The town set to double by 2050 has 498 residents
Istat's 2050 projections place three towns around Cosenza and Vibo Valentia among the five fastest-growing, while the Apennines age to ten older people for every young one.
The town set to double has 498 residents
Castel Gabbiano, in the province of Cremona, has 498 residents today. Istat's projections say it will have 1,102 by 2050: more than double, +121.3%, the steepest jump in Italy. No large city comes close.
Today Istat publishes the first results of its permanent business census — where Italian firms hire, innovate and hold on. It counts the economic present. But there is another census, quoted far less, that shows where those firms will still have someone to sell to: the census of people.
The towns projected to grow most by 2050
Projected percentage change in population between 2025 and 2050. Source: DatiItalia — based on Istat projections.
Where the map flips
The usual story is simple: the North grows, the South empties. The projection figures contradict it in several places. Three of the five towns that will grow most by 2050 are in Calabria. Soriano Calabro, in the province of Vibo Valentia, rises from 2,410 to 5,232 residents, +117.1%; San Lucido, near Cosenza, from 7,411 to 15,805; Longobardi, also in the Cosenza area, doubles from 3,071 to 6,542.
This is not a South emptying everywhere. It is a South in patches.
Then there is the other Italy, the one measured by the old-age index. In Farini, in the Piacenza Apennines, there are 1,053 older people for every hundred young ones — more than ten to one. A few kilometres away, Ferriere counts 976.5. The birth rate draws yet a third geography. More babies are born in Carrega Ligure, in the province of Alessandria, at 26 per 1,000 residents, and in Elva, high in the Maira valley above Cuneo, at 25 per 1,000: villages of a few hundred people, where a single newborn shifts the statistic.
Towns above a thousand residents where most babies are born
Birth rate per 1,000 residents, 2025, municipalities with at least a thousand people. Source: DatiItalia on Istat data.
Fonte Nuova, from 1951 to today
Population at each census. Source: DatiItalia on Istat data.
The census that really counts
Firms are counted every year now. People used to be counted every ten years, in the old censuses, and those series record changes no company balance sheet ever will. Fonte Nuova, on the edge of Rome, had 583 residents in 1951. Today it has 32,787: +5,523.8%, the strongest postwar growth in Italy. Ardea went from 2,361 to 51,374, Pomezia from 3,644 to nearly 65,000, Policoro, on the Ionian coast near Matera, from 862 to 17,727.
It was the commuter towns and the twentieth-century land reclamations, not the industrial districts, that moved the most Italians.
The 2050 projections are fragile: a few hundred residents are enough to make a percentage explode. But they mark where, firms or no firms, there will still be a town. Castel Gabbiano, 498 people today, tops those projections. Fonte Nuova, which started at 583, is already there.
Population, municipality by municipality
Every municipality coloured by its number of residents.