In 874 Italian municipalities there is not a single school. No nursery, no primary, no middle school: getting children to class means getting in the car and driving to the next town. That is more than one municipality in ten, out of a total of 7,896, and it is one of the most concrete consequences of the demographic winter: where children disappear, schools close, and where schools close it becomes even harder for new families to arrive.
Thanks to Ministry of Education data on the school years from 2015/16 to 2025/26, we can reconstruct Italy's school geography municipality by municipality: where the institutes are concentrated, where they are closing and how fast.
Where the schools are: the municipal ranking
The distribution of institutes follows, unsurprisingly, that of the population. Rome dominates with 1,928 schools in the 2025/26 school year: 229 nursery schools, 387 primaries, 191 lower-secondary and 227 upper-secondary schools, plus no fewer than 894 state-recognised private schools, almost half the total. Milan follows with 822 institutes and Naples with 811, then Palermo (620), Turin (533) and Genoa (410).
The ratio between Milan and Naples is striking: the two cities have an almost identical number of schools even though Milan today has roughly 450 thousand more residents. It is the legacy of a Naples that was full of children until the 1980s, and the reflection of a school network that adapts to demographic decline with years of delay.
The 15 municipalities with the most schools
Total number of school institutes (state and state-recognised private, nursery to upper secondary) per municipality, school year 2025/26. Source: MIUR.
Rome: the 2020 peak, then the descent
Rome's time series captures the turning point well. Between 2015 and 2020 the capital's number of schools grew steadily: from 1,985 to 2,045 institutes, driven above all by private schools and upper-secondary institutes. Then the curve flipped: 1,966 in 2022, 1,914 in 2023, and a stabilisation around 1,928 in 2025. Since the peak, Rome has lost 117 schools in five years.
It is no coincidence that the decline matches the arrival at enrolment age of children born after 2015, the years in which Italian births collapsed below 500 thousand a year. The first to close are nursery schools and the smaller private institutes, the most exposed to falling enrolment.
Rome: number of schools, 2015-2025
Total school institutes in Rome by school year: growth up to the 2020/21 peak of 2,045, then the decline.
Naples: ten years of uninterrupted closures
If Rome's decline began in 2020, Naples' has lasted a decade. In 2015/16 the city counted 875 schools; since then the number has fallen almost every year, down to 811 in 2025/26: 64 institutes fewer, 7.3 percent of the network. It is the direct effect of the Neapolitan demographic collapse, with the population now below 910 thousand inhabitants and a constant loss of young families to the hinterland and the North.
Milan, by contrast, shows an almost motionless network: 839 schools in 2015, 822 ten years later. The decline exists but is minimal, because the city's attractiveness partly offsets the birth dearth. The comparison between the two series is the school-system version of the two cities' opposite demographic trajectories.
Naples: number of schools, 2015-2025
Total school institutes in Naples by school year: from 875 to 811 in ten years, a 7.3% decline.
The towns without a school: the educational desert
The most striking figure remains that of the municipalities entirely without institutes: 874, over 11 percent of the national total. They are overwhelmingly the same small mountain municipalities that top the rankings of aging and depopulation: villages under 500 inhabitants where school-age children can be counted on one hand, and keeping a school building open would cost tens of thousands of euros per pupil.
For these territories the nearest school is often 15 or 20 minutes away by car, and in valley municipalities the time is measured in hairpin bends. The closure of the local school is almost always the final act of a depopulation that has already happened — but it is also an accelerator: for a family with young children, the absence of a school is reason enough not to move in, and often to leave.
A network that will have to redesign itself
The figures for the 2015-2025 decade point in one direction: Italy's school network has stopped growing and has begun to contract, starting from the demographically declining cities and the lower grades. With current birth cohorts, every year roughly 200 thousand fewer children enter the school system than fifteen years ago: one in four of today's middle schools simply will not have the pupils to exist in 2040.
The challenge is not just to close in an orderly fashion, but to decide what to keep open and where: mountain school buildings as outposts of fragile territories, multi-grade classes, school transport. The map of schools municipality by municipality, which on DatiItalia you can consult alongside each town's demographic data, is the starting point for understanding where this transformation has already begun.