Yes, Italy does have provinces. There are 107 provincial-level entities in total, sitting between the 20 regions and the thousands of municipalities, and their existence is written directly into Article 114 of the Italian Constitution.1The Constitution of the Republic of Italy. The Constitution of the Republic of Italy – Section: Title V, Regions, Provinces, Municipalities What has changed in the last decade is not whether provinces exist but what they do, how their leaders are chosen, and how much money they have to work with.
How Many Provinces There Are
The 107 figure includes both standard provinces and the metropolitan cities that replaced provinces in Italy’s largest urban areas.2Istat. Istat – Provinces They are spread unevenly across the country. Northern regions tend to have more of them; Lombardy alone contains 12 provincial-level divisions, while Valle d’Aosta has none and operates as a single regional unit.
The number was 92 in the early 1990s and grew as new provinces were carved out over the following two decades. A 2016 constitutional referendum would have removed provinces from the Constitution altogether, but voters rejected it, with roughly 59% voting no. That result left provinces as a permanent constitutional feature.
Where Provinces Sit in the Structure
Article 114 lists the Republic’s components as “the Municipalities, the Provinces, the Metropolitan Cities, the Regions and the State.” That single sentence means provinces are not an administrative convenience the government can dissolve by decree. Article 118 then assigns administrative functions starting at the municipal level and moving upward based on subsidiarity, so provinces pick up tasks that individual towns cannot handle alone.3Senato della Repubblica. Constitution of the Italian Republic – Section: Art. 118 Coordinating a road network across dozens of small municipalities is the classic example. So is running a high school system that draws students from a wide catchment.
Article 117 gives the national parliament exclusive authority over how provinces are elected and what their fundamental functions are.4Senato della Repubblica. Constitution of the Italian Republic – Section: Art. 117 That is why a single national law was able to reshape every province in the country at once.
What Provinces Do Today
After the 2014 reform, provincial responsibilities were narrowed to a defined core: provincial roads, upper secondary school buildings, environmental protection, territorial planning, and transport coordination.5Padova University Press. The Role of Regulatory Modes in Regional Governance: Insights from the Delrio Reform in Italy
Roads are the most tangible piece. Provincial road networks are the secondary and tertiary routes that link smaller towns to each other and to the national highway system. Maintaining bridges, resurfacing worn pavement, and clearing snow in mountain areas all fall to the province.
Education is the other headline duty, with an important limit. Provinces are responsible for upper secondary schools only. Elementary and middle school buildings are the municipality’s problem. Once a student enters high school, the province handles the physical facilities, decides which schools to merge or expand, and coordinates services like transport to sports facilities and help with textbook costs.6Eurydice. Italy – Administration and Governance at Local and/or Institutional Level
Environmental protection and territorial planning fill out the core list. Provinces coordinate waste management across municipal lines, monitor local environmental conditions, and enforce land-use plans. They also help coordinate civil protection when floods, earthquakes, or other disasters cut across town boundaries.
One less visible function touches everyday life: each province hosts one or more Centri per l’Impiego, the public employment offices where unemployed workers register, sign service agreements, and access job listings and training. National policy sets the rules, but the province provides the administrative framework.
What Changed in 2014
Law 56 of 2014, known as the Delrio Law after the minister who pushed it through, is the reason provinces feel different today than they did a decade ago. It did not abolish them, but it changed two things fundamentally.
First, direct elections disappeared. Before the reform, residents voted for their provincial president and council the same way they voted for a mayor. After 2014, provincial representatives are chosen indirectly by the mayors and municipal councilors within the province. Ordinary residents no longer cast a ballot for provincial leadership.
Second, provincial responsibilities shrank to the core list above. Everything else was meant to shift to regions or municipalities. In practice, implementation varied across Italy’s 15 ordinary-statute regions, each of which had significant discretion. Some provinces were stripped of nearly all functions and lost most of their central-government funding. Others kept their road and school duties without the budget to carry them out well.
The Delrio Law was designed as a first step toward constitutional abolition. When the 2016 referendum failed, provinces were left in a weakened but still-existing state.
Metropolitan Cities
The same 2014 law created a parallel category called the metropolitan city, or città metropolitana. Ten provinces in ordinary-statute regions were converted into metropolitan cities starting in January 2015, and four more were established by special-statute regions shortly after. The 14 are Turin, Milan, Genoa, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Bari, Reggio Calabria, Palermo, Catania, Messina, and Cagliari.
Metropolitan cities inherit all the functions of the provinces they replaced and add powers built for large urban areas: strategic territorial planning, coordination of public services and infrastructure across the metro area, economic development, and management of digital networks. The mayor of the central city automatically serves as the metropolitan mayor. Rome’s mayor, for example, also leads the metropolitan city of Rome.
Bolzano, Trento, and the Special-Statute Regions
The standard story does not apply everywhere. Italy has five special-statute regions with constitutional statutes granting extra autonomy: Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Valle d’Aosta, Sicily, and Sardinia. The Delrio Law directly governs only the 15 ordinary-statute regions. The special-statute regions handle provincial organization on their own terms.
Two provinces stand out. The Autonomous Province of Bolzano (South Tyrol) and the Autonomous Province of Trento together make up the Autonomous Region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, but the real power sits at the provincial level. A second autonomy statute enacted in 1971 progressively transferred most legislative and administrative functions from the region to these two provinces.7Provincia autonoma di Trento. History of the Special Autonomy of Trentino – South Tyrol
Bolzano and Trento can legislate on nearly every subject except areas the state monopolizes, such as national defense, public order, justice, and currency. Healthcare, education, local taxation, and social services are all under provincial control, and they keep a far larger share of tax revenue collected in their territory than ordinary provinces do. Bolzano’s autonomy also has a linguistic dimension: the province has a German-speaking majority, an Italian-speaking minority, and a small Ladin-speaking community, and its special status is rooted in postwar international agreements protecting those minorities. The Delrio Law’s reduction of provincial powers did not touch these two provinces.
Valle d’Aosta, at the other extreme, has no provinces at all. Sicily and Sardinia kept their own provincial structures under regional law, which is why Sicily set up metropolitan cities on its own timeline.
The Prefect
Alongside the elected provincial government sits a second figure most people outside Italy have never heard of: the Prefect. Every province has one. The Prefect is not elected. Appointed by the national Council of Ministers on the proposal of the Minister of the Interior, the Prefect represents the central government directly inside the province.
The Prefect’s office handles public order and security, coordinates the activities of national agencies operating at the provincial level, and acts as the link between local governments and Rome. When a natural disaster hits, the Prefect coordinates the state’s response alongside local civil protection. When a municipal government collapses or acts unlawfully, the Prefect can step in. The role is deliberately nonpartisan and institutional.
This dual structure, with an elected provincial president handling roads and schools and an appointed Prefect handling public order and state coordination, reflects a long-standing tension in Italian government between central authority and local self-rule.
How Provinces Are Funded
Provinces raise some of their own revenue, mainly through a tax on motor vehicle insurance policies called the Imposta Provinciale di Trascrizione. The base rate is 12.5% on motor liability premiums, and each province or metropolitan city can adjust it up or down by 3.5 percentage points, giving an effective range of 9% to 16%. Beyond that, provinces rely heavily on transfers from the central government and, to a smaller extent, from their region.
The Delrio reform hit those budgets hard. When the 2016 referendum failed and provinces were not abolished, many were left legally responsible for roads and school buildings but operating on drastically reduced funding. Deferred maintenance on provincial roads and aging school facilities became visible in several parts of the country, particularly in the south, where fiscal resources were already thinner.