The 2018 quality of life rankings for Italian cities, compiled by ItaliaOggi, has been published: Bolzano, Belluno and Trento take the podium. Milan holds steady, Rome slips. Matera also performs well.
Bolzano at one end, Vibo Valentia at the other. The prosperous North at one end, a South that is still lagging behind at the other, despite a few signs of recovery here and there. But above all, medium-sized provincial capitals at one end — such as Trento, Belluno and Parma, but also Matera — and the large metropolises struggling at the other, like Rome, Florence, Naples and Palermo, with the sole exception (up to a point) of Milan. The picture painted by the ItaliaOggi survey, carried out together with the University of Rome La Sapienza, is still one of an Italy divided in terms of quality of life in its cities, even though some of the gaps are beginning to narrow: partly due to the spread of organised crime to the north as well (one of the parameters taken into account in drawing up the rankings), and partly due to some tentative recovery among provincial capitals in central and southern Italy.
Bolzano, Trento and Belluno are confirmed on the podium of the 2018 quality of life rankings, testament to the solid grip on top positions now held by north-eastern cities, which dominate all of the first thirty places. Another interesting finding to emerge from the analysis is that the ideal Italian city has an average population of 100,000: in the top 40 places, in fact, only Verona and Padua have slightly more than 200,000 inhabitants, while Brescia, Parma, Modena, Reggio Emilia, Bergamo, Trento, Forlì, Vicenza, Bolzano and Piacenza have more than 100,000; all the other 28 cities have fewer.
On the other hand, there is an evident worsening of living conditions in Italy's major cities: the highest-ranked, Milan, is in 55th place and is the only one not to have lost ground compared to last year. Further down we find Turin in 78th place, Rome in 85th, Palermo in 106th and Naples in 108th. And the largest of them all, Rome, registers a sharp fall this year, dropping 18 places compared to last year. In its survey, ItaliaOggi resorts to a road metaphor to better explain the situation: governing a small town is like riding a scooter through traffic, whereas governing a large city is like driving a bus — far harder to handle due to the slowness and unwieldiness of the administrative apparatus.
Almost all of the bottom positions go to the South, with Vibo Valentia propping up the table, but there are also significant steps forward for the likes of Teramo and Matera, named European Capital of Culture for 2019. There are, however, numerous partial rankings — from the environmental one to those on crime, population and the healthcare system — in which southern cities appear near the top. Conversely, while twenty years ago social and personal hardship was a predominantly northern phenomenon, it is now emerging in the South as well, confirming that it is increasingly difficult to draw a simple dividing line between the two Italys.
