Italy's centenarians increase by 30% in ten years: the vast majority are women

Italy's group of centenarians is growing. Due to the (positive) effect of the lengthening of life on 1 January 2024, there will be 22,552 centenarians living in Italy, 81% of whom will be women. Considering that on 1 January 2014 there were 17,252 centenarians, the growth in a single decade was over 30%. On the same date, there were 677 residents aged 105 years or over (defined as semi-supercentenarians): the latter, unlike the slightly younger group, recorded a net decrease compared to the 1,047 individuals recorded in 2020 (the peak reached since the beginning of the survey) for a structural reason: over the last four years, the survivors of the generations born in the years of the First World War, characterised by a contingently lower birth rate, have progressively entered the over-105 age group.

This structural effect," Istat explains, "had affected previous generations between 2016 and 2019, leading to a decline in the population aged 100 years and over, which has started to grow again from 2020 onwards, registering an increase of almost 60% between 2019 and 2024. The gender ratio among semi-supercentenarians is strongly skewed in favour of women: there are 600 of them, or 89% of the total, against 77 men (11%). Also at the beginning of January, there were 21 residents who had reached and surpassed the 110-year threshold (super-centenarians). Confirming greater female longevity, only one of them is male. In the 15 years of the survey of the semi-super and supercentenarian population, i.e. in the period from 2009 to 2024, a total of 8,521 individuals have passed the 105-year threshold, of whom 7,536 are women (88%) and 985 are men (12%). The most common first names are Joseph for men and Mary for women, followed by Anthony and Rose in second place and John and Anne in third.

Both women and men who have reached the age of 105 are almost all in the marital status of widowed (86% and 81% respectively). The greatest differences are to be found between the single and the unmarried, with males accounting for 6% and females for 12%, but especially between the married and the married where women account for only 1% and men for 13%, due to the greater female longevity that more frequently leads male persons to spend the last years of their lives still with their partners. A total of 200 individuals passed the age of 110 between 2009 and 2024, 92% of whom were female. On 1 January 2009, only 10 of these were still alive, while on 1 January 2024 as many as 21 are still alive, more than doubling in 15 years.

At the beginning of 2024, the oldest living person was a lady residing in Emilia-Romagna, who was able to cross the 114-year age mark in October this year. Among men, the oldest living person at 1 January 2024 was a gentleman residing in Molise aged 110, who subsequently passed away earlier this year. At the end of October, the 'new' doyen resides in Basilicata and is also over 110 years old. Therefore, the absolute Italian male and female longevity records remain unbeaten, held respectively by Antonio Todde (resident of Sardinia) who died in 2002 a few weeks before turning 113, and especially by Emma Morano (resident of Piedmont) who died in 2017 at the age of 117 and who, while still alive, had held the record for the longest-lived contemporary woman in the world. Today, this record is held worldwide by John Alfred Tinniswood, a British citizen, among men (112 years of age) and Tomiko Itooka, a Japanese citizen, among women (116 years of age). Ever since there has been an officially recognised international record, the longest-living woman in history has been Jeanne Calment, a French citizen who died in 1997 at the age of 122. The longest living man was Jirōemon Kimura, a Japanese citizen who died in 2013 at the age of 116. The more than 22,000 centenarians living on 1 January 2024 are heterogeneously distributed across the territory.

Lombardy is the region with the highest presence in absolute terms, with over 3,000 residents, followed by Latium and Emilia-Romagna with over 2,000. The same applies to semi-supercentenarians who are concentrated in Lombardy with more than 100 residents, then in Emilia-Romagna and Veneto with more than 60 individuals. In relative terms the territorial representation of the centenarian population changes. Liguria, in fact, is the region with the highest concentration of centenarians, 61 per 100,000 residents, followed by Molise (58) and Friuli Venezia-Giulia (54). Lombardy with a value of 34 per 100,000 ranks in the last positions, also below the national value (38 per 100,000). Limiting the analysis to the semi-supercentenarian population alone, it is Molise, on the other hand, that has the highest concentration, 3.1 per 100,000 residents, followed by Liguria (2.4) and Basilicata (2.1).