Grado, Aquileia and Terzo: living between the island and the mainland

The zone's three municipalities are home to 13,342 people.

• Grado lives on tourism, and on foreign tourism above all: 1,499,900 nights in 2025, with guests from abroad making up 80%. The town changes face in summer, when 66% of its overnight stays fall. The 2011 census found 8,435 homes without a resident, out of 12,576.
• Aquileia, 3,124 residents, also draws mostly foreign visitors (77%), almost all in summer.
• Terzo d'Aquileia, 2,686 residents, is the quietest of the three and the closest to the station, to Palmanova and to Udine.

Cervignano is not in the zone, but the station serving Grado and Aquileia is there; it is covered in the Lower Friulian plain. By overnight stays in 2025, Grado ranks among the region's top three:

• Emergencies: for Grado and Aquileia the nearest round-the-clock emergency department is in Monfalcone, 38 min and 25 min away; for Terzo it is Palmanova, 18 min. Grado's first-aid point opens only in the summer season, on dates that change every year.
• Heart attack and stroke: the hub is Udine, 56 min from Grado and 36 min from Terzo. See hospitals and A&E.
• Trains leave from Cervignano-Aquileia-Grado station: direct services to Udine, Trieste, Venice, Milan and Rome, plus the cross-border train to Villach at weekends. It is 27 min by car from Grado, 13 min from Aquileia.
• Trieste airport: 20 min from Aquileia, 34 min from Grado.
• Full-fibre broadband: Terzo 97.3% of households, Aquileia 87.8%, Grado only 21.5%.

Grado's OMI value for flats is €2,200/m², but its cheapest and dearest zones sit at €850/m² and €3,800/m²: the street matters more than the town. €200,000 buys roughly 90 m² on the island and 250 m² in Terzo. Grado recorded 326 home sales in 2025 (-4.7% on the year before). What these figures are, and are not: house prices in Friuli.

If you are thinking of holiday lets, Grado does better than Lignano: each holiday-flat bed in the Grado area sold 34 nights over 2025, compared with 15 around Lignano (PromoTurismoFVG, estimated), and a foreign guest taking a whole house tells the Bank of Italy survey of a median outlay of €117 per night. The long-let OMI rent, €6.9/m² a month, is low against the price, for a theoretical gross yield of 3.7%.

Two local rules. All three municipalities use the land register (libro fondiario) inherited from Austria-Hungary: ownership passes when the purchase is entered in the register, not at the notary's signature alone (how it works). And ILIA, Friuli's property tax, on a second home not registered with the Region is 0.95% in Grado, 1.06% in Aquileia and 0.76% in Terzo; registered, it falls to 0.70% (the ILIA guide). The purchase step by step: buying a house in Italy.

On paper Grado has the gentlest winter in the zone: January's mean is 6.0 °C and frost comes on roughly 15 nights in a year; Aquileia counts 56. The driest municipality in Friuli is Grado, with 970 mm of rain a year. Grado has some 56 summer nights above 20 °C, while Aquileia reaches 50 days over 30 °C.

But Grado's figures carry low reliability: against ARPA's climate grid the town hall falls in the sea, so the value is taken a few hundred metres away, in the first cell with data. Aquileia's and Terzo's numbers are sound. Comparisons with Vienna, Munich and Ljubljana are in winter and summer in Friuli.

• Water. Apart from P2, the frequent-flood class P3 takes in 28% of Grado's land. Storm surges and high tides may not be covered by these maps at all; read the map for the exact address (how to check).
• Hospital distance: 38 min to A&E and 56 min to Udine, measured on empty roads.
• Winter on the island: a small, older community, 34% aged 65 or over, and many shuttered homes.
• Fibre is still scarce on the island.
• A summer economy: December to March brings Grado only 3% of its tourist nights.