The city under Vesuvius went from 875 schools to 800 in eleven years, while Rome's coastal belt keeps adding classrooms. In Milan, more than half of all schools are private.
In the 2015/16 school year Naples had 875 schools. In the year that has just ended, 800 remain — one closure every two months, for eleven years straight. Over the same period Fiumicino, on the coast west of Rome, went from 56 to 59 schools. Small numbers, opposite directions.
ISTAT has just updated its classification of Italian educational qualifications, the grid the country uses to measure diplomas and degrees. But before the qualifications come the classrooms, and the map of classrooms is shifting — not the way you would expect. It is not just tiny mountain schools that are closing. Italy's third-largest city, one of the country's most populous municipalities, is closing them too.
Number of school sites per municipality, state and private. Source: DatiItalia — based on the education ministry's school registry
Rome tops the ranking with 1,930 school sites, but eleven years ago it had 1,985. Milan slipped from 839 to 820. Naples, as we have seen, fell from 875 to 800 — the steepest drop of the three. Italy's school map is thinning out precisely where most of its students live.
The opposite movement exists, and it runs through the commuter belts. Fiumicino climbed from 56 to 59 schools, Aprilia from 39 to 41, Vimercate in Brianza from 22 to 24, Melegnano from 16 to 17. These are the towns young families move to when the city becomes too expensive: the classrooms follow the removal vans, a few years behind.
Then there is the suburban ring that grows in residents but not in schools. Trecate, near Novara, has 21,305 inhabitants and 6 schools in total — the same number as in 2015/16. Bresso, on Milan's doorstep, has 9 schools for 26,672 residents: not one more than eleven years ago, and no upper secondary school at all. Anyone there who wants to attend one catches a bus every morning.
Total school sites in the municipality of Naples by school year. Source: DatiItalia — based on the education ministry's school registry
Inside the Naples decline sits a detail that the debate on southern state schools usually ignores. In Naples, government-funded private schools ("paritarie") collapsed from 302 to 231, and state primary schools from 191 to 169: the city is losing on both fronts. But Italy's capital of non-state education is elsewhere. In Milan, 460 school sites out of 820 are private — more than half. In Rome the figure is 894 out of 1,930, just under one in two.
And the strongest concentration lies further south. In Giugliano in Campania, Italy's most populous municipality that is not a provincial capital, 54 schools out of 95 are private. Where the state arrives late, private schools fill the gap — from Milan's hinterland to Naples'.
One necessary disclosure: the registry we use counts school sites, not enrolled pupils, nor residents' qualifications, which are not yet in our database municipality by municipality. ISTAT's new classification is designed precisely to read those better, once they arrive.
Of Italy's 7,896 municipalities, only 7,013 have at least one school site. The rest have none: children get into a car or a coach towards the next town. And among those that do have one, many stop there. Abbateggio on the Maiella massif, Agra above Lake Maggiore and Aidomaggiore in the Oristano area count 1 school each — almost always a nursery or a primary, the last outpost before the coach.
It is the other face of the lowest birth rate in the history of the Italian Republic: where no children are born, sooner or later the classroom closes. But the numbers on this page show it is not a law of nature that applies evenly. Naples went from 875 schools down to 800. Fiumicino, over the same years, went from 56 up to 59: three classrooms gained where the country loses them by the dozen.