Where do Italians get treated? The country's hospital network is highly concentrated: out of almost 7,900 municipalities, only 581 host hospital facilities with beds. All the others depend on healthcare mobility, and the distance to the nearest hospital is one of the variables that weigh most on quality of life, especially in inner areas.
In this analysis we rank Italian municipalities by number of hospital beds, on the latest available data, referring to 2021. The picture that emerges is that of a system hinged on the big cities, with Rome and Milan alone concentrating an imposing share of the national supply.
The 15 municipalities with the most hospital beds
Beds in hospital facilities per municipality, latest available data (2021)
Rome and Milan: two healthcare capitals
The top of the ranking holds no surprises: Rome is first with 28,602 beds spread across 126 facilities, Milan second with 19,436 beds in 60 facilities. Together, Italy's two largest cities exceed 48,000 beds. Naples is third with 11,752, followed by Turin with 10,920.
The ratio between facilities and beds reveals different models: Rome has a very fragmented network, with many facilities including small ones, while Milan concentrates its supply in larger hubs on average, from the great research hospitals to the university hospitals attracting patients from all over Italy.
The second tier: university hubs
Behind the big four, the ranking is led by cities hosting medical schools and university hospital trusts: Bologna with 7,178 beds, Palermo with 6,800, Bari with 6,668, Brescia with 6,376, Padua with 6,344, Catania with 5,706, Genoa with 5,614 and Verona with 4,508. These are the nodes of highly specialised healthcare, towards which healthcare mobility flows converge, largely from the South to the North.
The regions of the 50 municipalities with the most beds
Regional distribution of the 50 municipalities with the largest hospital bed capacity
What this ranking says, and what it does not
A ranking by municipality measures where the beds physically are, not how many are needed nor for whom. Big-city hospitals serve catchment areas far wider than municipal borders: the hospital of Padua or the Bari polyclinic treat patients from entire regions. So a municipality without a hospital is not necessarily underserved, if nearby facilities can be reached in reasonable time.
The critical point is exactly there: in inner and mountain areas, travel times to the nearest emergency room often exceed 30-40 minutes, a threshold that for time-dependent emergencies, heart attacks and strokes above all, makes the difference. The per-municipality data on DatiItalia lets you cross hospital capacity with population, ageing and territorial fragility: it is the intersection of these maps, more than any single ranking, that tells the real state of Italian healthcare.
Data referring to 2021
A final caveat: the bed data is the latest available at municipal level and refers to 2021. Since then the hospital network has undergone reorganisations and the NRRP projects on community hospitals and health centres: absolute values may have changed, but the geography of concentration described here remains substantially stable over time.