Chart and table of population level and growth rate for the Florence, Italy metro area from 1950 to 2025.

At the beginning of 2024, the number of residents in Florence amounted to 367,581 people. Specifically, two thirds of the population were aged between 15 and 64. Over 65 citizens account for 28 percent of the total, whereas the inhabitants between 0 and 14 years old are only a small minority.

At the beginning of 2024, the total number of Florence inhabitants amounts to 367,581 people. In particular, females represent more than half of the population, with almost 200,000 (53 percent), whereas males account for only 47 percent of the residents.

Rome is the most populous city in Italy. With 2.75 million inhabitants, the capital of the country put ahead Milan and Naples. Compared to the number of citizens in 2012, the resident population of Rome increased by over 140,000 individuals. Regional data Rome is located in the center of Italy in the Lazio region. Lazio is the second-largest region in terms of population size after Lombardy. In 2024, the region counts roughly 5.7 million inhabitants, whereas Lombardy has over ten million individuals. The third-largest region is Campania, with 5.6 million people. Naples, the major center of Campania, has around 910,000 inhabitants at the beginning of 2024. Nevertheless, this city was, back in the 19th century, one of the largest cities in Western Europe. Tourism in Rome The Eternal City is also the main tourist destination in Italy and was the eighth most-visited city in Europe. The largest groups of international visitors in Rome came from the United States of America, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Every year, more and more tourists also enjoy the best-known tourist attractions in Rome, like the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Palatine Hill, which together recorded almost ten million visitors in 2022.

Milan, Bologna, Genoa, Florence, and Turin recorded a population increase between 2022 and 2023. In fact, all the other largest municipalities registered a decrease, most prominently in the south and on the islands. However, Naples is the third-largest Italian municipality, after Rome and Milan.

In 2023, the biggest communities of foreign nationals in Italy were in Milan, Bologna, Florence, Turin, Rome, and Genoa, where more than ten percent of the inhabitants were not of Italian origin. These cities are mostly located in the north of the country. On the contrary, in the southern municipalities of Bari, Catania, and Palermo the incidence of the immigrant population is minimal, well below five percent. Italian demographics In 2024, beyond five million foreign residents lived in Italy, compared to the total population of 59 million inhabitants. Projections assert that in the upcoming years, the number of Italian citizens will progressively decrease, mostly given to the aging population and low birth rates. In fact, it has been predicted that the median age could reach 53.6 years by 2050, whereas the country experienced a constant decline in the number of births. In 2010, almost 550,000 babies came into life, but ten years later only 400,000 births were recorded. The divide between north and south From the distribution of immigrant residents, there is an evident separation between the northern Italian regions and the southern part of the country, making those territories less attractive for foreigners in terms of work opportunities. Analysis on the index of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in 2005, in 2015 and 2025 reveal that the total wealth produced by the southern region represents only half of the one recorded in the north. Moreover, in 2023 the unemployment rate in northern regions was around four percent, whereas in the south it reached 14 percent.

Throughout the early modern period, the largest city in Italy was Naples. The middle ages saw many metropolitan areas along the Mediterranean grow to become the largest in Europe, as they developed into meeting ports for merchants travelling between the three continents. Italy, throughout this time, was not a unified country, but rather a collection of smaller states that had many cultural similarities, and political control of these cities regularly shifted over the given period. Across this time, the population of each city generally grew between each century, but a series of plague outbreaks in the 1600s devastated the populations of Italy's metropolitan areas, which can be observed here. Naples At the beginning of the 1500s, the Kingdom of Naples was taken under the control of the Spanish crown, where its capital grew to become the largest city in the newly-expanding Spanish Empire. Prosperity then grew in the 16th and 17th centuries, before the city's international importance declined in the 18th century. There is also a noticeable dip in Naples' population size between 1600 and 1700, due to an outbreak of plague in 1656 that almost halved the population. Today, Naples is just the third largest city in Italy, behind Rome and Milan. Rome Over 2,000 years ago, Rome became the first city in the world to have a population of more than one million people, and in 2021, it was Italy's largest city with a population of 2.8 million; however it did go through a period of great decline in the middle ages. After the Fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476CE, Rome's population dropped rapidly, below 100,000 inhabitants in 500CE. 1,000 years later, Rome was an important city in Europe as it was the seat of the Catholic Church, and it had a powerful banking sector, but its population was just 55,000 people as it did not have the same appeal for merchants or migrants held by the other port cities. A series of reforms by the Papacy in the late-1500s then saw significant improvements to infrastructure, housing, and sanitation, and living standards rose greatly. Over the following centuries, the Papacy consolidated its power in the center of the Italian peninsula, which brought stability to the region, and the city of Rome became a cultural center. Across this period, Rome's population grew almost three times larger, which was the highest level of growth of these cities.

