In 2025, the top city for startups in Italy is *****, with a total score of *****, surpassing Rome by almost ********* the score.****** ranked **** in the European Union and is the sole Italian city included in the global top 100. Other leading Italian cities for startups are Rome, Turin, and Florence.

The Italian region with the highest number of enterprises is Lombardy, in the north. In 2024, this region counted about 943,000 companies, while Campania in the south followed with over 595,000 firms. Milan, the capital city of Lombardy, is the most important financial and industrial center of Italy. The geography of business Despite the big role of Lombardy and Lazio as business centers, a broader picture of the distribution of companies nationwide shows an interesting scenario. According to data on the number of companies broken down by macro-region, most enterprises in Italy are in the South and on the main islands, Sardinia and Sicily. An explanation behind these numbers might be the high prevalence, together with large companies, of many small businesses and individual entrepreneurship in the Southern regions and on the Islands. Economic upturn for the South Similarly, the growth rate of enterprises in the southern regions and provinces is showing a promising economic upturn for these regions, which have always been observed economically as the tail-end of the country. In 2024, the province of Naples, in the southern region of Campania,recorded a growth rate of 1.58 percent, one of the largest in the country.

The statistic shows the leading five Italian cities by number of startups in 2017. According to the figure, the city of Milan ranked first with over *** thousand startups, followed by the city of Rome with *** companies. According to the same source, Lombardy counted a total of *** thousand startups, while the region of Lazio counted ***, meaning the great majority of startups in Lazio was based in Rome.

Milan and Bologna were the cities with the highest amount of Bitcoin ATMs and two of four places in Italy with over 10 Bitcoin ATMs in August 2025, with most of these installations to be found in the south of the country. The Mediterranean country had 219 cryptocurrency withdrawal machines across the country. They are different from traditional cash machines in that they do not connect to a bank account but connect users to a Bitcoin wallet or exchange. This way, they can convert physical money into digital currency. An open-source website lists Italy as being the second-highest country in the world in terms of how many companies accept cryptocurrency payments.

As of November 2019, over *** companies in retail or food service accepted Bitcoin in Italy in 2019, a number significantly higher than in other business sectors in the country. In particular, there were *** retailers and *** service companies where it was possible to pay with the cryptocurrency. Furthermore, as of September 2019, the number of ATMs in Italy accounted for roughly *** percent of the global number of Bitcoin ATMs.

Using Bitcoin offline The Italian city with the largest number of Bitcoin-enabled ATMs was Lombardy’s capital Milan, followed by Bologna. Lombardy was the region with the highest number of stores where it was possible to pay by Bitcoin. Per capita, however, most stores that accepted the cryptocurrency were found in the region of Trentino-South Tyrol.

Online payments In 2019, Bitcoin was the third most popular payment method for online purchases in Italy. Used on average *** thousand times a month, it was however still lagging behind other online payment services. PayPal, for example, was used on average *** million times a month. Like in most countries around the world, Bitcoins were far from being mainstream: according to a 2018 survey, only ***** percent of Italians owned cryptocurrencies.

In 2021, Milan had nearly as many companies with a cryptocurrency ATM or in-store payment method as Rome - despite the capital city's much bigger size. The figures shown here come from an open-source website, where people can list (especially small) businesses with a crypto payment option. In the case of Italy, most of these firms are located in the north of the country with cities like Genoa, Florence or Bologna having more crypto-applying businesses than their larger counterparts in the south.