Italian Geography
Italy's land is divided into regions, provinces, comunes and frazioni.
Regions
Italy is divided into twenty regions (It: regioni), just like the U.S. is divided into fifty states. Examples of these Italian regions include Umbria, Abruzzo, and Sicily. If you familiar with Italian cooking you probably will recognize the names of some regions, because Italian cooking styles are regionally distinctive.
There is currently a proposal under consideration in Italy to reduce the number of regions to twelve. Will this effect your genalogical research? Probably not. The old vital records in which you are interested were all created at the local level. It is more important to know the name of the region at the time of the record's creation than the region's name today. For more information about Italian Regions, visit this Link. Below is a list of the current twenty regions in aphabetical order with their capitals, population, and area.
| Regions | Capital | Area(km) | Population |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abruzzo | L'Aquila | 10,794 | 1,324,000 |
| Aosta Valley (Valle D'Aosta)* | Aosta | 3,263 | 126,000 |
| Apulia (Puglia) | Bari | 19,362 | 4,076,000 |
| Basilicata | Potenza | 9,992 | 591,000 |
| Calabria | Catanzaro | 15,080 | 2,007,000 |
| Campania | Naples | 13,595 | 5,811,000 |
| Emilia-Romagna | Bologna | 22,124 | 4,276,000 |
| Friuli-Venezia-Giulia* | Trieste | 7,855 | 1,222,000 |
| Lazio | Rome | 17,207 | 5,561,000 |
| Liguria | Genoa (Genova) | 5,421 | 1,610,000 |
| Lombardy (Lombardia) | Milan (Milano) | 23,861 | 9,642,000 |
| The Marches (Le Marche) | Ancona | 9,694 | 1,553,000 |
| Molise | Campobasso | 4,438 | 320,000 |
| Piedmont (Piemonte) | Turin (Torino) | 25,399 | 4,401,000 |
| Sardinia (Sardegna)* | Cagliari | 24,090 | 1,666,000 |
| Sicily (Sicilia)* | Palermo | 25,708 | 5,030,000 |
| Tuscany (Toscana) | Florence (Firenze) | 22,997 | 3,677,000 |
| Trentino-Alto-Adige* | Trento | 13,607 | 1,007,000 |
| Umbria | Perugia | 8,456 | 884,000 |
| Veneto | Venice | 18,391 | 4,832,000 |
* Autonomous regions with special statutes
Provinces
Each region of Italy is divided into provinces (It: provincia), just like the states of the U.S are divided into counties. Some examples of provinces include Salerno (in the region of Campania), Messina (in the region of Sicily), and Teramo (in the region of Abruzzo). There are a total of 103 provinces currently, with a region containing from one to nine provinces. Recently, new provinces were created to acommodate the growing population in somw areas. For more information about Italian Provinces, visit this Link.
Comunes
In Italy, the comune, (plural comuni) is the basic administrative division of both provinces and regions, and may be properly approximated in casual speech by the English word township or municipality. The comune provides many of the basic civil functions: registry of births and deaths, registry of deeds, contracting for local roads and public works, etc. It is headed by a mayor (sindaco) assisted by a council of aldermen, the Consiglio Comunale. The offices of the comune are housed in a building usually called the Municipio, or Palazzo Comunale. As of the 2007 census, there were 8,101 comuni in Italy; they vary considerably in area and population. For a complete list of Italian comunes, visit this Link.
Frazioni
A frazione, in Italy, is the name given in administrative law to a type of territorial subdivision of a comune. Most comuni have several frazioni, occasionally several dozens, while some have none. It is cognate to the English word fraction, but in practice is roughly equivalent to "parishes", "hamlets" or "wards" in other countries. For a complete list of Frazioni, visit this Link.