In 2025, Italy’s resident population is estimated to be almost 59 million inhabitants. About one-sixth of them lived in Lombardy, the most populous region in the country. Lazio and Campania followed, with roughly 5.7 million and 5.6 million inhabitants, respectively. These figures are mainly driven by Rome and Naples, the administrative capitals of these regions, and two of the largest metropolitan areas in the country. Which region has the oldest population? The population in Italy has become older and older over the last years. The average age in the country is equal to 46.8 years, but in some regions this figure is even higher. Liguria records an average age of 49.6 years and has one of the lowest birth rates in the country. Demographic trends for the future Liguria’s case, however, is not an outlier. Italy is already the country with the highest share of old people in Europe. At the same time, the very low number of new births means that, despite an always-increasing life expectancy, the Italian population is declining. Indeed, projections estimate that the country will have five million fewer inhabitants by 2050.

Synthetic populations for regions of the World (SPW) | Italy

Dataset information

A synthetic population of a region as provided here, captures the people of the region with selected demographic attributes, their organization into households, their assigned activities for a day, the locations where the activities take place and thus where interactions among population members happen (e.g., spread of epidemics).

License

CC-BY-4.0

Acknowledgment

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation under the NSF RAPID: COVID-19 Response Support: Building Synthetic Multi-scale Networks (PI: Madhav Marathe, Co-PIs: Henning Mortveit, Srinivasan Venkatramanan; Fund Number: OAC-2027541).

Contact information

Henning.Mortveit@virginia.edu

Identifiers

Sources

Files description

Base data files (ita_data_v_0_9.zip)

Derived data files

Validation and measures files

The European Copernicus Coastal Flood Awareness System (ECFAS) project aimed at contributing to the evolution of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (https://emergency.copernicus.eu/) by demonstrating the technical and operational feasibility of a European Coastal Flood Awareness System. Specifically, ECFAS provides a much-needed solution to bolster coastal resilience to climate risk and reduce population and infrastructure exposure by monitoring and supporting disaster preparedness, two factors that are fundamental to damage prevention and recovery if a storm hits.

The ECFAS Proof-of-Concept development ran from January 2021 to December 2022. The ECFAS project was a collaboration between Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS di Pavia (Italy, ECFAS Coordinator), Mercator Ocean International (France), Planetek Hellas (Greece), Collecte Localisation Satellites (France), Consorzio Futuro in Ricerca (Italy), Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (Spain), University of the Aegean (Greece), and EurOcean (Portugal), and was funded by the European Commission H2020 Framework Programme within the call LC-SPACE-18-EO-2020 - Copernicus evolution: research activities in support of the evolution of the Copernicus services.

Description of the containing files inside the Dataset.

The ECFAS Coastal Dataset represents a single access point to publicly available Pan-European datasets that provide key information for studying coastal areas. The publicly available datasets listed below have been clipped to the coastal area extent, quality-checked and assessed for completeness and usability in terms of coverage, accuracy, specifications and access. The dataset was divided at European country level, except for the Adriatic area which was extracted as a region and not at the country level due to the small size of the countries. The buffer zone of each data was 10km inland in order to be correlated with the new Copernicus product Coastal Zone LU/LC.

Specifically, the dataset includes the new Coastal LU/LC product which was implemented by the EEA and became available at the end of 2020. Additional information collected in relation to the location and characteristics of transport (road and railway) and utility networks (power plants), population density and time variability. Furthermore, some of the publicly available datasets that were used in CEMS related to the above mentioned assets were gathered such as OpenStreetMap (building footprints, road and railway network infrastructures), GeoNames (populated places but also names of administrative units, rivers and lakes, forests, hills and mountains, parks and recreational areas, etc.), the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS) and Global Human Settlement Population Grid (GHS-POP) generated by JRC. Also, the dataset contains 2 layers with statistics information regarding the population of Europe per sex and age divided in administrative units at NUTS level 3. The first layer includes information for the whole of Europe and the second layer has only the information regarding the population at the Coastal area. Finally, the dataset includes the global database of Floods protection standards. Below there are tables which present the dataset.

