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Can you locate all nine castelli of San Marino?
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Italy is one of the easiest countries in the world to recognise and one of the harder ones to pin, because almost everything that identifies it identifies the whole of it. The regions are the tier that actually differs from place to place: they run the roads, the hospitals and the local railways, five of them have a second official language, and every one of them signs its own border. This page is the twenty of them, the groups worth learning them in, and what puts you inside one from a photograph.
Italy has been divided into twenty regions since the 1948 constitution, though fifteen of them sat on paper until 1970, when the ordinary-statute regions finally elected councils and took over powers the state had been running from Rome. The other five were given their statutes immediately, between 1946 and 1963, and for a reason: each had a language, an island or a border problem that the new republic did not want to argue about. Those five are Sicily, Sardinia, Valle d'Aosta, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and between them they are why an Italian road sign is sometimes not in Italian.
Below a region sit the provinces and metropolitan cities, which is the tier a number plate encodes, and below those the comuni, of which there are about eight thousand. A region is the largest unit under the state and much the most powerful: health, local transport, most planning and a large share of the roads are regional, which is why the name and the coat of arms turn up on so much roadside furniture.
Several of the names are two places joined with a hyphen, and that is the useful part. Emilia-Romagna is the Via Emilia's plain plus the Byzantine exarchate around Ravenna, Trentino-Alto Adige is an Italian-speaking valley joined to a German-speaking one, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia is the Friulian countryside joined to the strip Italy kept around Trieste. Where a region is named for two halves, the halves are genuinely different on the ground, and telling which half you are in is usually easier than naming the region.
Two of the names have moved. Calabria meant the Salento in antiquity, which is the heel and is now the far end of Apulia, and it slid across the gulf to the toe in the Byzantine period. Marche is not a place name at all: it is the plural of "march", the frontier counties of the Holy Roman Empire, which is also why nothing in it is called Marche.
The traps are almost all cities.
A famous city is not a region, and the region is often not the one you would guess. Venice is Veneto, Milan is Lombardy, Florence is Tuscany, Naples is Campania, Turin is Piedmont, Genoa is Liguria and Bologna is Emilia-Romagna, which are the easy ones. Rimini is Emilia-Romagna and not Marche. Matera and its cave dwellings are Basilicata and not Apulia, which is the single most common mistake on this map. Assisi is Umbria. Pompeii and the Amalfi coast are Campania. The Cinque Terre are Liguria. Alberobello and its trulli are Apulia.
Lake Garda is three regions at once. The western shore is Lombardy, the eastern is Veneto and the northern tip is Trentino-Alto Adige, so a photograph of the lake settles nothing on its own.
Two states inside Italy are in no region. San Marino sits inside Emilia-Romagna's border with Marche and the Vatican inside Rome, and neither is Italian territory, so neither is an answer here.
Those five groups are Italy's own. They are the ripartizioni geografiche, the cut ISTAT publishes every national figure in and the one a news bulletin means by "il Nord" or "il Sud". Eurostat carries the same five as Italy's top-level statistical regions, which is the reason this game can check its grouping against a published map rather than against somebody's memory. Each one can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog.
North West is Piedmont and the Alpine corner beside it, plus Lombardy and the Ligurian coast: the industrial triangle, the richest part of the country and the most populous of the five. Centre is the four regions either side of the Apennines from Tuscany down to Rome. North East is the Veneto plain, the mountains above it and the Via Emilia running southeast to the Adriatic. South is six regions and the whole peninsula below Rome. Islands is Sicily and Sardinia, which between them are a sixth of the country and have special statutes, their own languages and, in Sardinia's case, very little in common with anywhere else on this map.
Trentino-Alto Adige: two valleys stapled together, Italian-speaking Trentino in the south and German-speaking Alto Adige, or Südtirol, in the north. It was Austrian until 1919 and the northern half never stopped being German, so every sign, every shop front and every place name up there comes in both languages. If you are looking at an Italian road sign with German on it, there is nowhere else in the country you can be. The architecture finishes the job: onion domes, steep roofs, painted facades and apple orchards on terraces up the valley sides.
Apulia, or Puglia: the flattest and one of the driest parts of Italy, running from the Gargano promontory down the Adriatic to the tip of the heel. Look for olive groves that go to the horizon, dry stone walls, whitewashed towns and reddish soil, with no mountains anywhere except the Gargano itself. The trap is Basilicata, which is wedged into the instep and gets credited with Apulian things constantly, Matera above all. The rule of thumb is relief: if the ground is flat and the sea is on your left going south, you are in Apulia.
