Living a healthy life is a fairly universal ambition.
Eating well depends largely on the choices you make. Being active depends on your motivation. But the place you live can make both of those things easier, or harder. You can have a gym close to home, or you can step outside and find a cycle path, a hiking trail, a climbing wall, a lake, a swimming pool, a sports field or a local club where you can try something you have never done before.
In Trentino, perhaps that is the distinctive part: sport is not simply something you watch or save for the weekend. It is part of how the territory is lived. And the numbers tell a story that goes back quite a long way.
A ranking you may never have heard of
Every year, Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore publishes its Sports Index, comparing Italy’s provinces across 32 indicators. They look at participation in sport, competitive results, clubs and registered athletes, facilities, investment, events, Paralympic sport, sports tourism and the relationship between sport and society.
In 2026, the province of Trento ranked second in Italy, after taking first place in 2025. But the longer-term picture is more interesting: over twenty editions of the Sports Index, Trento has finished first eight times and has missed the podium only once. In 2026 it was once again first in the individual sports category and in women’s sport.
So no, this is not simply the result of one particularly successful sporting season. It is a level of consistency that says something about the place itself.
Here, unsurprisingly, you can do sport. A lot of it.
Skiing, snowboarding and cross-country skiing are the obvious examples. But there is also cycling and mountain biking, hiking, climbing, running, trail running, sailing, canoeing, swimming, tennis, athletics, volleyball, football, basketball and many other activities. And you do not have to be an athlete.
The interesting part is the possibility of making movement part of everyday life, whether through organised activities or simply by using the environment around you. A network of clubs, facilities, sports associations, cycle paths, trails and natural spaces makes it possible to be active in very different ways, at different ages and different levels.
That is also what the Index tries to capture: not only who wins competitions, but how active and developed a place is from a sporting point of view.
Sport, health and community
When you choose where to live, health does not depend only on the quality of the healthcare system. It also depends on the habits your everyday life actually allows you to have.
How easy is it to be active? How much space do you have around you? How easy is it to find an activity for yourself or your children? Are there opportunities to take part in sport without being competitive?
In Trentino, sport is also used as a tool for prevention, inclusion and social connection. In 2026, for example, the Province funded 14 sport di cittadinanza projects, designed to encourage physical activity among people of different ages, genders and circumstances, including people with disabilities.
So sport is not only about medals or major events. It is also one way of building community.
And then there is the place where you do it
Having mountains, forests and lakes helps. It would be strange to pretend otherwise. But beautiful scenery does not automatically create quality of life.
You also need infrastructure, maintenance, clubs, services, accessibility and a culture that makes the landscape genuinely usable. Air quality is part of the picture too. Monitoring for 2025 showed an overall positive situation in Trentino and continued a decade-long improvement trend, with legal limits respected for most monitored pollutants. Ozone during the summer remains an area of concern. That detail matters because we would rather describe Trentino as it is than turn it into a postcard.
Nature is the starting point. What you do with it is a choice. What a place enables you to do with it is the result of long-term investment.
Quality of life does not begin when you go on holiday
Perhaps that is the real point. When people outside Italy think of Trentino, it is easy to picture skiing, the Dolomites or a weekend by a lake. But if you are considering moving here, something else matters much more: what can you do on a Tuesday evening after work, on a Saturday morning without planning a trip, or together with your children during the week?
Sport captures that difference rather well. Here, if you want it to, being active can become part of everyday life. Not because everyone has to become sporty, but because the territory gives you plenty of opportunities to be. And perhaps that is part of quality of life too: not simply having more free time, but living somewhere where you can use that time well.
