From the domestic boom to global tourism: what Italy's regional tourism map is really telling us

This figure is taken from a recent article published on the Istat website, Dal Grand tour al turismo di massa (From the Grand Tour to mass tourism) – Istat.

Let's start with what the chart actually shows, before getting to what it might mean. These are two photographs of the regional distribution of Italian tourist overnight stays — 1962 and 2025 — 63 years apart. Not a film, two isolated frames. This is important to keep in mind throughout everything that follows: what we are reading are the starting and ending points of a journey whose intermediate route we cannot see. In between there were oil shocks, terrorism that hit inbound tourism hard in the 1970s and 80s, the economic crisis of 2008–2014, Italy's slow economic decline, low-cost airlines, the big digital platforms, short-term rentals, and the collapse of Covid. The reading that follows is one plausible interpretive key, not the only possible one.

The starting point: a map almost entirely in the Centre-North

In 1962 the ranking is clear-cut: Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Liguria, Lombardia and Toscana occupy the top five positions, and together with two other regions — Trentino-Alto Adige and Lazio — they concentrate three quarters of all national tourist overnight stays. The Mezzogiorno (southern Italy), taken as a whole, accounts for a mere 11.7%. It is the snapshot of a country where mass tourism has only just been born — overnight stays had doubled in a single decade, driven by the economic boom and new transport infrastructure — yet it remains an almost entirely domestic phenomenon concentrated in a handful of northern regions. Not by coincidence, in 1962 the foreign component is in the majority in only two of these seven regions: Trentino-Alto Adige (a stone's throw from German-speaking countries) and Lazio (meaning Rome). Everywhere else, whoever is travelling in Italy is almost always Italian. This is the baseline.

This model worked for decades. Then, in a way fairly well documented in the tourism economics literature, the growth in domestic demand began to slow after 2008: stagnant disposable incomes, low-cost flights and digital platforms opening up new opportunities but also fiercer competition, holidays increasingly fragmented rather than concentrated in one solid block, an ageing population. Over the same period — despite a sharp interruption during the Covid years — international demand kept growing, to the point where today it is the engine driving most of the system. Let's see what these changes have produced.

The Mezzogiorno doubles

The first shift, and perhaps the most important, concerns precisely the regions that in 1962 were on the margins of the map: Campania, Sicilia, Puglia, Sardegna, all relegated to the bottom of the rankings. By 2025 the Mezzogiorno's overall share has doubled compared to its starting point of 11.7%. A structural change, one that brings these regions above territories once far stronger, such as Piemonte and Liguria.

The backdrop that helps make sense of this movement is the transformation of demand as a whole: the share of foreign overnight stays on the national total rises from 33.6% to 55.3% between 1990 and 2025, and today the foreign component is in the majority in eleven Italian regions — against just two in 1962. The South does not grow in a vacuum: it grows as the entire system internationalises, and it captures a portion of this new demand (from 3% in 1962 to 10% in 2025), alongside a share of domestic tourism that over the years has started looking beyond the traditional northern destinations (from 8% to 12%).

Rome

In 2025 Lazio moves from seventh to second place — one of the sharpest jumps in the entire map. But to truly understand this movement you have to go down one level, from the region to the city. Between 2015 and 2025 Rome, alongside Milano, Venezia and Firenze, consistently ranks among the top destinations by number of overnight stays; the overall increase in the combined weight of these four cities on the national total, however, is attributable almost entirely to just one of them: Rome, which by itself in 2025 accounts for 9.4% of overnight stays across the whole country — more than entire medium-sized regions. In the capital, as in the other major cities, foreign tourists now make up more than three quarters of the total.

Trentino-Alto Adige and the confirmation of a vocation already present

Trentino-Alto Adige follows a similar trajectory — from sixth to third place — but with a different story behind it: it was already, in 1962, one of only two regions with a foreign majority. Its climb up the rankings does not start from scratch: it is the reinforcement of an international vocation — the mountains as a destination for Central European tourism — that the rest of the country took decades to reach.

Veneto, first then and first now: a stability that conceals a transformation

Veneto is the only region that opens and closes the ranking in the same position, first in 1962 and first in 2025. But reading this stability as stagnation would be a mistake: the post-war Veneto was, beyond Venice, largely a mass seaside destination with a domestic vocation (Jesolo, Bibione), not very different from the model that elsewhere — as we will see shortly — has lost ground. The fact that the region still sits at the top today, in a system where demand has shifted heavily towards foreign visitors, suggests that within itself it has managed to grow a second engine — the Dolomites, the lakes, outdoor tourism, the transformation of seaside resorts — capable of capturing the new international demand while traditional seaside tourism slowed. It is a stability of position built on a capacity to adapt to international demand.

Emilia-Romagna and Liguria: where the map shows the sharpest decline

On the other side, the most visible drop concerns precisely the two regions that in 1962 held first and third place: Emilia-Romagna and Liguria. The Istat data is explicit in describing this movement: between 1962 and 2025 their share of the national total shrinks considerably.

Both remain among the regions most tied to the original demand model — the domestically driven mass seaside tourism built on small accommodation businesses — in a system where that model alone is no longer enough to hold on to the top positions reached in the post-war years.

A map that remains concentrated nonetheless

It is worth closing this reading of the map with one final observation, which applies to all regions together: despite the almost complete reshuffling of names in the rankings, the geographical concentration of Italian tourism has not disappeared. The Mezzogiorno doubles, yes, but from a very low base; a handful of regions — and, as we have seen, often just a few individual cities within them — continue to attract the lion's share of national overnight stays. The map has changed far more in its protagonists than it has broadened in its overall geography.