What we do with your data

The short version. We collect one thing on purpose, and that is your email address, and only if you type it into one of the signup boxes yourself. We use it to send you the newsletter and to tell you about things we make. We do not sell it, rent it, or pass it to anyone beyond the services listed further down that are needed to store it and deliver the mail. There is no advertising network on this site and nothing follows you off it.

Who runs this site

Anywhere Consulting OÜ, Kiriku 6, Tallinn, Estonia. Registry code 14386871. The company is Estonian, so this site is run under EU data protection law, and the rights near the bottom of this page are real rights rather than a formality.

Write to ciao@anywhereitaly.com about anything on this page. That address reaches a person.

What we collect

Your email address, when you give it to us. We store it with the page you were reading at the time, and where it applies, the town or the region that prompted you, because that tells us which pages are worth writing more of. We do not ask for your name, and there is no account to create.

Your answers in the trip planner. How many days, which months, which corners of Italy, what you care about, how you get around. No name, no email, nothing that identifies you. Worth knowing before you use it: every plan is saved and gets its own public web address, so anyone with the link can read it. There is no free text box, so there is nothing personal to leak, but the plan itself is public.

A count of visits. This one runs on our own server rather than somebody else’s. It sets no cookies, builds no profile of you, and cannot follow you to other sites. It tells us how many people opened a page, and that is the whole of it. It runs whether or not you agree to anything below, because there is nothing in it to agree to.

Measurement from Google, Meta and X, only if you say yes. We also keep a record of traffic using tools from Google, Meta and X. These are not ours. They run on their servers, they set cookies, and some of them exist so that those companies can recognise you on other sites. That is a real difference from the count above, which is why we ask first and why neither loads until you allow it. Say no and neither ever runs. Your answer is stored in your browser; clearing your browser data will make us ask again.

Why keep them at all, when the count above already tells us what we need? Because a record of how this site grew is worth having later, and it cannot be created after the fact. If we ever have to show somebody what Anywhere Italy became, the years in between are the evidence, and they have to be collected as they happen.

One marker in your browser. When you subscribe, the site remembers it locally so the newsletter popup stops appearing. It never leaves your browser, and clearing your browser data removes it.

Why we have it

Marketing, ours, and nothing else. We write about Italian towns and we would like to send you what we write. The lawful basis for the newsletter is your consent, given when you type your address in, and you can take it back at any time. The visit counts rest on our legitimate interest in knowing whether anyone is reading, which is why they are anonymous.

Where it is kept

The site runs on servers rented from Hetzner. The database is Neon. The newsletter is sent through Substack, so an address you give us is added to our Substack list. The introduction paragraph on a generated plan is written by Anthropic’s Claude from the shape of the trip, meaning the towns, the months and the length. Nothing that identifies you is sent there. Our domain is registered with Hover, which handles no personal data at all.

Some of this sits outside the European Union. Substack is a United States company, and the database region for this site is in the United States. If that matters to you, the honest answer is not to give us your address, and you can read every page here without one.

How long we keep it

Your address stays until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it, and then it goes. We do not keep a quiet copy of people who left.

What you can ask for

A copy of what we hold on you. A correction. Deletion. That we stop using it. That we hand it over in a portable form. You can withdraw your consent whenever you like, and every email we send carries an unsubscribe link that does it in one click. Ask at ciao@anywhereitaly.com and we will answer within a month, usually much sooner.

If we handle it badly, you can complain to the Estonian Data Protection Inspectorate, the Andmekaitse Inspektsioon, or to the equivalent authority in the EU country where you live.

The data the site is built from

Everything in the catalogue of towns comes from public information. Institutional Italian sources, public registers, and published guides, compiled and checked by us, with the method written up in full on About the data. None of it is personal data about you or about anybody else.

Changes

If this changes we will change this page and move the date at the top. There is no mailing list for policy updates, because nobody wants one.

The rules for using the site are on the terms page.