In Casavatore, on the edge of Naples, concrete covers 91.8% of the land. Lombardy's record, Lissone, sits twenty points below.
It is not Milan, nor one of the Brianza towns where the data centres are going up. It is Casavatore, a scrap of houses wedged between Naples and Arzano: here concrete and tarmac cover 91.8% of the municipal territory. Almost all of it. A few vegetable patches survive between the blocks.
Right now the papers are chasing the data-centre boom south of Milan and the new supermarkets near Treviso. Yet soil sealing has an older, more southern geography than that. And the record is not where the news is looking.
Share of municipal land sealed by construction. Source: DatiItalia — analysis of ISPRA data.
The usual story puts Lombardy at the top of soil consumption, and in absolute terms that holds. But in percentage the region's most sealed town, Lissone in Brianza, stops at 71.5%: high, yet twenty points below Casavatore. Right behind comes Sesto San Giovanni, 69.2%, the old city of factories. In the Naples belt, by contrast, three towns pass the eighty-per-cent mark: after Casavatore come Arzano at 83.4 and Melito di Napoli at 81.5.
These are small, crushingly dense towns, with some of the highest population density in Italy. Open land there ran out long ago.
Share of municipal land consumed. Source: DatiItalia — analysis of ISPRA data.
Counting in percentages rewards the small towns. Counting in hectares flips the table again. Padua alone has sealed 4,603 hectares, 49.7% of its land: more than any town in the Naples belt in absolute terms. To the north, in the sprawl of the Veneto, even Treviso reaches 39.5%, and around it warehouses and shopping centres keep rising, like the ones fought over these days in Villorba and Spinea.
In Lombardy the absolute count points somewhere else again. Paderno Dugnano, in the Milan hinterland, has sealed almost 880 hectares: more than Lissone, despite a lower percentage. It is onto this already-eaten plain that the new data centres of Corsico, Pero and Settimo Milanese will land.
The figure is not the concrete you can see. ISPRA counts "consumed" soil: covered by tarmac, buildings, sites, panels, roads. Once sealed, it almost never comes back. In 2024 the survey covers all of Italy's more than eight thousand municipalities, from the big cities to the villages that sit at the bottom of the rankings for average income or population density.
What the national totals don't say is how much each new warehouse weighs on land already tight. The percentage holds a town like Casavatore nailed at 91.8: there, the next square metre of free soil no longer exists.