Once a citizen of Italy how do I bring US funds over to live on?

You can use your ATM card of course, though be aware of foreign transaction fees from your bank, typically around 3%.  It might be better to establish a local bank account in Italy and wire transfer money over as needed. 

You're only taxed on money earned in Italy.

Romaniac
Expat.com Experts Team

We were going to move to Italy but that is another story for another day.....we researched and re-researched the best possible ways for our pension monies to go from USA to Italy.  It is a total pain in the butt but we did work it out.  We set it up with our bank so that we would call into the wire transfer office once a month....give a code/pin and they would do a once a month transfer into our Italian bank account.  It does cost every time that you do it....our fee was going to be $25.  We found that the big problem with wire transfers are that most banks want the person doing the transfer wants the person to be physically in the bank.  There are however some web sites that you can do transfers through as well.  One is called Transfer Wise.

i have been using TransferWise for several months and it is very satisfactory in speed of transfer and much lower cost than wiring money, where both the sending bank and the receiving bank take their not insubstantial cut.

This is not a plug for TransferWise, there are several other companies that provide similar service.