* Adriatic folder contains the countries: Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina

* Malta was added to the dataset

Copernicus Land Monitoring Service:

Coastal LU/LC

Scale 1:10.000; A Copernicus hotspot product to monitor landscape dynamics in coastal zones

EU-Hydro - Coastline

Scale 1:30.000; EU-Hydro is a dataset for all European countries providing the coastline

Natura 2000

Scale 1: 100000; A Copernicus hotspot product to monitor important areas for nature conservation

European Settlement Map

Resolution 10m; A spatial raster dataset that is mapping human settlements in Europe

Imperviousness Density

Resolution 10m; The percentage of sealed area

Impervious Built-up

Resolution 10m; The part of the sealed surfaces where buildings can be found

Grassland 2018

Resolution 10m; A binary grassland/non-grassland product

Tree Cover Density 2018

Resolution 10m; Level of tree cover density in a range from 0-100%

Joint Research Center:

Global Human Settlement Population Grid
GHS-POP)

Resolution 250m; Residential population estimates for target year 2015

GHS settlement model layer
(GHS-SMOD)

Resolution 1km: The GHS Settlement Model grid delineates and classify settlement typologies via a logic of population size, population and built-up area densities

GHS-BUILT

Resolution 10m; Built-up grid derived from Sentinel-2 global image composite for reference year 2018

ENACT 2011 Population Grid

(ENACT-POP R2020A)

Resolution 1km; The ENACT is a population density for the European Union that take into account major daily and monthly population variations

JRC Open Power Plants Database (JRC-PPDB-OPEN)

Europe's open power plant database

GHS functional urban areas
(GHS-FUA R2019A)

Resolution 1km; City and its commuting zone (area of influence of the city in terms of labour market flows)

GHS Urban Centre Database
(GHS-UCDB R2019A)

Resolution 1km; Urban Centres defined by specific cut-off values on resident population and built-up surface

Additional Data:

Open Street Map (OSM)

BF, Transportation Network, Utilities Network, Places of Interest

CEMS

Data from Rapid Mapping activations in Europe

GeoNames

Populated places, Adm. units, Hydrography, Forests, Hills/Mountains, Parks, etc.

Global Administrative Areas

Administrative areas of all countries, at all levels of sub-division

NUTS3 Population Age/Sex Group

Eurostat population by age and sex statistics interescted with the NUTS3 Units

FLOPROS

A global database of FLOod PROtection Standards, which comprises information in the form of the flood return period associated with protection measures, at different spatial scales

Disclaimer:

ECFAS partners provide the data "as is" and "as available" without warranty of any kind. The ECFAS partners shall not be held liable resulting from the use of the information and data provided.

This project has received funding from the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101004211

In 2023, the distribution of body-mass-index (BMI) across Italy varied greatly by region. According to the data, southern regions had a higher share of overweight and obese people compared to the national average. Overall, the overweight population in Italy is projected to reach **** percent by 2029. The Italian regions with the highest share of people considered as having a normal weight in 2023 were Trentino-South Tyrol, Tuscany, and Marche. Conversely, the region of Aosta Valley hosted the most underweight people in the country, in relative terms, with *** percent.

Diabetes The number of individuals suffering from diabetes in Italy amounted to ***** in 2022. Although the risk factors related to type one diabetes are not fully known, among the risk factors for diabetes type 2, being overweight or obese are among the most common. Indeed, in 2021, almost ** percent of obese women were also diabetic. This rate lowers to **** percent for men. Obesity among children and adolescents Childhood obesity is becoming an issue in the country, with the share of overweight and obese children growing every year. Indeed, Italy has become one of the European countries with the highest obesity rate among children. This tendency is more prevalent among young boys, with **** percent of male minors overweight between 2020 and 2021, compared to ** percent of females.

As of December 2024, Lombardy was the region in Italy hosting the largest share of immigrants, followed by Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, and Piedmont. Lombardy is the region with the highest number of inhabitants in the country. The north Italian region has ten million residents, around one sixth of the total national population, and was housing 18,200 immigrants. The Mediterranean route to Europe  In 2020, 955 migrants died or went missing in the Italian Central Mediterranean Sea in the attempt to reach Europe. In 2024, 66,317 people arrived at the Italian shores, 91,300 individuals less compared to 2023. Death and missing cases still represent a serious hazard for the people who want to reach Italy from North Africa. Racism on the rise in Italy Race-related violence is strictly correlated with immigration. According to 2020 data, the cases of racial physical violence increased, in particular between 2016 and 2018. Over these three years, the cases of body violence ranged from 24 to 127 attacks. Similarly, insults, threats, and harassment became more widespread. Between 2017 and 2019, the cases grew from 88 to 206, while only in the first three months of 2020 there were 53 episodes of racist insults, threats, and harassment.