Nine in ten Italian municipalities live with landslide or flood risk. An atlas to make sense of it, built on ISPRA open data.
Pick a hazard and an indicator, then move around the map: from the regions down to the provinces and the 7,899 municipalities. Click an area for details, search for your municipality, or switch on the local detail to see the actual areas of the ISPRA hazard mosaics, down below municipal level.
Where the risk weighs most: provinces and municipalities ranked by people exposed, in absolute numbers or as a share of the population.
Behind the percentages are villages evacuated in the night, roads wiped away, people who never made it home. For decades the CNR-IRPI has been reconstructing the direct impact of landslides and floods on Italy's population.
The figures alongside come from the Polaris Periodic Report and cover the documented events with victims across the country.
Source: CNR-IRPI, Polaris Periodic Report, Year 2024 (DOI 10.30437/REPORT2024).
Repairing costs far more than preventing. Since the end of the Second World War, landslides and floods have handed Italy a bill of 112 billion euros, and in recent years the pace has tripled. Securing the entire national territory would cost around 26 billion: little more than half of what has been spent on repairs since 2010.
Hover over or tap a bubble for the details. The comparison shows orders of magnitude: the ANCE-CRESME estimates are in 2023 values, the ReNDiS amounts at current values; the area of each circle is proportional to the amounts. And the repair bill does not include the victims, nor the damage that was never compensated.
The European Commission's Joint Research Centre has estimated that every euro invested in river flood-retention basins avoids up to four euros of future damage. Applied to Italy's needs, that ratio would turn the €26 billion of risk-mitigation works into over €100 billion of avoided damage in the decades to come.
Even without multipliers, the maths adds up quickly: securing the entire country costs about eight years of repairs at the current pace. Yet funding keeps arriving mostly after the disasters: according to Greenpeace's analysis of Civil Protection data, between 2015 and 2024 landslides and floods produced over €19 billion in officially recognised damage, and public compensation covered barely 17% of it. The rest fell on families, businesses and local authorities.
And the biggest saving appears in no budget: every project completed before the disaster is a list of victims, evacuees and compensation payments we will never have to count.
Sources: ANCE-CRESME, ISPRA ReNDiS, JRC, Emilia-Romagna Region, Greenpeace Italy — full references and links under Data sources.
ItaliaFragile was born to make a risk that touches nearly every Italian municipality readable by anyone. The data on landslides and floods exist, are public and of good quality — but they remain confined to technical platforms and specialist reports. This atlas turns them into maps, rankings and understandable figures, municipality by municipality, so that citizens, journalists and administrators can see where risk concentrates, who lives inside it, and what it costs to keep chasing disasters instead of preventing them.
A data journalist and computer scientist, for over a decade he has been turning data into stories across Europe and Africa, covering migration, environment and territory on four continents.
He has trained newsrooms across Europe and Africa; his work has received, among others, the Data Journalism Award (2014), the Sigma Award (2021) and the European Commission's Lorenzo Natali Media Prize.
Answers to the most common questions about what the atlas shows, where the data come from and how to reuse them.
The areas classified as high and very high landslide hazard (P3 and P4) and the flood-prone areas under the medium scenario (P2) for Italy's regions, provinces and 7,899 municipalities, together with the exposed population and buildings. The data come from the ISPRA national hazard mosaics published on the IdroGEO platform.
Landslides. The areas classified as high (P3) and very high (P4) hazard in Italy's hydrogeological management plans, mosaicked at national scale by ISPRA. This is the indicator used for land, population and buildings exposed.
Floods. The areas liable to flooding under the medium hazard scenario (P2): floods with a return period of 100 to 200 years, as defined by European Directive 2007/60.
The people. The exposed population is the number of residents in hazard areas according to the most recent ISTAT census available on the platform. It is not a forecast: it is a snapshot of who lives today in areas classified as hazardous.
The local detail. The "actual areas" switch overlays the ISPRA mosaics on the map as published, via the IdroGEO WMS service: it is the sub-municipal detail of the classified areas, and it turns on automatically when you search for a municipality.
The limits. The mosaics aggregate plans drawn up at different times and with different criteria by the district basin authorities; boundaries are generalised for display. For official purposes, the maps of the competent authorities prevail.
It means that part of the municipal territory is classified as hazardous in Italy's hydrogeological management plans, not that a disaster is imminent. It is a snapshot of where risk exists and is documented: 94% of Italian municipalities have at least one landslide or flood hazard area.
Hazard is the probability that a phenomenon — a landslide or a flood — affects a given area. Risk combines hazard with exposure (the people, buildings and activities present) and their vulnerability. The atlas shows hazard and exposure: where the classified areas are and who lives in them.
The risk indicators come from the ISPRA IdroGEO platform, which mosaics Italy's hydrogeological management plans at national scale and is updated periodically. Casualty data come from the CNR-IRPI Polaris periodic report, administrative boundaries from ISTAT, and the economic figures from ANCE-CRESME, ISPRA ReNDiS and the JRC. All sources are listed under Data sources.
Yes. ISPRA IdroGEO data and ISTAT boundaries are published under a CC-BY 4.0 licence: you can reuse them by crediting the source (ISPRA IdroGEO, ISTAT) and, if you reuse this site's elaborations, ItaliaFragile with a link.
ItaliaFragile is an independent data journalism project by Jacopo Ottaviani, a data journalist and computer scientist, Chief Data Officer at Code for Africa and ICFJ Knight Fellow. Read more in About the project.