherapists, hairdressers, beauticians) (4), real estate (2) or tourism (restaurants or accommodation rental) (11), while eight interviewees worked in other sectors. Twenty five of the 42 interviewees had a partner and at least one child, the remainder being single or in a childless couple. In the in-text quotations, each interviewee is identified with a code comprising their number in the list of interviews, their sex (M/F) and age in years.

The interviews explored the followings issues: sociodemographic characteristics, employment situation prior to migration, previous migration experience, the migration decision (how the idea originated, how they made the decision, how they found the information etc.), motivation, the migration process, labour and social insertion in the hosting context, perceptions of life in Valencia and an overview of the experience, its satisfactory and unsatisfactory elements.

4. Findings

This section presents the key results of the participant observation and interviews, organized by the major issues emerging from the analysis in response to the main research questions about motivation, definitions of quality of life and the role of work in the migration process.

4.1. The motivation and decision to migrate

While concern with both work and quality of life are evident in participants’ discourses about their motivation for migrating, the order in which they mentioned the two issues and the relevance they assigned to them provide important evidence of their motivations. They always presented the aspiration for a better life as their priority when deciding whether to migrate, with work appearing to have an instrumental role in the decision. Benson and O’Reilly (2009) observe that migrants’ narratives about quality of life are usually comparative, their perception of “better” is relative to their context of origin. According to the narrative reconstruction of our interviewees, the first step was the desire to escape from a reality which did not fulfil their needs. Their discourses contained many negative adjectives describing the places they came from and everyday life there.

The second step was their first encounter with Valencia. In both the Facebook communities and the interview responses, the expression “I fell in love with Valencia” appears repeatedly to describe the sensation they felt on coming to Valencia, generally for tourism reasons, indicating that this is a classic case of what Williams and Hall (2002) call tourism-informed mobility. The presence of relatives and friends having migrated earlier and the help potentially received from them does not appear in any interviews as a factor facilitating the decision to migrate or the migration process. Study or tourism reasons motivated the first contact with the city, with the internet in general and social networks providing much essential information on the insertion process (documents, accommodation, labour insertion). All of these elements meant that neither migratory chains, understood as movements “in which prospective migrants learn of opportunities, are provided with transportation, and have initial accommodation and employment arranged by means of primary social relationships with previous migrants” (MacDonald & MacDonald, 1974, p. 227), nor the migrant community’s social capital (Gurak & Caces, 1992; Pascual de Sans, 2007; Requena, 1991) was any longer essential, as they had been before the digital revolution. In our case, migrants gathered information not by means of primary social relationships but by contact with unknown people belonging to the virtual Italian community, or directly from the internet, both of these channels thus facilitating new migration flows of pioneers.

Finally, the prospective migrants sought the means to make their projects economically possible. This process clearly reveals that job-seeking was not the principal driver of their decision-making. Indeed, the issue of work appears in their discourses only after the decision to migrate had been taken. The decision must therefore have been based on the desire for a better life, inspired by their first impressions of the city of Valencia as contrasting with the unsatisfactory elements of life in their country of origin. In other words, Valencia appeared in their minds to offer many things which they lacked in hometowns and which would make their lives better.

4.2. Individual existential searching and migration

Comparing the discourse of our Italian participants, both in online discussions and in interviews, with the data gathered in other ethnographic LM research, the main difference is that we have found no references whatsoever to identity reconstruction or personal growth paths and that migration is never represented as a new start enabling recovery from traumatic experience. In our observations, migration is not presented “as a way of overcoming the trauma of these events, or taking control of their lives, or as releasing them from ties and enabling them to live lives truer to themselves” (Benson & O’Reilly, 2009, p. 610).

The fact that introspection, personal growth, and the search for authenticity are not relevant drivers of the migration experience in our data, in contrast to many other LM studies, could in principle mean that the Italy-to-Valencia flow is not an LM, according to the first definition given by Benson and O’Reilly (2016). Nevertheless, the evidence of our research suggests that there is another way to interpret a migration oriented by the search of a better life. Some of our interviewees come directly to Valencia, moving their businesses from their place of origin, while others had previous experience of life abroad, either when studying (e.g., on Erasmus exchanges) or for migratory motives. Finally, they decided to remain in Valencia precisely because the city offered the best balance, they had found among all the elements they consider relevant for achieving a good quality of life.

