Drill the map, not flashcards. Free, no account.
Loading game...
Can you locate all 12 provinces of the Netherlands?
Can you place all 265 municipalities of Bulgaria?
Can you locate all 41 counties of Romania, and Bucharest?
Can you place all 94 districts of Austria?
Something on this map looks wrong? Report a map issue
A region narrows an Italian round down to a quarter of the country, and the province is the tier that names a town. It is the two letters at the end of a number plate, the second line of every postal address and the unit Italians use when they say where somebody is from, which is why it is the half of the country worth learning once the regions stop being a challenge.
The map is the provinces and metropolitan cities as ISTAT draws them on 1 January 2026. A metropolitan city is a province in everything but name: in 2015 the largest urban areas, Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin and the like, swapped their provincial council for a metropolitan one with the same borders, so the map does not tell them apart and neither does this game. Valle d'Aosta is the odd one out, a region with no provinces under it that is counted as a single unit here, and Bolzano and Trento are the two autonomous provinces that between them make up Trentino-Alto Adige.
Most provinces are named for their chief town, and where the town is well known in English the name here is the English one: Turin, Milan, Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, Genoa, Syracuse, Padua and Mantua. Every name can be switched to the Italian form in the start dialog, which is the one on the road signs.
Sardinia is the part of this map that is newer than most of the internet. The island was redrawn in 2025, when the region abolished the province of Sud Sardegna it had created in 2016 and brought back Gallura, Ogliastra, Medio Campidano and Sulcis Iglesiente, with Sassari made a metropolitan city beside Cagliari. Older maps, and the older datasets many quizzes are built from, still show the five-province island, so a name you learnt there may not be one here.
The smallest provinces are too small to tap comfortably at the scale of the whole country. Trieste, Prato and Monza e della Brianza are the usual victims, and the smallest of them carry a tap area wider than their shape; zoom in for the rest.
The traps are the ones a nearby big city sets.
The province is named for a city that is not always the biggest in it. Barletta-Andria-Trani is three towns sharing a name because none of them would yield, Verbano-Cusio-Ossola is three districts, and Monza e della Brianza is a province that was split off Milan in 2004 and now wraps around its northern edge.
Several are small enough to be missed entirely. Trieste, Prato and Gorizia are a few hundred square kilometres each, against Bolzano or Sassari at several thousand, so the map is far from evenly spaced and the clusters are in the north.
Those five groups are the same ones the regions game uses. They are the ripartizioni geografiche, the cut ISTAT publishes every national figure in, and each province sits in exactly one because each region does. Each can be switched on and off on its own in the start dialog, which is the quickest way to learn the map a quarter at a time.
Bolzano, or Bozen: the northern half of Trentino-Alto Adige, Austrian until 1919 and German speaking ever since. Every sign has two languages on it, the towns have two names, and the architecture is Alpine, with onion domes and steep roofs. A plate reading BZ is the only one in Italy whose owner is likely to be speaking German.
Trieste: the smallest province on the map, a strip of limestone coast hung under Slovenia at the head of the Adriatic. It was the Habsburg empire's port and still looks it, with grand waterfront squares, Slovene on the signs of the villages above the city, and a plate code that most Italians will tell you they have seen on the road once.
Gallura Nord-Est Sardegna: the northeast corner of Sardinia, with the Costa Smeralda and the Maddalena archipelago, and a province in its own right again since 2025. Olbia is its largest town and Tempio Pausania the historic one. If an older map puts it inside Sassari, that is why.
110 provinces and metropolitan cities as of 2026, counting Valle d'Aosta as the one unit it is. That is three more than the 107 many datasets still carry: Sardinia replaced its five provinces with eight in 2025, so the old Sud Sardegna is gone and Gallura Nord-Est Sardegna, Ogliastra, Medio Campidano and Sulcis Iglesiente are back.
Very little on the map. A metropolitan city replaced the province around each of the largest urban areas in 2015 and kept its borders, so Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin, Florence and the rest are drawn exactly as they were. What changed is the governing body: a metropolitan city has a mayor who is the mayor of the capital town and a council elected by the municipalities inside it, where a province has a president and its own council.
Yes. A current plate carries the province as two letters in the blue band on the right, next to the year of issue: RM for Rome, MI for Milan, NA for Naples, TO for Turin. Plates issued between 1994 and 1999 carry no code at all. Since there are more than a hundred provinces and only twenty regions, the code narrows a round far more than the region does.
Because it is a region too small to be divided: the Valle d'Aosta region has no provinces under it, and the functions of one are carried out by the region itself. ISTAT counts it as a single unit at this level, which is why it is one answer here and the number plate code AO is the only two letters it has.
Into the five ripartizioni geografiche that ISTAT publishes every national figure in: North West, Centre, North East, South and Islands. A province sits in the same group as its region, and they are the same five groups the regions game offers, so what you learn there carries over.
The ones that wrap around a better-known neighbour: Monza e della Brianza against Milan, Fermo against Ascoli Piceno in the Marche, and Barletta-Andria-Trani against Bari and Foggia in Apulia. And on the islands, the new Sardinian provinces, if what you learnt was the five-province map.
For the tier above, try Italy Regions. For other European maps of a similar size, France Departments, Spain Provinces and Germany Districts are the same kind of question in their own countries.
