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.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the area of modern-day Italy, at the time a collection of various states and kingdoms, was estimated to have a population of nineteen million, a figure which would grow steadily throughout the century, and by the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the population would rise to just over 26 million.

Italy’s population would see its first major disruption during the First World War, as Italy would join the Allied Forces in their fight against Austria-Hungary and Germany. In the First World War, Italy’s population would largely stagnate at 36 million, only climbing again following the end of the war in 1920. While Italy would also play a prominent role in the Second World War, as the National Fascist Party-led country would fight alongside Germany against the Allies, Italian fatalities from the war would not represent a significant percentage of Italy’s population compared to other European countries in the conflict. As a result, Italy would exit the Second World War with a population of just over 45 million.

From this point onwards the Italian economy started to recover from the war, and eventually boomed, leading to increased employment and standards of living, which facilitated steady population growth until the mid-1980s, when falling fertility and birth rates would cause growth to largely cease. From this point onward, the Italian population would remain at just over 57 million, until the 2000s when it began growing again due to an influx of migrants, peaking in 2017 at just over 60 million people. In the late 2010s, however, the Italian population began declining again, as immigration slowed and the economy weakened. As a result, in 2020, Italy is estimated to have fallen to a population of 59 million.

Population estimates for the Roman empire, by European region (thousands).

This database represents a collection of osteological and biochemical information from two Imperial-era skeletal collections (Casal Bertone and Castellaccio Europarco) from Rome. Data collection was accomplished between 2007-2009. In the database, you will find basic demographic information (age and sex), an inventory of each skeleton, measurements, skeletal pathology data, records of teeth examined and their pathological conditions, and results of all biochemical analyses undertaken to date (C, N, O, Sr, Pb isotopes; Pb and Sr concentration). No information on the archaeological context of the skeletons (e.g., provenience, grave goods, etc.) is included in this database, as that information is the purview of the Archaeological Superintendency of Rome. I'm suggesting a CC BY-NC-SA license for these data -- that is, feel free to use the data as you see fit for your academic publications; I just ask that you credit me appropriately. For a synthesis of data from different sites, citation is fine. If you're interested in analyzing unpublished data, like dental pathology, I would appreciate co-authorship. To find my own analyses and interpretations, or to get additional context, please see the relevant publications at the link below. If you don't have access to them, I will gladly send you a copy of anything published or under review. I have photographs of skeletons and pathologies that you can request if needed.

Don't hesitate to contact me for more information, to ask about research that's been done with these collections, or to suggest a paper that we could collaborate on - killgrove @ uwf . edu.

Publications from these data: [Pathology Data] Killgrove, K. In press. Imperialism and physiological stress in Rome (1st-3rd centuries AD). In: Bioarchaeology of Contact, Colonialism, and Imperialism, H. Klaus and M. Murphy, eds. University Press of Florida. [Stature Data] Killgrove, K. In press. Using skeletal remains as a proxy for Roman health: the potential and problems with palaeopathology, biochemistry, and postcranial morphology. In: Diet and Nutrition in the Roman World, C. Holleran and P. Erdkamp, eds. Routledge. [Sr and O Data]Killgrove, K. and J. Montgomery. 2016. All Roads Lead to Rome: Exploring Human Migration to the Eternal City through Biochemistry of Skeletons from Two Imperial-Era Cemeteries (1st-3rd c AD). PLOS One 11(2): e0147585. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0147585. Killgrove, K. 2013. Biohistory of the Roman Republic: the potential of isotope analysis of human skeletal remains. Post-Classical Archaeologies 3: 41-62. Killgrove, K. 2010. Identifying immigrants to Imperial Rome using strontium isotope analysis. In Roman Diasporas: Archaeological Approaches to Mobility and Diversity in the Roman Empire, H. Eckardt, ed. Journal of Roman Archaeology supplement 78, Chapter 9, pp. 157-174. Killgrove, K. 2010. Migration and Mobility in Imperial Rome. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina. [Also includes relevant bibliography on the archaeological context of the cemeteries.] [C and N Data] Killgrove, K. and R.H. Tykot. 2013. Food for Rome: a stable isotope investigation of diet in the Imperial period (1st-3rd centuries AD). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32(1): 28-38. DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2012.08.002. [Pb Data] Montgomery, J., J. Evans, S. Chenery, V. Pashley, K. Killgrove. 2010. “Gleaming, white and deadly”: lead exposure and geographic origins in the Roman period. In Roman Diasporas: Archaeological Approaches to Mobility and Diversity in the Roman Empire, H. Eckardt, ed. Journal of Roman Archaeology supplement 78, Chapter 11, pp. 199-226. [Nonmetric Trait Data]

Killgrove, K. Submitted. Using biological distance techniques to investigate the heterogeneous population of Imperial Rome. Manuscript submitted for edited volume, The Archaeology of Circulation, Exchange, and Human Migration, D. Peterson and J. Dudgeon, eds.

Questions should be directed to me at killgrove@uwf.edu.

In 1500, the largest city was Paris, with an estimated 225 thousand inhabitants, almost double the population of the second-largest city, Naples. As in 1330, Venice and Milan remain the third and fourth largest cities in Western Europe, however Genoa's population almost halved from 1330 until 1500, as it was struck heavily by the bubonic plague in the mid-1300s. In lists prior to this, the largest cities were generally in Spain and Italy, however, as time progressed, the largest populations could be found more often in Italy and France. The year 1500 is around the beginning of what we now consider modern history, a time that saw the birth of many European empires and inter-continental globalization.

rCRS refers to the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence and CR refers to the mtDNA coding region.MtDNA haplogroups (hg) identified in Roman Iron Age populations.

N represents the number of analyzed individuals from each of the sites.Geographical origins and archaeological contexts of ancient samples analyzed in the present study.

rCRS refers to the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence and CR refers to the mtDNA coding region.MtDNA haplogroups identified in Medieval populations.

Jews were the dominant religious group in the Israel-Palestine region at the beginning of the first millennia CE, and are the dominant religious group there today, however, there was a period of almost 2,000 years where most of the world's Jews were displaced from their spiritual homeland. Antiquity to the 20th century Jewish hegemony in the region began changing after a series of revolts against Roman rule led to mass expulsions and emigration. Roman control saw severe persecution of Jewish and Christian populations, but this changed when the Byzantine Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion in the 4th century. Christianity then dominated until the 7th century, when the Rashidun Caliphate (the first to succeed Muhammad) took control of the Levant. Control of region split between Christians and Muslims intermittently between the 11th and 13th centuries during the Crusades, although the population remained overwhelmingly Muslim. Zionism until today Through the Paris Peace Conference, the British took control of Palestine in 1920. The Jewish population began growing through the Zionist Movement after the 1880s, which sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rising anti-Semitism in Europe accelerated this in the interwar period, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, many European Jews chose to leave the continent. The United Nations tried facilitating the foundation of separate Jewish and Arab states, yet neither side was willing to concede territory, leading to a civil war and a joint invasion from seven Arab states. Yet the Jews maintained control of their territory and took large parts of the proposed Arab territory, forming the Jewish-majority state of Israel in 1948, and acheiving a ceasefire the following year. Over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced as a result of this conflict, while most Jews from the Arab eventually fled to Israel. Since this time, Israel has become one of the richest and advanced countries in the world, however, Palestine has been under Israeli military occupation since the 1960s and there are large disparities in living standards between the two regions.

It contains a collection of ancient agricultural productivity as found in archaeological literature. Mostly collected from Solonakis (2017). (XLSX)

Estimates of the maximum possible population fed in optimal conditions.