A New Report Maps Where Italy's Woodlands Are GrowingItaly has crossed a threshold most of its own citizens probably haven't noticed: the country's forests now cover more territory than its farmland does, a reversal that hasn't been true since the Middle Ages. Wooded areas have pushed past 100,000 square kilometers, more than a third of the entire national territory, and have exceeded utilized agricultural land every year since 2020.The finding comes from "Foreste in Comune" (Forests in Municipalities), the first socioeconomic survey ever conducted of forest assets at the municipal level across Italy. The report was promoted by PEFC Italia (the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification), working with UNCEM, Legambiente and Consorzio Caire, and built on data from Italy's national Forest Map and its Forest and Forestry Chain Information System (SINFor), cross-referenced against economic and demographic figures compiled separately for each of Italy's roughly 7,900 municipalities. It's the first time anyone has systematically connected forest coverage data to a given town's population trends, land consumption and patterns of depopulation or repopulation, rather than treating forest extent as a purely environmental statistic. The Most Forested Places in Italy The report ranks Italy's most heavily wooded municipalities down to the decimal point. Marcetelli, a small town in the province of Rieti, tops the list with 98.4% of its territory covered by forest, the most forested municipality in the entire country. Not far behind are Bormida in the province of Savona at 97.07%, Percile near Rome at 96.99%, and Drenchia and Grimacco, both in the province of Udine, at 96.79% and 96.59% respectively. Marcetelli's case illustrates what forest coverage can actually be worth in economic terms, not just ecological ones. The report estimates the town's forest assets generate close to €8 million a year in environmental benefits, through air purification, water regulation, soil protection and carbon storage. For sheer scale rather than percentage, Gubbio in Umbria holds the record, with 26,804 hectares of forest, the largest absolute forest area of any Italian municipality, ahead of San Giovanni in Fiore in Calabria and Città di Castello, also in Umbria. A Deeply Uneven Distribution Despite the striking headline number, Italy's forests are far from evenly spread. Roughly 75.7% of the entire national forest area sits within just 3,596 mountain municipalities, territories that together cover nearly half the country's landmass but house only 13.5% of its population. The imbalance gets sharper still at the extremes: 495 "hyper-forested" municipalities, where forest covers more than 80% of the land, are home to just 1% of Italy's population, yet collectively contain nearly 14% of the country's total forest area, more forest than exists across the entire other half of Italy where woodland is scarce. That other half tells a very different story. In roughly half of Italy's municipalities, forest cover sits below 20% of the territory, and these lower-lying, more populated areas, home to more than two-thirds of the national population, contain less than 10% of the country's forests. The province of Verona offers a clear regional snapshot of that split: towns like Isola della Scala have barely 3.8 hectares of forest out of nearly 7,000 total hectares, while several municipalities in the province, including Bovolone, Cerea and Oppeano, report no forest cover at all in the survey. Growth Driven by Absence, Not Just Nature The report is careful not to frame this expansion as a straightforward environmental win. Much of the growth is happening through spontaneous renaturalization, forest reclaiming land that farming has simply abandoned, concentrated heavily in mountain and upland hill regions. Over the past two decades, roughly 1.3 million farming operations shut down nationally, three-quarters of them in exactly these marginal, harder-to-farm areas, a wave of closures that has cost Italy around 850,000 hectares of cultivated land. That tradeoff carries real ecological costs of its own. Traditional extensive agriculture, permanent meadows, terracing, mixed cropping, agroforestry, produced semi-natural habitats that many species have come to depend on over centuries of interaction between farming communities and the land. When that farming disappears and forest reclaims the terrain, those particular habitats and the species tied to them tend to decline too. Meanwhile, the opposite pressure is intensifying on Italy's plains, where industrial agriculture keeps consolidating into large-scale monocultures precisely because flat terrain is easier and cheaper to mechanize, further narrowing landscape diversity even as the mountains grow wilder. A Population Question Hiding Inside a Forestry Report Behind the ecological story is a demographic one. Farms in Italy's interior, mountainous regions, already dealing with steep terrain, fragmented land parcels and higher production costs than the plains, have also been steadily losing younger residents to outmigration, while large-scale retail and food distribution networks increasingly favor standardized, high-volume production that leaves little room for the small, local crop varieties historically grown in these areas. There are early signs the pattern might not be permanently one-directional, though. Between 2021 and 2025, 932 Italian municipalities recorded a net positive migration balance of more than 10 per thousand residents, and a meaningful share of them were located in some of the country's most heavily forested areas, suggesting forest-covered regions may be gaining a new kind of appeal even as traditional farming retreats from them. What Comes Next The report's authors frame the real challenge ahead as finding balance rather than picking a side between the two extremes it documents: unchecked agricultural abandonment and renaturalization on one hand, and increasingly intensive, ecologically flattening agriculture on the other. Italy's forests represent a genuine ecological and economic asset, but the report's authors argue that sustainable forest management alone won't determine what happens next. The future of Italy's interior, they suggest, will depend on whether the country can support high-quality, diversified agriculture and give real value to local specificities, so that the forest's return doesn't simply come at the cost of the communities that shaped these landscapes, and their biodiversity, for centuries in the first place.