This gazetteer is a joint product of two research projects, UrbanOccupationsOETR (European Research Council - Starting Grant, Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850-2000, https://urbanoccupations.ku.edu.tr, Grant agreement ID: 679097) and POPGEO_BG (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, Population Geography of Bulgaria, 1500- 1920: A Historical Spatial Analysis, https://popgeo.ku.edu.tr, Grant agreement ID: 867474) both funded by the European Commission.

M. Erdem Kabadayı and Grigor Boykov have been the principal investigators of UrbanOccupationsOETR and POPGEO_BG, respectively.

This unprecedented large-scale Ottoman gazetteer is based on mid-nineteenth century population registers (NFS.d. with their archival fond) available at the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye, Directorate of State Archives. Its current first version enlists 16.296 populated places (12.285 and 4.011 geolocated within UrbanOccupationsOETR and POPGEO_BG, respectively) extracted from 764 population registers dating between 1830 and 1849. For details of the geolocation procedure, especially for UrbanOccupationsOETR but also valid to a large extent POPGEO_BG, see:

Ma, Jilian, Akın Sefer, and M. Erdem Kabadayı. “Geolocating Ottoman Settlements: The Use of Historical Maps for Digital Humanities.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium of the International Cartography Commission on the History of Cartography “Mapping the Ottoman Realm: Travelers, Cartographers and Archaeologists” 21–23 April 2020, Istanbul, Turkey (Rescheduled for December 2021, Florence, Italy), edited by Imre Josef Demhardt, Vol. 3. Göttingen: Copernicus Publications, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5194/ica-proc-3-10-2021.

The gazetteer is available in the format of a spreadsheet with 15 columns. It provides the following information for all of the 16.296 enlisted populated places:

• longitude
• latitude
• register_date_in_Hicri (calendar)
• doc_type (mufassal or icmal population registers)
• NFS.d. register_number (as in the archival fond)
• project (acronym)
• toponym_modern (current toponym in various languages depending on the location of the populated place today). For 797 populated places, toponym_modern is entered as ‘vanished.’ These populated places are all geolocated with coordinates by using georeferenced historical maps. However, no current settlements could be identified in their locations.
• toponym Ottoman in NFS.d. (typed as accurately as possible in Arabic script copying from the Ottoman population registers)
• toponym transcribed (original handwritten Ottoman to Latin script, as a principle, following the Redhouse lexicon) from NFS.d.
• kaza (the Ottoman administrative unit on the sub-district level as stated) in NFS.d.
• kaza_1848_1264 and liva_1848_1264 correspondences of enlisted kaza information in NFS.d. registers according to the official Ottoman yearbook dating to 1848 (1264 in Hicri):
  • Salname-i Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniye. 2nd edition. Istanbul: Darü’t-Tıbaatü’l-Amire, 1264.
• (Unique) populated place id (number)

As well as two additional administrative levels, divan and nahiye for the limited number of populated places.

POPGEO_BG was an individual fellowship; therefore, Grigor Boykov has contributed to the construction of this section of the gazetteer single-handedly, from its conceptualization to the data entry and control.

UrbanOccupationsOETR, on the other hand, sustained a large research team between 01.10.2016 and 30.09.2022 at Koç University and several team members contributed to the gazetteer in varying capacities:

M. Erdem Kabadayı conceptualized and designed the research with support from Grigor Boykov. M. Erdem Kabadayı, Akın Sefer, Grigor Boykov, and Piet Gerrits supervised the project. Piet Gerrits designed and maintained graphical user interfaces for geolocation and data entry. Akın Sefer as a team leader, located, evaluated, and selected the population registers, supervised and controlled geolocation and data entry, and conducted data curation, coding, control, and cleaning. Efe Erünal, Aysel Yıldız, and Semih Çelik also conducted source selection. Efe Erünal was also active in geolocation and data entry control.

Following UrbanOccupationsOETR team members in alphabetical order geolocated populated places and entered data into our geospatial databases: Akın Sefer, Aysel Yıldız, Barış Yıldırım, Deniz Ali Uyan, Efe Erünal, Fulya Özturan, Jilian Ma, Mertkan Karaca, Nikola Rakovski, Semih Çelik, Şehnaz İyibaş.

External researchers Furkan Elmas and Alper Kara conducted Ottoman transcription corrections and new entries under the supervision of Akın Sefer.

Piet Gerrits maintained the digital research infrastructure of the UrbanOccupationsOETR and merged the POPGEO_BG dataset to construct the gazetteer. Furthermore, he also prepared the GeoPackage and data visualization interface available at: https://urbanoccupations.ku.edu.tr/gazetteer/.

This gazetteer is a work in progress, and we would appreciate critical feedback to improve it in its following versions. Please get in touch with mkabadayi@ku.edu.tr / mekabadayi@gmail.com / grigor.boykov@univie.ac.at / griboykov@yahoo.com for your correction suggestions and inquiries.

