Thin walls ruining your Italian home? Soundproof it properly.

Thin walls in your Italian holiday home — and how to fix them properly

You bought a place in Italy for one reason: to escape. A house by the sea in Puglia, an apartment on Lake Como, a villa in the Tuscan hills, a retreat near Lake Garda. Somewhere to sleep with the windows open and read on the terrace in silence. Then the first real summer arrives and you discover the truth about your Italian holiday home: the walls are thin. You hear the neighbour’s TV until midnight, children thundering across the floor above from seven in the morning, voices from the balcony next door as if they were inside your bedroom.

The cruelty of it is specific. In your main home back in the UK, Ireland or the US you’ve somehow adjusted to whatever you live with. But this house was supposed to be different — you go there for a handful of precious weeks, and those are exactly the weeks the noise destroys. You paid a premium for peace and ended up counting down the days until you fly home.

This page is for owners caught in that exact trap — both those who bought a second home and those who rent out a holiday property and watch the reviews suffer because of noise. We won’t sell you the fantasy of a quick DIY fix that leaves you, after three failed attempts, with the same problem and a lighter wallet. We’ll explain why it happens, what genuinely works, and why getting it right the first time makes financial sense — even if you only spend a month a year in the house.

“The best soundproofing for an Italian villa isn’t the cheapest quote — it’s the one that actually works.”

Why you hear everything in an Italian holiday home

There’s a structural reason that noisy neighbours in Italy feel so much closer than they would back home. A large share of Italian holiday properties — especially in coastal and lakeside resort towns built in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s — share one acoustic weakness: the dividing walls between apartments are thin, often lightweight hollow brick or even single-layer plasterboard. At the time, developers built to maximise sellable square metres, and sound insulation was neither a regulatory priority nor a selling point.

This matters for foreign buyers in particular, because the building standards you’re used to are different. A British or American buyer assumes a baseline of privacy between dwellings that simply wasn’t built into much of the Italian holiday housing stock. A Tuscany holiday home with thin walls, or a Lake Como apartment that transmits every footstep, isn’t a defect unique to your property — it’s the norm for the era and the market.

Then summer makes it dramatically worse, for three reasons at once:

• ✓The heat means windows stay open, so outdoor noise stacks on top of what already comes through the walls.
• ✓The buildings are full: neighbours are on holiday too, so they’re home, they stay up late, they have guests, the children run from morning till night.
• ✓In resort areas the people next door change constantly — one week a quiet family, the next a group coming home at three in the morning.

The single most important thing to understand is this: the noise doesn’t only come through the wall you share with your neighbour. It can travel through the floor, the ceiling or the side walls too. Before fixing anything, you have to know where the sound is actually getting in — and that’s rarely obvious from inside the room. It’s the same mechanism we describe in our guide on thin walls in your Italian holiday home.

What you’ve already tried — and why it wasn’t enough

Almost everyone, before calling a specialist, runs through the same sequence of household remedies. We know them well, because clients describe them at every single survey.

Earplugs. They get you through one bad night, but you can’t spend your entire holiday sleeping with plugs in, night after night — you wake with sore ears and hear the louder noises anyway. They’re a plaster over a structural problem.

The “furniture” fixes. The bookcase pushed against the wall, heavy curtains, thick rugs, acoustic foam panels ordered online. All of it absorbs a little echo inside the room but does nothing to stop the sound arriving from outside.

Absorption improves the acoustics inside a room. Insulation blocks the noise coming in. To stop your neighbours, you need insulation — and no rug or foam panel delivers it.

The local builder or plasterer. He fits a plasterboard wall that “insulates,” you spend a few hundred euros, and two months later the noise is practically unchanged. It isn’t really his fault: a general builder works with simple materials because he doesn’t know how to combine the complex ones, and uses a basic technique because that’s what construction uses. For a foreign owner the trap is even deeper — a local contractor can’t issue the acoustic certification you’d need to claim Italy’s 50% tax relief. More on that below, because it’s where the real money is lost.

What actually stops the noise

To block sound passing through a wall, adding mass isn’t enough — you have to manage vibration. This is the principle behind the Tecnologia Acustica Vibrante® (Vibrant Acoustic Technology) developed by SilenzioCasa, and it’s what separates real acoustic insulation from the cosmetic kind.

The idea is counterintuitive. A traditional rigid wall blocks only part of the sound and lets the rest through: it reduces noise by roughly 3 to 8 decibels, an improvement the ear can barely register. A counter-wall engineered to “vibrate” in a controlled way behaves instead like a shock absorber — it dissipates the sound energy rather than reflecting it, and reaches a reduction of 15 to 19 decibels.

That’s the difference between “it sounds the same to me” and “I can’t hear them anymore.”

There’s a crucial warning, too: without proper design of the vibration, the insulation is irremediably compromised. A traditional wall built without this characteristic can’t be corrected after the fact — it has to be torn out and redone. Which is exactly why the first job has to be the right one.

The founder

Paolo Marchetto

SilenzioCasa was founded by Paolo Marchetto in 2005, specialised from day one in one thing only: soundproofing private homes. In twenty years he has made over 3,200 homes quiet, developed the SonorTop® material and brought the Tecnologia Acustica Vibrante® to maturity. His principle is uncomfortable and honest at once: “Unlike others, we can’t promise results we’re not sure we can deliver — on pain of a full refund.”

