Neighbourhood shops have fallen by 11% over ten years: the Centre and North are hardest hit
More than half of municipalities have no IT or telecoms shops. The South is holding its own thanks to tourism. Ancona, Pesaro and Mantua top the list for closures
More than 5,000 Italian municipalities have no computer or mobile phone shops, and over 3,000 have nobookshops, stationers, toy shops or shops selling other cultural or leisure products. Hardware shops, furniture showrooms and shops selling household goods are absent from 2,163 localities. Taking it to the extreme: 329 municipalities do not even have a single retail outlet.
It is the crisis in local retail, which is affecting the central and northern regions in particular, where tourism has failed to stem the long-term trends driving this decline (from large-scale retail to e-commerce). This regional snapshot was compiled by Nomisma’s Observatory on Reciprocity and Local Trade, which shared the trends over the last ten years, province by province, with *Il Sole 24 Ore*.
The territories
Since 2015, Italia has seen an overall decline of 11.2 per cent in the number of local shops. ‘This is a clear sign of urban centres becoming depopulated, of relationships weakening and of communities at risk of losing their traditional points of reference,’ comments Francesco Capobianco, head of the Public Policy division at Nomisma. Moreover, the decline in local retail does not merely affect the economy, but has a direct impact on quality of life and on social cohesion within local areas’.
At the bottom of the table are Ancona (-21.3%), Pesaro and Urbino (-20%) and Mantua (-19.9%). Below them, a further 27 provinces recorded declines greater than the national average. Of these, only two (Bari and Sassari) are in the South. Southern Italy has in fact held up better, not only with all its provinces below the national average, but even showing, in 11 cases, a positive change compared with ten years ago (led by Trapani, Crotone and Naples).
The Mezzogiorno Estate
This trend is now clearly evident from Nomisma’s analysis – which takes into account only local shops, excluding tourist accommodation and petrol stations – but it had already been hinted at by the data released in March by Confcommercio, which had recorded a decline in business numbers from 2012 to 2025 across 122 municipalities. In that instance too, the South had dominated the bottom of the rankings, showing a less severe decline in business activity. ‘The resilience holds up to a certain extent, because the reduction in active businesses remains,’ notes Mariano Bella, director of Confcommercio’s Research Department. ‘However, it is more moderate.’ There are various contributing factors: ‘There are incentives – he continues – such as the ‘Resto al Sud’ scheme, which supports the launch of new businesses, or the single Special Economic Zone (ZES). We are unable to say exactly how much of an impact they have, but they certainly play a role’.