If you would like to use the gazetteer in further publication, please use the credentials specified below:

The statistic shows the opinion on welcoming immigrants and refugees in Italy in 2016. According to the survey, 41 percent of respondents within the population of Florence believed that Italians have to welcome only the refugees and reject those people who migrate for economic reasons.

At the beginning of 2024, the most populous immigrant community in Florence was that of Romania, with 7,200 residents. The Peruvian and Chinese citizens consisted of 6,300 people each, with Albania being the fourth most represented country with 4,600 nationals.

This statistic shows the ten largest cities in Italy in 2025. In 2025, around 2.75 million people lived in Rome, making it the largest city in Italy. Population of Italy Italy has high population figures and a high population density in comparison to other European countries. A vast majority of Italians lives in urban areas and in the metropolises (as can be seen in this statistic), while other areas, such as the island Sardinia, are rather sparsely inhabited. After an increase a few years ago, Italy’s fertility rate, i.e. the average amount of children born to a woman of childbearing age, is now on a slow decline; however, it is still high enough to offset any significant effect the decrease might have on the country’s number of inhabitants. The median age of Italy’s population has been increasing rapidly over the past 50 years – which mirrors a lower mortality rate – and Italy is now among the countries with the highest life expectancy worldwide, only surpassed by two Asian countries, namely Japan and Hong Kong. Currently, the average life expectancy at birth in Italy is at about 83 years. Most of Italy’s population is of Roman Catholic faith. The country actually boasts one of the largest numbers of Catholics worldwide; other such countries include Brazil, Mexico and the United States. The central government of the Roman Catholic Church, the Holy See, is located in Vatican City in the heart of Italy’s capital and ruled by the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. Officially, Vatican City does not belong to Italy, but is a sovereign state with its own legislation and jurisdiction. It has about 600 inhabitants, who are almost exclusively members of the clergy or government officials.

In 2023, the total number of tourist overnight stays in Florence, including international and domestic travelers, increased sharply over the previous year, but remained below pre-pandemic levels. Overall, travel accommodation establishments in Florence reported around 9.8 million overnight stays by inbound visitors and roughly 2.9 million overnight stays by domestic tourists in 2023. Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance Florence is one of the best-known cities in Italy and a popular destination for tourists from all over the world. Located in the region of Tuscany, it is the eighth-largest city in Italy in terms of population size. Since the Middle Ages, the city has been an important center of art, culture, trade, and politics, but its true heyday started in the 14th century, with the beginning of the Renaissance. It was in Florence that this innovative philosophical and art movement was born, and the city was home to some of the greatest poets and artists of the period, like Francesco Petrarca, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Impact of COVID-19 on Italian tourism Tourism is one of the most significant economic sectors in Italy, contributing to over 200 billion euros in 2019. Due to the impact of the health crisis, however, the total contribution of travel and tourism to GDP in Italy in 2022 was still three percent lower than pre-pandemic levels. Similarly, while the number of international tourist arrivals in Italy rebounded in 2022, it did not catch up yet with the figures from 2019. Overall, the highest volume of tourist arrivals came from Germany, France, and Austria in 2022.

In 2024, the total number of foreign residents in Italy was over five million people. In 2023, Rome and Milan were the cities with the largest presence of immigrant population, followed by Turin, Naples, and Florence.

The Black Death was the largest and deadliest pandemic of Yersinia pestis recorded in human history, and likely the most infamous individual pandemic ever documented. The plague originated in the Eurasian Steppes, before moving with Mongol hordes to the Black Sea, where it was then brought by Italian merchants to the Mediterranean. From here, the Black Death then spread to almost all corners of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. While it was never endemic to these regions, it was constantly re-introduced via trade routes from Asia (such as the Silk Road), and plague was present in Western Europe until the seventeenth century, and the other regions until the nineteenth century. Impact on Europe In Europe, the major port cities and metropolitan areas were hit the hardest. The plague spread through south-western Europe, following the arrival of Italian galleys in Sicily, Genoa, Venice, and Marseilles, at the beginning of 1347. It is claimed that Venice, Florence, and Siena lost up to two thirds of their total population during epidemic's peak, while London, which was hit in 1348, is said to have lost at least half of its population. The plague then made its way around the west of Europe, and arrived in Germany and Scandinavia in 1348, before travelling along the Baltic coast to Russia by 1351 (although data relating to the death tolls east of Germany is scarce). Some areas of Europe remained untouched by the plague for decades; for example, plague did not arrive in Iceland until 1402, however it swept across the island with devastating effect, causing the population to drop from 120,000 to 40,000 within two years. Reliability While the Black Death affected three continents, there is little recorded evidence of its impact outside of Southern or Western Europe. In Europe, however, many sources conflict and contrast with one another, often giving death tolls exceeding the estimated population at the time (such as London, where the death toll is said to be three times larger than the total population). Therefore, the precise death tolls remain uncertain, and any figures given should be treated tentatively.