What all they have in common is that escaping from an undesirable environment allowed them to pursue an individual pathway of growth which was not a reconstruction of their self-identity but the realization of their true identity frustrated by their context of origin and favoured by living in Valencia. Finally, the geographic proximity of Valencia to Italia, more than other medium-sized Spanish cities such as Malaga and Seville let Italians immigrants to maintain easier both commercial and relational ties with their country of origin. All of the interviews and the great majority of online conversation make clear that Italians in Valencia are searching for a better quality of life and that this is their main motivation, but they define quality of life and the lifestyle they seek, quite differently from other migrant groups studied by LM scholars. The next section examines in detail the sense in which they have achieved a better life by moving to Valencia, how they define a better life and what factors make their lives better.

4.3. Quality of life

As improving their quality of life appears to be the migrants’ main motivation, we have explored the meaning they give to the expression “quality of life” and how moving to Valencia allows them to better it. As explained by Benson and O’Reilly (2009), “how individuals perceive destinations is the result of a complex interaction between their prior experiences of a location… and their individual circumstances (including cultural, educational and economic capital) at the point of migration” (p. 613). The very diverse elements of the better life in Valencia relative to Italy can be summarized in two dimensions: according to the interviewees and participants in the virtual communities, they found life in Valencia less stressful and less expensive.

Many elements were found to contribute to the first dimension (4.3.1-4.3.4), making life less stressful in Valencia and others to the second dimension (4.3.5). The following subsections consider the most relevant factors and those recurring most often in migrants’ discourse.

4.3.1. Sustainable mobility

The concrete possibility of moving around daily by bicycle, electric scooter or public transport, with Valencia’s extensive intermodal network (tram, metro, bus), rather than by car, is a strong point of the city often mentioned by the interviewees and highly valued by migrants for reasons related both to the choice of a sustainable and healthy lifestyle and to the comfort that such mobility implies.

Beyond the question of values, this aspect of the lifestyle has concrete advantages, for example, getting out of their cars gives people a more relaxed rhythm of life.

Sustainable mobility is appreciated by the interviewees for multiple and intertwined reasons related to medium-environmental sustainability arguments, economic reasons due to cheaper mobility and stress-free life. All of them relevant to a greater or lesser extent depending on the individuals’ preferences.

4.3.2. Public services

Another feature which makes Valencia particularly attractive for Italian migrants is the relative efficiency of the public administration and its services in comparison with their home country.

4.3.3. Feeling of security in urban life

One of the most frequently recurring themes, both in the Facebook groups and in the interviews, was the difficulties of living in Italy today, given the degeneration of the urban context and, more generally, of living conditions in the collective space.

Participants often described the public spaces — not only the streets and neighbourhoods, but also the parks and gardens — in many Italian towns and cities as in a state of neglect, all of which contributed to a general feeling of insecurity not perceived in Valencia.

Although the reasons for migrating to Valencia emerging from this analysis are varied, they all have in common a connection with what the city offers that the interviewees could not find in their hometowns in Italy.

4.3.4. An ideal city for children

The availability of a large number of parks and green areas, the network of children’s play facilities throughout the city, the continuous offer of cultural, sports and outdoor activities are elements that were highly valued by families with children.

4.3.5. A good balance between prices and income, between services and taxes

The other dimension of the quality of life in Valencia perceived by the migrants was the low cost of living, comprising two main elements: the affordability of everyday life, at the supermarket, in terms of transport and of leisure, thanks to the wide availability of outdoor activities and structures, and relatively low taxes, making the economic balance more favourable in Valencia than in Italy.

The relationship with the state, i.e., all aspects of the individual’s contribution to the collective and of the services provided in return, was perceived as a comparative advantage of the Spanish fiscal system. In general, there was seen to be a positive balance between taxes paid and the services that the city provided in terms of amenities and efficient public services.

