Every place you can buy Italian mobile data, ranked

The order to try, cheapest first

There are four realistic ways to get Italian data, and they are separated by more than a few euros.

The eSIM is cheapest and fastest. The Iliad kiosk is by far the best value if you want a physical Italian SIM. The airport is the worst of both — most expensive, and you queue for it.

In the city

Iliad Italy sells prepaid from €9.99 a month for 120 GB plus calls, available at Iliad kiosks in shopping malls. For anyone staying several weeks, or working from Italy, nothing else on this page is close on price per gigabyte.

TIM and Vodafone tourist SIMs are sold at airports and at tobacconists — the tabacchi, identifiable by the white T on a black or blue sign, which are on more or less every Italian high street. That ubiquity is the selling point rather than the price.

Whichever you choose, bring your passport. Registration of a prepaid SIM in Italy requires a passport or ID document, without exception, and the shop completes it before the SIM works. Budget a few minutes for paperwork rather than a few seconds.

At the airport

Rome Fiumicino has a TIM kiosk and Relay / World Duty Free outlets carrying SIM packs; the peak queue there runs about 12 minutes. Milan Malpensa has Vodafone and TIM kiosks, with a peak queue around 10 minutes. Off-peak both drop to a few minutes.

Our figure for an Italian airport SIM is about $18 — for a product that costs less in town, from the same carriers. Buy at the airport if you have no alternative, not because it is convenient.

The eSIM route

Buy before you fly, scan the QR code, and the profile is sitting on your phone waiting to attach when you land. No counter, no passport, no queue. From our Italy plan data, checked 13 August 2026:

• Saily, 1 GB / 7 days — $3.99 (verified)
• Saily, 3 GB / 30 days — $8.99 (verified)
• Airalo, 10 GB / 30 days — $19 (verified)
• Airalo, 50 GB / 30 days — $35 (verified), the cheapest per-gigabyte rate we hold for Italy at $0.70

The catch is hardware. eSIM needs a phone that supports it — iPhone XS and later, and most Android flagships of recent years. Check yours against our eSIM compatible phones list before you rely on it, because there is no fixing this at the gate.

Getting by until you have bought something

WiFi in Italy is good in hotels and at major tourist sites, and both Rome airports have free WiFi. It is slower and less reliable in rural areas. That is enough to buy an eSIM on arrival if you forgot to do it at home, which is a genuinely useful fallback: airport WiFi, five minutes, and you have data without joining the kiosk queue.

Before you buy anything

Check where your existing plan was issued. If it is an EU or EEA plan, roam-like-at-home covers Italy at your domestic rates and every option above is a waste of money. This catches out a surprising number of people who buy a tourist SIM out of habit.

For the full local-versus-eSIM comparison and every provider's pricing, see the Italy hub.