Our technology

The SilenzioCasa system: SonorTop® and Vibrant Acoustic Technology

At the centre of our work is not a product off the shelf, but a system. The wall, the ceiling or the floor “works acoustically” by vibrating — a phenomenon invisible to the naked eye that is exactly what cushions and cuts the noise passing through the element. Density, build-up and the coupling between layers are tuned precisely for that purpose.

There’s a detail that matters especially if children sleep in the house over summer, or if the bedroom is where you’ll finally rest: the insulating material we use, SonorTop®, is 100% natural, recycled fibre, free of toxic adhesives and with zero release of volatile substances. You won’t find it for sale — only we use it, inside our own systems. Paolo Marchetto developed it after a client, a lung specialist, said he would never want rock wool or glass wool sealed inside the walls of his own home. Over 80% of our work is in bedrooms, and we’re not willing to seal a potentially problematic material inside a wall, forever.

How much it costs — and why it pays off even for a few weeks a year

This is the question every holiday-home owner asks: is it worth spending on a house I only use a month a year? Here are the real figures from our 2026 price list (10% VAT, materials and labour included):

In practical terms, soundproofing the bedroom wall you share with a neighbour — say 4 m wide by 2.7 high, about 10.8 m² — costs around €2,106 with the 6 cm wall. So the cost to soundproof a wall in Italy is far more predictable than most owners fear.

Now the part that changes the whole perspective. Take a complete intervention at €8,770 and spread it across the working life of the insulation — twenty years, with no maintenance. That works out to €439 a year, or about €1.20 a day.

Less than a coffee at a bar — for sleeping soundly every single night you spend in that house, for the next two decades.

And there are two further financial arguments. A soundproofed home is worth more on the market — and in tourist areas, where the quality of rest is everything, it’s a genuine selling point and a stronger listing if you rent. Second, the work is eligible for a 50% tax deduction — but that comes with a catch that traps almost every foreign owner.

The trap of the cheap quote

Italy’s 50% tax deduction on soundproofing only applies if whoever does the work can issue the acoustic result certification. A general builder or plasterer cannot. So that €3,000 quote that looks cheaper actually costs you the full €3,000, while the same work done by a certified specialist costs you €1,500 in real terms, because you recover the other half through the deduction.

On top of that comes the risk of redoing everything. The same “path of errors” repeats hundreds of times: a first attempt with a plasterer at €800 that doesn’t work, a second with a competitor at €1,440 that improves little — and then, finally, the job done properly, after you’ve already paid to demolish the earlier work. The total bill easily reaches €7,000–€8,000 to solve a problem that would have cost far less to fix correctly from the start.

“When you see a price of 40–50 euros per square metre, it’s easy to understand that something is wrong.” — Paolo Marchetto

For a foreign owner managing the project from abroad, getting it right the first time isn’t just cheaper — it spares you the nightmare of coordinating a second and third round of work across borders. We’ve collected the most common pitfalls in the article on the noisy neighbours ruining your Italian holiday home.

Why a local builder can’t solve this — but an Italian acoustic specialist can

It’s tempting, as a foreign owner, to bring in a contractor you trust from home or hire the local handyman from the village. Both routes usually disappoint, for the same underlying reason: residential acoustics is a specialism, not a general building skill.

A specialist like SilenzioCasa does three things a generalist cannot:

• 1.An on-site survey to identify exactly where the noise enters — the shared wall, but potentially also the floor, ceiling or side walls.
• 2.The design of the vibration through the Tecnologia Acustica Vibrante®, choosing the 6 cm or 8 cm system by the type of noise.
• 3.The certification that unlocks the 50% tax relief — which only a qualified acoustic specialist is entitled to issue.

With more than 3,200 homes soundproofed since 2005 and over 50,000 m² of surfaces treated, residential acoustics is the only thing the company does. We don’t adapt standard solutions to your problem — we build the solution to measure, right in your home, with an in-house team and full accountability.

The guarantee that takes the risk off your shoulders

This is the difference that matters most of all, especially when the house is far away and you can’t oversee the work in person every day. SilenzioCasa works with a “100% Satisfied or Refunded” guarantee — and the guarantee is on the result, not on the numbers on a technical data sheet.

It means you decide whether the problem has been solved, whether you’ve gone back to sleeping, whether there is now silence in that bedroom. Decibels on a piece of paper don’t decide — you do. If the answer is no, the refund is total.

“You just have to hope our technician says ‘yes, the work can be done’. From that moment, the risk is no longer on your shoulders — it’s on ours.”

For a holiday home, this is decisive: you commit to the expense knowing the risk isn’t yours. Either it works, or your money comes back. Full details are on the 100% Guarantee page.

From Lake Garda to Tuscany, Como, Puglia and beyond

We treat holiday homes and second homes across Italy — the lakes, the coasts, the hill towns. Sleeping with the windows open and reading on the terrace in silence is the whole point of owning a place here, and we make that possible without a language barrier: we support English-speaking owners from the first survey to the final hand-over.

Frequently asked questions