Italy has 7,896 municipalities today. It sounds like an immutable number, carved into the country's administrative geography, yet it keeps shrinking: the official archives of territorial changes record 345 municipal abolitions, almost all of them in the past decade and almost always through merger with a neighbouring town.
Behind every abolition lies a similar story: a small municipality no longer able to guarantee services, strained budgets, state and regional incentives to merge, and finally a referendum sealing the birth of a new entity with a new name. In this article we reconstruct the map of the disappeared municipalities: when they vanished, where and why.
The merger wave: 2014-2019
The timeline of abolitions is anything but uniform. For decades Italy's municipal boundaries remained essentially frozen; then, from 2014, the wave arrived. That year saw 57 abolitions, 2016 set the all-time record with 75 cases, and 2019 closed the golden cycle of mergers with 65 municipalities suppressed. In total, the vast majority of abolitions in the entire historical series are concentrated between 2014 and 2019.
This is no accident: the 2014 Delrio law and the accompanying regional laws introduced extraordinary grants for merging municipalities, lasting ten years and cumulative. For towns of a few hundred inhabitants, often unable even to cover the costs of their administrative machinery, merging became a concrete way out. After 2019 the pace collapsed: 14 abolitions in 2020, then single-digit numbers, with 6 cases in 2023 and 8 in 2024.
Municipal abolitions by year
Number of abolished municipalities recorded each year in the territorial-change archives. The peak came in 2016 with 75 cases, then the collapse after 2019.
The names that are gone
Scrolling through the list of abolitions means reading a disappearing toponymy. In 2019, the year of the great Venetian and Lombard mergers, Valstagna vanished into the new municipality of Valbrenta; Molvena became part of Colceresa; Trichiana was absorbed into Borgo Valbelluna; and in Apulia, Acquarica del Capo merged with Presicce into the new municipality of Presicce-Acquarica. In Tuscany, Tavarnelle Val di Pesa joined Barberino to create Barberino Tavarnelle.
The most recent mergers follow the same script. In January 2024, Veneto saw the birth of Santa Caterina d'Este, from the merger of Vighizzolo d'Este and Carceri, and Setteville, born from the union of Quero Vas and Alano di Piave. Small towns of the plain and the foothills that individually numbered no more than a few thousand inhabitants, and that together are trying to keep a school, a registry office and a technical department alive.
Sometimes the old name survives in the new one: Lu e Cuccaro Monferrato, Piadena Drizzona, Lusiana Conco, Sorbolo Mezzani. Other times it disappears entirely, replaced by an area toponym such as Valdilana, Borgocarbonara or Terre d'Adige.
Not only mergers: the other territorial changes
Abolition is the most drastic change, but not the only one. The ISTAT archives also record 340 changes of municipal seat and 47 name changes: municipalities that live on but correct their name, often to recover a historical spelling or add a geographical reference distinguishing them from namesakes.
Then there are territory acquisitions: when a municipality is abolished, its boundaries do not vanish but are absorbed by the new entity or split among neighbours. Every merger thus generates a chain of changes: the abolition of the original municipalities, the birth of the new one, the transfer of ISTAT and cadastral codes. This is why the count of Italian municipalities changes almost every year and why every territorial database must constantly be realigned.
Why municipalities merge (and why they often don't)
The geography of mergers is not random. The overwhelming majority of cases are concentrated in the North, led by Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont and Trentino, where the regions added their own incentives on top of the state ones. In the South mergers remain rare, even though the share of municipalities under a thousand inhabitants is just as high.
The economic engine is clear: a town of 500 inhabitants spends a far higher share of its budget on administration than one of 5,000, and a merger promises economies of scale plus ten years of state grants. But the brake is identity: the bell tower, in the literal sense. Dozens of merger referendums have been rejected by the citizens of the smaller municipalities, fearful of losing representation, local services and their own name on the map.
The result is a typically Italian compromise: the double and triple names of the new municipalities, stitching together the previous identities, and the preservation of the historic town halls as branch offices.
A process bound to continue
With the demographic winter emptying inner Italy, the pressure for mergers is set to grow. Thousands of Italian municipalities today have fewer than a thousand inhabitants, and many of them have lost over 90 percent of their population since 1951: for these entities the threshold of administrative sustainability has already been crossed.
The post-2019 slowdown, however, shows that economic incentives alone are not enough: without local consensus, mergers stop. The story of the 345 disappeared municipalities is therefore also a map of the future: it shows where administrative Italy is already adapting to its demographic decline and where, instead, identity-based resistance keeps ever smaller town halls alive. On DatiItalia you can browse the complete archive of territorial changes, municipality by municipality and year by year.