The resident population in Italy, as of 9 October 2011, it has 59.433.744 people. This is the result of the fifteenth general census of population and housing, elaborated by Istat. The increase compared to 2011, when there were 56.995.744 residents, it was 4,3%, an increase that should be attributedhowever, to the sole growth of the foreign component which, with the increase of 2.694.256 units, more than compensated for the decrease of 250 thousand individuals of Italian nationality.
A contingent, the foreign one, which has more than 4 million residents, most of whom reside in the North, and which is growing in all regions of the Peninsula, while Italian citizens are decreasing in the South and in some regions of the North. The municipalities that recorded the greatest increase in Italian residents are Rognano, Sant'Alessio con Vialone and Roncaro, all in the province of Pavia, while the municipality that loses the most is Paludi, in the province of Cosenza.
To grow more, at the overall population level they are the regions of the Centre-North, among which Trentino-Alto Adige (+9,5%), Emilia Romagna (+8,5%), Lazio (+7,6%) and Lombardy (+7,4%) stand out, while slighter increases, around at 1%, they were recorded in the South and in the Islands, up to the population losses (in all three cases above 2%) in Molise, Basilicata and Campania.
In Italy there are 28.745.507 men and 30.688.237 women, or 93,7 men for every hundred women. A relationship, this, which does not record major differences at the territorial level.
More variable, from this point of view, the "geography of aging". The average age of the resident population is, overall, 43 years, ranging from the minimum values in Campania (under 40 years) to the maximum values in Liguria (48 years). As far as the municipalities are concerned, the "youngest" is Orta di Atella, in the province of Caserta, with an average age of 32, while the oldest is Zerba (65 years). The number of people over one hundred years of age is growing enormously, going from 6.313 in 2011 to the current 12.620 (+138,9%), most of whom, 83,7%, are women.
The increase in population involved 4.867 municipalities (60,1%), especially in the North (and especially in the North West), while the majority (64,4%) of the municipalities in the South recorded a loss of population . The resident population is therefore distributed as follows: 26,5% in North-Western Italy, 23,5% in Southern Italy, 19,5% in the regions of Central Italy, 19,3% in Italy North-East and the remaining 11,2% in the Islands. The most populous region is Lombardy with 9.704.151 residents, the one with the least inhabitants is Valle d'Aosta (126.806).
The five largest municipalities in Italy are Rome (2.617.175 residents), Milan (1.242.123), Naples (962.003), Turin (872.367) and Palermo (657.561). The smallest is Pedesina (30 residents), in the province of Sondrio.
