This population data for Italy was collected from istat.it. I pulled the 2023 data on 2023-APR-07. The data reflects the population of each comune as of JAN-01 of each year. I then wrote code (Java, R) to reformat the data.
Note: There is a new access point for Italian data located at Data Warehouse. This will gradually replace the i.stat system.
Some comuni are listed in my data files as NA. If you see an NA value it is because the comune does not exist as of the pull date, at least by that name. Occasionally comuni are merged together with other comuni to form a new one. Or sometimes a comune is cleaved into parts to form several new comuni.
At the time of this data pull, the data shows 5 super regions, 20 regions, 107 provinces, and 7894 comuni.
There are three files here for each year. The first file has population data for all comuni in Italy (tutti). The second file only includes comuni in the southern super region (sud), Sicilia, and Sardegna AND which had population less than 20,000. The third file includes includes special circumstance comuni as explained in the paragraph below. They are all sorted first by region and then by comune population in descending order.
There are comuni which qualify for the 7% tax regime, but are in a special category. The Italian Finance Ministry has a web page about the 7% tax regime and discusses which comuni qualify. It has links to lists of comuni shown in annex 1, 2, and 2-bis. If you click on those links you can see the lists. For your convenience I have collected all the comuni from those annexes into a single list available at the button below.
Note: In the past there was some disagreement about whether the comuni on those annex lists which have population greater than 20,000 qualify for the 7% tax program. As you can see at the Finance Ministry's web page, those comuni are: Teramo, Ascoli Piceno, Macerata, Spoleto, Reiti, and Fabriano. Commercialista Niccolò Bolla recently updated his position on this matter. Whereas previously he said that those comuni qualified for the program, he now says that the government has changed its position. He now advises that no comuni which have a population over 20,000 are qualified for the 7% tax program. At this time, I am not aware of any Italian tax expert who has a contrary position. I now firmly believe that no comuni anywhere in Italy can qualify for the 7% tax program if it has a population greater than 20,000. I have updated the file "2023 other_comuni.tsv" below to include only comuni whose population is not greater than 20,000.
These files are in tab separated value (tsv)* format. You should be able to import this data into any spreadsheet easily.
Here is a file for all comuni in Italy covering years 2019..2023. This might be useful to see trends in a comune.
Here is where you can access files I posted previously for 2021 and 2022.
* Why not csv? Yes, csv is more common but also more error prone. If there are any commas in your data, they have to be properly escaped to distinguish them from the commas used as separators. Tabs are much more rare in data.
See also for information on the boundaries of comuni in Italy.