(All) Italian Cities’ Size Distribution

Abstract

By revisiting well-established empirical regularities, this paper examines the distributional properties of city sizes in Italy over the period 2001–2024. Three main findings emerge. First, when considering the full population of approximately 7,900 municipalities, city sizes are well approximated by a lognormal distribution. Second, consistent
with Gibrat’s law, city population growth rates appear to be independent of initial city size. Third, the upper tail of the distribution follows Zipf’s law, although the results are sensitive to the choice of the truncation threshold. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to urban dynamics and the organization of the Italian urban
system.