Italy has crossed a threshold most of its own citizens probably haven't noticed: the country's forests now cover more territory than its farmland does, a reversal that hasn't been true since the Middle Ages. Wooded areas have pushed past 100,000 square kilometers, more than a third of the entire national territory, and have exceeded utilized agricultural land every year since 2020. The finding comes from "Foreste in Comune" (Forests in Municipalities), the first socioeconomic survey ever conducted of forest assets at the municipal level across Italy. The report was promoted by PEFC Italia (the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification), working with UNCEM, Legambiente and Consorzio Caire, and built on data from Italy's national Forest Map and its Forest and Forestry Chain Information System (SINFor), cross-referenced against economic and demographic figures compiled separately for each of Italy's roughly 7,900 municipalities. It's the first time anyone has systematically connected forest coverage data to a given town's population trends, land consumption and patterns of depopulation or repopulation, rather than treating forest extent as a purely environmental statistic. The report ranks Italy's most heavily wooded municipalities down to the decimal point. Marcetelli, a small town in the province of Rieti, tops the list with 98.4% of its territory covered by forest, the most forested municipality in the entire country. Not far behind are Bormida in the province of Savona at 97.07%, Percile near Rome at 96.99%, and Drenchia and Grimacco, both in the province of Udine, at 96.79% and 96.59% respectively. Marcetelli's case illustrates what forest coverage can actually be worth in economic terms, not just ecological ones. The report estimates the town's forest assets generate close to €8 million a year in environmental benefits, through air purification, water regulation, soil protection and carbon storage. For sheer scale rather than percentage, Gubbio in Umbria holds the record, with 26,804 hectares of forest, the largest absolute forest area of any Italian municipality, ahead of San Giovanni in Fiore in Calabria and Città di Castello, also in Umbria. Despite the striking headline number, Italy's forests are far from evenly spread. Roughly 75.7% of the entire national forest area sits within just 3,596 mountain municipalities, territories that together cover nearly half the country's landmass but house only 13.5% of its population. The imbalance gets sharper still at the extremes: 495 "hyper-forested" municipalities, where forest covers more than 80% of the land, are home to just 1% of Italy's population, yet collectively contain nearly 14% of the country's total forest area, more forest than exists across the entire other half of Italy where woodland is scarce. That other half tells a very different story. In roughly half of Italy's municipalities, forest cover sits below 20% of the territory, and these lower-lying, more populated areas, home to more than two-thirds of the national population, contain less than 10% of the country's forests. The province of Verona offers a clear regional snapshot of that split: towns like Isola della Scala have barely 3.8 hectares of forest out of nearly 7,000 total hectares, while several municipalities in the province, including Bovolone, Cerea and Oppeano, report no forest cover at all in the survey. The report is careful not to frame this expansion as a straightforward environmental win. Much of the growth is happening through spontaneous renaturalization, forest reclaiming land that farming has simply abandoned, concentrated heavily in mountain and upland hill regions. Over the past two decades, roughly 1.3 million farming operations shut down nationally, three-quarters of them in exactly these marginal, harder-to-farm areas, a wave of closures that has cost Italy around 850,000 hectares of cultivated land. That tradeoff carries real ecological costs of its own. Traditional extensive agriculture, permanent meadows, terracing, mixed cropping, agroforestry, produced semi-natural habitats that many species have come to depend on over centuries of interaction between farming communities and the land. When that farming disappears and forest reclaims the terrain, those particular habitats and the species tied to them tend to decline too. Meanwhile, the opposite pressure is intensifying on Italy's plains, where industrial agriculture keeps consolidating into large-scale monocultures precisely because flat terrain is easier and cheaper to mechanize, further narrowing landscape diversity even as the mountains grow wilder. Behind the ecological story is a demographic one. Farms in Italy's interior, mountainous regions, already dealing with steep terrain, fragmented land parcels and higher production costs than the plains, have also been steadily losing younger residents to outmigration, while large-scale retail and food distribution networks increasingly favor standardized, high-volume production that leaves little room for the small, local crop varieties historically grown in these areas. There are early signs the pattern might not be permanently one-directional, though. Between 2021 and 2025, 932 Italian municipalities recorded a net positive migration balance of more than 10 per thousand residents, and a meaningful share of them were located in some of the country's most heavily forested areas, suggesting forest-covered regions may be gaining a new kind of appeal even as traditional farming retreats from them. The report's authors frame the real challenge ahead as finding balance rather than picking a side between the two extremes it documents: unchecked agricultural abandonment and renaturalization on one hand, and increasingly intensive, ecologically flattening agriculture on the other. Italy's forests represent a genuine ecological and economic asset, but the report's authors argue that sustainable forest management alone won't determine what happens next. The future of Italy's interior, they suggest, will depend on whether the country can support high-quality, diversified agriculture and give real value to local specificities, so that the forest's return doesn't simply come at the cost of the communities that shaped these landscapes, and their biodiversity, for centuries in the first place.