Sell on Cerco&Trovo: free local classifieds for Perugia and Umbria
Cerco&Trovo is the free small-ads site for Perugia and the rest of Umbria, running since 1978. Who may list free, the 24-character titles, the staff check before an ad appears, and how to list there alongside your other channels.
- Cerco&Trovo is a free classified ads site for Perugia and the rest of Umbria, published by Maxi Editor. It started as a printed small-ads paper in October 1978 and passed 10 million published ads in 2020.
- It carried 12,325 live ads across all sections when we checked in October 2026. That is a local noticeboard, not a national marketplace, and you should treat it as one.
- The free service is for private sellers handling at most two items of the same kind. Trade sellers, and anyone promoting a business, have to use the paid services.
- There is no checkout, no commission and no buyer protection. Buyers phone or message you and you settle it between yourselves.
- FLUF Connect can list, edit and remove your ads, and takes an ad down when the item sells on another channel.
This guide is for sellers in or around Perugia who already list on bigger sites and want one more local outlet. If your stock is on Subito, Vinted or eBay, Cerco&Trovo reaches a different buyer: someone in Umbria who wants to collect the item this week and pay cash. For furniture, white goods, bikes, tools and anything awkward to post, that local reach is worth more than another national listing. For small, postable items you will sell faster on the national sites.
What Cerco&Trovo is
Cerco&Trovo (cercoetrovo.it) is the free small-ads service of Maxi Editor, a publisher based in Perugia. It began on paper. Its founder, Massimo Lenterna, told Umbria Journal that it launched in October 1978 with about fifty ads. By its 42nd year it had carried 10 million. The same interview covers the move to digital and notes that people still buy the printed edition.
Today the site is the main face of it. Its own home page describes it as a portale di annunci gratuiti, a free classified ads portal, and showed 12,325 ads across all sections when we checked in October 2026. The listings are overwhelmingly in Perugia and the towns around it, places like Assisi, Gubbio, Bastia Umbra, Magione and Torgiano.
Scale matters here, so be clear-eyed about it. Twelve thousand live ads across cars, property, jobs and goods is a small pool next to a national site. What it has instead is concentration: the people reading it are nearby, and many of them have read it for decades.
Who can list for free
This is the rule that catches resellers out. The site’s terms reserve the free text ads for private advertisers handling, occasionally, “massimo n. 2 oggetti della stessa natura” – a maximum of two objects of the same nature. Businesses advertising their own vacancies also qualify. Everyone else, including a private seller with more of the same thing, “devono utilizzare i servizi a pagamento”: they must use the paid services.
So forty pairs of the same trainers are not what the free sections are for, and the editorial team may well say so. Clearing a house, selling your own furniture and the odd bike is precisely the case they had in mind.
Some things are barred from the free service outright, whoever is posting. The terms list cucciolate in vendita, litters of puppies or kittens offered for sale, alongside prestazioni professionali o di servizio, professional and trade services, and finanziamenti ed assicurazioni, loans and insurance. A job offer is refused unless it carries at least a landline telephone number, which is an unusually old-fashioned rule and a fair signal of how this paper has always been run.
What you can advertise
Ads are filed under what the site calls rubriche, columns, in the newspaper sense. Four of them are big enough to have their own menus: Veicoli for vehicles, Immobili for property, Lavoro for work and Incontri for personals. Everything else lives under Altre rubriche, and that is where goods are sold.
Those goods columns are worth reading as a list, because they tell you what the readership actually buys:
- Abbigliamento (clothing), Arredamento (furniture) and Elettronica (electronics), the three that overlap most with what a reseller already stocks
- Arte e Preziosi (art and valuables), Hobby, and Sport e tempo libero (sport and leisure)
- Animali (animals), Agricoltura (agriculture) and Mamma e bambino (mother and baby)
- Istruzione (education), In regalo for things given away free, and Miscellanea as the catch-all
The agricultural column is a reminder of where this paper is read. Umbria is farming country, and a tractor attachment or a stack of olive crates is an ordinary listing here in a way it would not be on a fashion app.
FLUF lists into the goods sections only. Vehicles, property, jobs and personals ask for details a product record does not hold, and several of them are paid, so they are left out deliberately.
How an ad goes live
Three of the site’s own rules shape every ad, and none of them are yours to change.
- Ads are short. The title field takes 24 characters and the description 240. That is a headline and roughly two sentences. FLUF shortens longer titles and descriptions on a word boundary so they fit.
- Your phone number is published. It is required, and it goes on the ad itself, because ringing the seller is the whole mechanism. Nothing on the site hides it behind a contact form.
