The record belongs to Ronco Canavese, 383 people above Turin. The map of who arrives is the opposite of the one campaign speeches draw.
The Italian municipality with the highest share of foreign residents is not in Milan, and not in Rome. It is a village of 383 people clinging to the mountains above Turin. In Ronco Canavese, in the Val Soana, 137 residents are foreign nationals — 35.77% of the total. There is no railway station, no shopping centre, none of the shop-theft stories that fill campaign speeches.
And yet one word dominates this week's debate: insecurity. A Bologna councillor claims an eighty per cent rise in thefts from shops and promises to grill the council. A man deported for robberies drifts back into Lazio and ends up in jail. The two stories travel together, immigration and crime, as if one explained the other. The data on who lives where sketches a very different map.
Reading the ranking of municipalities by foreign population as a share of residents is a tour of the Italy that is emptying out. At the top sits Baranzate, on the edge of Milan, where foreigners make up 36.56% of the population: 4,376 people packed into a grid of old workers' housing. Just below, the map changes. Bajardo, Airole, Vessalico, Lucinasco — four villages in the hinterland of Imperia, a few hundred residents each, where almost one in three was born abroad.
This is where the story inverts. Where the speeches see an invasion, the population registers see the only thing holding off collapse. Ordona near Foggia, Monticiano in the Siena hills, Monfalcone in the province of Gorizia: places where, without the new foreign residents, the population curve would already be below zero. The national average is 7.3%. These villages clear it four or five times over, and they are not the cities where fear makes the news.
Foreign residents as a share of the total. Source: DatiItalia — ISTAT data
Here it is worth saying plainly what these numbers do not contain. DatiItalia publishes no crime statistics: we have no thefts by municipality, no robberies by neighbourhood, and no chart on this page can tell you whether crime in Bologna has risen or fallen. Anyone tying the map of foreigners to the map of crime is skipping a step that open data, today, simply does not allow.
What we can say is who lives in Bologna. Foreign residents number 58,806, or 15.07% of the population — roughly double the Italian average, but a long way from the mountain villages at the top of the ranking. The largest community is Romanian, 9,015 people; Bangladesh follows with 4,877. In a city of 391,473, these are mostly families, not a column on the march.
Average declared income by year. Source: DatiItalia — MEF data
Back to Ronco Canavese, because that is where the two arguments meet. The village's average declared income is €17,085, against a national average of €21,985 — a third poorer than the country, with one of the highest old-age indices in Italy. Newcomers find no treasure to fight over. They find empty houses and low wages, and often they are the only reason the school stays open.
The same story repeats in Castel San Giovanni, near Piacenza, where foreigners make up 23.69%: farming, logistics, work Italians have stopped doing. The question the speeches never ask is a simple one. If safety depended on the share of foreigners, these villages would be the most dangerous places in Italy. Has anyone ever heard about the crime rate in Vessalico?