We used US based ccs for a full 14 months til we finally got our residency cards and then were able to open a local account. I needed the local account to set up $ transfers through transferwise, so I'm not sure if TW would work for you. It depends on what the destination account is.
I've heard Schwab is pretty good for international ATM withdrawals but that's hearsay to me.
Yeah - most of our $ is in the US. We keep our Italian account stocked with 5,000 - 20,000 € or so. We fund it when it either starts approaching 5k, or when the exchange rate drops.
That's great info, thank you!
I do have a local account already (dual citizen, so no residency issues), so it sounds like I can use Transferwise.
Schwab is good - I opened an account there for my daughter to use while she was studying in Europe for several years and it worked with no problems at all, both for ATM withdrawals and making purchases.
Edited to ask: any issues making large purchases/transactions with your US based cards in Italy? I'm always concerned about not being able to actually complete a purchase because the transaction is flagged as potentially fraudulent. The credit card companies have bizarre ideas about fraud - like the time I was trying to buy a plane ticket directly from British Airways and my credit card was rejected because the CC company thought that ba.com was not a legit website :-)