All the entrepreneurs and self-employed people in the sample also remarked how easy it was to set up a new activity with a very low budget. In contrast, the situation in Italy was assessed negatively: On one hand, taxation was perceived as excessive, above the sensitive threshold of half of income, while on the other the public services provided in return were seen as inadequate, heightening the perception of unfair taxation, strengthening the idea of the state as the enemy.

Two more elements complete the portrait of Valencia as an attractive city: the climate and the general possibility of having a Mediterranean lifestyle. The sample can be divided into two groups with different but converging discourses: those from the North of Italy and those from the South.¹ The former was sun-seeking ‘heliotropic migrants’, as are Northern European migrants, while the latter sought to maintain their prior Mediterranean lifestyle. Where they coincided was in aspiring to and valuing positively the Mediterranean way of life made possible essentially by the climate.

The Italian migrants to Valencia interpreted their migration project as a way to reconstruct a more balanced social and economic situation in terms of costs and benefits, taxes and services, energy to expend and amenities, to live a less stressful and more secure life. In short, a better life for them meant less stressful and more secure, with a better work-life balance. The values shared and lived in the new context also certainly influenced their projects. Many interviewees underlined the relevance for them of the attitude of people in the street and in everyday life in a public context. Personal growth, then, as key element of LM, was possible for these Italians migrating to somewhere where they could be themselves because of very different structural conditions, a more liveable urban context and better living conditions.

The relevance of each of the above-mentioned elements of the positive balance in the quality-of-life changes depended on interviewees’ place of origin. Nonetheless, the overall balance was the same: living in Valencia improved their quality of life because of all of those factors. The variety of profiles of people in our sample led us to evaluate the differences. People from the north of Italy put more value on the climate but considered the balance positive because they did not have to completely renounce the high quality of public services they had enjoyed before migrating. Conversely, people from the south strongly valued the quality of services in Valencia, far superior to their hometowns, while maintaining the Mediterranean climate and sociality of the Italian south. It was not about each element, but about the balance.

4.4. The role of work: instrumental or part of a new lifestyle?

In order to achieve and maintain the lifestyle made possible by the migration, Italians in Valencia often run small businesses as self-employed expatriates, a finding consistent with other studies (e.g., Stone & Stubbs, 2007). We found that they used their businesses as a means, not an end, as instruments to fund their new life. In fact, as reported above, when asked why they had moved, they mentioned climate, quality of life and a more relaxed lifestyle ahead of business opportunities.

Nevertheless, work was not perceived only as an instrument to achieve the new lifestyle but in some cases as part of the new lifestyle. Many interviewees explained that they were self-employed not only to avoid the poor working conditions of the local labour market but because they preferred to be their own boss. Setting up a new business was their way of realizing a project which they had found it impossible to carry out in Italy because of two main obstacles: excessive start-up and maintenance costs and taxes, and an overcomplicated bureaucracy sometimes used to favour applicants having personal ties with politicians or administrators.

Furthermore, being self-employed expatriates (Stone & Stubbs, 2007) allowed them to maintain the acceptable work-life balance they were seeking as part of their new lifestyle: in fact, self-employment was instrumental to their migration project as Benson and O’ Really remark by reporting that “these lifestyle migrants use their businesses as a means to an end; they use them to fund their new lifestyles” (Benson & O’Really, 2009, p. 610). In our case, self-employment was simultaneously a mean and part of the new lifestyle in itself.

Thus, these Italians had undertaken a LM in a double sense: coming to Valencia allowed them to realize their dream of being their own boss, gaining freedom and independence, while also achieving a new, more comfortable, and life-friendly work-life balance.

5. Discussion and conclusions

This study has analysed the main features of an almost unknown, emerging and fast-growing flow of migrants within Southern Europe during the last recession. The results of our ethnographic investigation show that the Italian migrants’ representation of their migratory experience reflects the main features represented in the LM literature. Through the migration project, individuals sought to escape from a stressful and unsatisfactory context to fulfil their personal dream of choosing for themselves a life based on values and preferences they considered significant.

