Pricele #49: Gasoline (1 litre) in Italy 🇮🇹

Crude oil trades on a world market at one price, so the pump price is almost pure policy. Countries that tax fuel heavily land near the top of the table; oil producers that subsidise it land at the bottom, sometimes below what it costs to refine. The spread between the cheapest and most expensive country here is wider than for any other item in the game.

Of the 32 countries priced for gasoline, Italy ranks #9 from the top at $2.06, 1.5× the median of $1.38.

Italy runs close to the eurozone average on groceries but below it on café prices. An espresso taken standing at the bar is still priced at a level many Italians treat as near-fixed, and that convention holds cappuccino prices down relative to northern Europe. Basic food carries just 4% IVA against a 22% standard rate, one of the largest such gaps anywhere in the EU. Italy is therefore a country where the state has decided, in tax law, that groceries are close to untaxable, and the cappuccino convention is a second, entirely informal version of the same instinct applied to coffee.

See the full table for gasoline in every country or everything priced in Italy.