Americans are already heading to Europe in search of affordable homes, but just how much more space can you get in Europe for the price of a modest Manhattan apartment?

A new study by My Dolce Casa, a research blog about living and retiring abroad, uses Realtor.com’s median listing price for a 500-square-foot apartment in Manhattan — around $750,000, or $1,500 per square foot — to compare value against what you can find in 68 regions in five European countries: France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. (Regions with inadequate data were omitted.)

Look first to Italy. Molise, a mountainous region that appeared on The New York Times’s 2020 list of 52 places to visit, took the top spot. For about $750,000, you can buy 8,333 square feet there, which comes to $90 per square foot. Calabria, in southern Italy, wasn’t too far behind at 8,242 square feet, which comes to about $91 per square foot. Homes this size would cost about $12 million at Manhattan prices.

France, Greece and Portugal didn’t crack the top 10, but Spain snagged the third and fourth spots on the list. Castilla-La Mancha, the region south of Madrid (and home to Cervantes’s Don Quixote), took third place, with 7,813 square feet, or $96 per square foot. Extremadura, on Spain’s border with Portugal, placed fourth with 7,426 square feet, or $101 per square foot. Rounding out the top five was the Italian island of Sicily, which had the fifth largest home size at 7,212 square feet, or $104 per square foot.

Not interested in Italy or Spain? You could score a good deal in Thessaly, Greece, where $750,000 snags a 5,859-square-foot home, or $128 per square foot. Less so in Lisbon — once more affordable, but now growing in popularity and cost. It was among the priciest on the list, with $750,000 buying 1,974 square feet, or $380 per square foot.

France didn’t have a region in the top 20, though Burgundy finished 22nd. There, $750,000 buys 4,880 square feet, or about $154 per square foot — still a bargain compared with Manhattan.

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The chart that appeared with an earlier version of this article included several European regions that were listed in the wrong order. The chart has been replaced.

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