Nevertheless, Italian migration to Valencia does not conform to the typology of LM studies by destination proposed by Benson and O’Reilly (2009): these are neither residential tourists nor migrants pursuing a rural idyll and certainly not bourgeois bohemians. They are LMs in an urban context, like those migrating to other European cities such as Lisbon or Athens highlighted in recent studies (Montezuma & McGarrigle, 2019), but not international homebuyers or investors in tourist cities as in other studies (Jover & Diaz-Parra, 2020). We contend that they represent a migration trend which has not hitherto been studied and which this paper seeks to make visible as an emerging LM, enriching LM studies with some novel elements.

The Italian community in Valencia is composed mainly of men or families, of working age, whose labour insertion represents a key element of their biography. This socio-demographic feature in principle approximates their migrant experience to that of economic migrants, while distinguishing them from the retired and affluent people mainly analysed by LM studies. Despite these differences, the search for a better life takes on a greater relevance in their discourses than work-related issues in explaining migration motivation. This means that the set of values usually attributed to lifestyle migrants is a determinant factor not only for those supported by a certain economic security, such as affluent and retired people, but also for those seeking to achieve it.

While it is evident that participants in any migratory process, including those motivated by lifestyle factors, cannot be separated by economic and political factors referring to the context of settlement, we dispute that the relevance of work-related issues for the migrants in our sample likens them to economic migrants, as stated by Huete and others (2013), or that “economic reasons weigh more heavily in the case of labour migration, whereas for lifestyle migrants the economic expectations are associated with other very important expectations related to the consumption of leisure experiences, and the enjoyment of outdoor activities” (p. 335). It is not a matter of different weights, both being relevant for the two groups of migrants, but of hierarchy and of priority. Our interviewees’ discourses make evident that what moved them was the aspiration to a better life in terms of values and lifestyle, with work being a means to achieve this, not the driver as for economic migrants. What led these latter to migrate was the search for a job or economic reasons in general, the improved lifestyle being a consequence. Furthermore, if economic and lifestyle migrants’ similar reactions to the last downturn call into question the differences between them (Huete et al., 2013), their migratory projects in both cases being impaired by the economic situation, the low relevance of economic evaluations in motivating this flow is extremely clear, because Italians have continued to come to Valencia despite the economic crisis and despite being pioneers unable to count on the help generally provided by a pre-existing migrant community.

Another novelty emerging from the observation of this group concerns what kinds of elements and conditions count in defining the ideal of a better life in the destination country, these being significantly different from the elements normally characterizing lifestyle migration. Elements of a value-oriented lifestyle mentioned by the interviewees include more sustainability, greater respect for the environment, the use of both public and private alternatives to the car, access to many parks and green spaces and the possibility of enjoying outdoor leisure activities.

Our interviewees were not migrating to boost an identity-making process, to reconstruct or renew their identity realizing personal growth through new experiences and situations as highlighted in other LM studies (Hoey, 2009), they were in search of a social context more favourable to their families and life project. With regard to the place itself, the Italians described Valencia as an ideal place to live, in a different sense from the idyllic representations reported in LM studies. They would agree with the mainstream LM account of an idyllic lifestyle as less stressful, more relaxed, with sun, sea, and pleasant temperatures throughout the year. Where they differed was in finding it not to a rural paradise but in an urban setting where a more relaxed lifestyle was facilitated by easy access to services, a better work-life balance, more opportunity to spend time outdoors, lower taxes, more facilities and so on. In our case the key elements of Italian migrants’ satisfaction with Valencia are amenities, easy bureaucracy, public services, and the availability of public leisure spaces and a more acceptable balance between their individual contribution to society (pay taxes) and what they received as citizens in their new social context (services). Life is better, according to our Italians in Valencia, when better public services, transport and infrastructure are provided, combining to make the urban context more liveable. To conclude, they were not engaged in a postmodernist introspective reconstruction of their self-identity, but were seeking a lifestyle more closely aligned with postmodern values related with collective dimension. In this sense, Italian migration to Valencia can be framed in postmodernist terms, where post-materialist values are changing life priorities: first, people seek a better life, in what could be called a holistic perspective, and once they find it, they try to make their project economically viable by seeking employment or creating a new business or self-employment opportunity.

Acknowledge

The authors are grateful to the peer reviewers and to the editor for their comments and suggestions thanks to which the quality of the paper significantly improved.

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