- Every ad is checked before it appears. A new ad sits as in attesa di pubblicazione, awaiting publication, until the editorial team clears it, usually by the next working day. That is normal, not a fault.
You also give a comune, the town the item is in. That single field does most of the work on a site this size: a buyer in Foligno filters to what is near Foligno, and an ad with the wrong town attached is effectively invisible to the people most likely to come and collect it.
Put together, the shape of a good listing here is narrow. A 24-character title such as Lavatrice Bosch 8kg says the make, the type and the size, which is all a local buyer needs to decide whether to ring. Padding it with condition, collection notes and a brand story leaves no room for the thing itself.
What it does not do
Cerco&Trovo takes no part in the sale. There is no basket, no payment, no shipping label and no commission, and so there is also no buyer protection, no feedback score and no record that a sale happened. A buyer sees your ad, rings the number on it, and you agree the rest.
That shapes how you should use it. Price for a cash collection, expect to be phoned rather than messaged, and remember that nothing on the site tells you an item has gone. You have to know that yourself.
Selling on Cerco&Trovo with FLUF Connect
FLUF Connect lists your existing stock to Cerco&Trovo and keeps it in step with everywhere else you sell. Open the Channels screen, choose Cerco&Trovo and sign in with the account details you use on the site.
Because the site has no checkout, there is nothing for FLUF to read back as a sale, and no orders arrive from it. The sync runs the other way: when an item sells on Depop, Facebook Marketplace or anywhere else you are connected, FLUF removes the Cerco&Trovo ad so nobody rings you about something you no longer have.
| What you want | On Cerco&Trovo with FLUF Connect |
|---|---|
| List an item you sell elsewhere | Yes, at the price you set |
| Photos on the ad | Yes, up to 8 |
| Change the title, description or price from FLUF | Yes |
| Remove an ad from FLUF | Yes |
| Item sells on another channel | FLUF takes the Cerco&Trovo ad down |
| Sale happens on Cerco&Trovo | Nothing to sync: the site has no checkout, so you mark it sold yourself |
| Orders on your FLUF Orders page | No |
| Relisting, offers or smart pricing on this channel | No |
Every FLUF plan includes crosslisting and inventory sync. The automation features come in from the Seller plan upwards, though none of them apply here. You can start with 7 days for £1, then from £9/month. FLUF connects to 71 marketplaces, so Cerco&Trovo sits alongside the national sites rather than replacing them.
One practical note for Umbrian sellers: pair it with a national channel rather than relying on it alone. A bed frame or a washing machine is worth advertising locally because nobody wants to post one. The same seller’s smaller items will still do better on Wallapop or Vinted, and FLUF keeps both sets in one place.
Related guides
Sources
- Cerco&Trovo home page, for the live ad count and the section list (checked October 2026)
- Cerco&Trovo: Termini, for who may use the free service (checked October 2026)
- Umbria Journal: the 10 millionth Cerco e Trovo ad (2020, checked October 2026)
- PagineGialle: Maxi Editor, Perugia, for the publisher (checked October 2026)
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Pick your topics first ›Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, for private sellers. The site's terms limit the free ads to private advertisers who deal only occasionally, and in no more than two objects of the same nature, plus businesses advertising their own vacancies. Beyond that you are expected to pay for the service. No commission is charged on a sale either way, since the site plays no part in the payment.
Perugia and the rest of Umbria. The listings sit in Perugia itself and the towns around it, such as Assisi, Gubbio, Bastia Umbra, Magione and Torgiano. It is a regional noticeboard, so treat it as a way to reach local buyers rather than a national marketplace.
Its home page showed 12,325 live ads across every section when we checked in October 2026. The business behind it is much older than that number suggests: it began as a printed small-ads paper in October 1978 and had published 10 million ads by 2020.
Cerco&Trovo allows 24 characters in the title and 240 in the description, which is a headline and about two sentences. FLUF shortens anything longer on a word boundary so the ad is accepted. It is the site's limit, not a FLUF one.
Yes, and it is not optional. The number is published on the ad because buyers are meant to call you directly. Expect the phone to ring rather than a message to arrive.
Every ad is checked by the editorial team before it appears. Until then it sits as awaiting publication, usually clearing by the next working day. Nothing has gone wrong and there is nothing to resend.
No. The site has no checkout, so a sale leaves no record for FLUF to read and no order reaches your Orders page. You mark the item sold yourself. The sync works the other way round: when the item sells on another channel you are connected to, FLUF removes the Cerco&Trovo ad.
No. Those three features start at the Seller plan, and none of them operate on this channel. What does work here is crosslisting and inventory sync, which every plan includes.
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