Molise: the smallest region on the mainland, split off from Abruzzo as recently as 1963, with two provinces, no famous city and a national joke about whether it exists at all. It is the ankle of the boot, between Abruzzo and Apulia on the Adriatic side, and it looks like both of them: Apennine hill country inland, a short flat coast, hill towns and a lot of sheep pasture. Nothing in a photograph will say Molise, so place it by elimination. If you are on the Adriatic south of Abruzzo and well north of the Gargano, this is what is there.
20. Fifteen have an ordinary statute and five a special one: Sicily, Sardinia, Valle d'Aosta, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The regions were created by the 1948 constitution, but only the five special ones were set up straight away; the other fifteen existed only on paper until the first regional elections in 1970. Below the regions are the provinces and metropolitan cities, and below those about eight thousand comuni.
Sicily, Sardinia, Valle d'Aosta, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Each was given a special statute for a reason of language, geography or border. Sicily had an active separatist movement in 1946 and got the first statute of all. Sardinia is an island with its own language. Valle d'Aosta is French speaking. Trentino-Alto Adige was Austrian until 1919 and its northern half is German speaking, which was the subject of a treaty with Austria. Friuli-Venezia Giulia sat on a disputed border with Yugoslavia and was the last of the five, in 1963. A special statute means more legislative power and, in most cases, a much larger share of the taxes raised locally.
No, they show the province, which is the tier below. A current plate is black on white in the format AA 000 AA, with a blue EU band on the left and a second blue band on the right carrying two letters and a year. Those two letters are the province code: RM for Rome, MI for Milan, FI for Florence, BZ for Bolzano. Since there are more than a hundred provinces and only twenty regions, the code narrows you considerably but you still need to know which region the province sits in. Plates issued between 1994 and 1999 have no code on them at all.
Italian everywhere, and a second language in three regions. German appears beside Italian throughout the province of Bolzano, in Trentino-Alto Adige. French appears beside Italian in Valle d'Aosta. Slovene appears beside Italian around Trieste and Gorizia in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which also signs in Friulian in the province of Udine. Ladin appears as a third language in a handful of Dolomite valleys, and Sardinian and other minority languages turn up on local signs elsewhere. Bilingual signage is the strongest single regional clue in Italy, because it happens in only a few places and it happens on everything.
A region is one of the twenty top-level divisions, with an elected council, a president and real legislative power over health, transport, planning and much of the road network. A province is the tier below, of which there are more than a hundred, including the metropolitan cities that replaced the provinces around the largest urban areas in 2015. Provinces have far less power than they used to and were nearly abolished in a referendum that failed in 2016. For anybody reading clues off a photograph the practical difference is that plates and older road signs encode provinces, while boundary signs, road ownership and public services show regions.
Nord-Ovest, Nord-Est, Centro, Sud and Isole, which translate as North West, North East, Centre, South and Islands. They are ISTAT's ripartizioni geografiche, the standard grouping every Italian national statistic is broken down by, and Eurostat uses the same five as Italy's top-level statistical regions. They carry no administrative power of their own: there is no government between a region and the state. They are how Italians talk about the country, though, and the South in particular is more often called the Mezzogiorno.
Apulia and Basilicata, because Basilicata is wedged into the instep of the boot and Matera, its best known place, is usually assumed to be Apulian. Marche, Umbria and Abruzzo, which are three medium sized regions stacked in the middle of the peninsula with no famous city between them. Molise and Abruzzo, since Molise was part of Abruzzo until 1963 and still looks like it. And Emilia-Romagna against Marche on the Adriatic, where Rimini is in the former and the border is further south than most people expect.
Sicily is the largest by area, a little ahead of Piedmont and Sardinia. The smallest is Valle d'Aosta, which is a single Alpine valley system with its tributaries and is about a hundredth the size of Sicily. By population the order is different again: Lombardy is much the most populous, with around a sixth of the country in it, and Valle d'Aosta the least, with fewer people than a mid sized town.
For other European administrative maps of a similar size, try France Regions, Poland Voivodeships, Netherlands Provinces and Germany States. If you want the harder version of the same country's problem, Spain Provinces and France Departments are the next tier down in their own countries.
