Italy Geography, Climate & Nature

Italy is famously boot-shaped: a narrow peninsula running roughly 1,200 kilometres north to south, with the Alps forming a wall along the northern border and the Apennines running the length of the country like a spine, separating the east coast from the west for almost all of it.

The Po Valley

The north is dominated by Italy’s largest lowland, bounded by the Alps above and the Apennines below and drained by the Po, the country’s longest river. It holds the agricultural and industrial heartland, most of the national wealth, and the fog and humidity that come with a flat basin between two mountain ranges. The great lakes — Como, Garda, Maggiore — sit along its northern edge where the Alps begin.

A country that is mostly upland

Roughly three quarters of Italy is mountain or hill, which is why the towns sit on summits, why the coastal plains are narrow, and why travel times rarely match the distances on the map. The Apennines are also seismically active along their whole length, and the damaging earthquakes of the last few decades have almost all been in that belt.

Islands and volcanoes

Sicily and Sardinia are the two large islands, with dozens of smaller ones around them. Sicily carries Mount Etna, the most active volcano in Europe, whose eruptions are frequent enough that ash on the streets of Catania is a normal inconvenience; Stromboli, in the Aeolians, has been erupting more or less continuously for millennia. On the mainland, Vesuvius stands over Naples and the three million people around it.

Two seas that behave differently

The Tyrrhenian side is deep, warm and steep-sided; the Adriatic is shallow, calmer and lined with long sand beaches; and the difference shapes everything from the fishing to where Italians take their holidays.

Italy’s climate splits along the Apennines. The south and the coasts follow a Mediterranean pattern of hot, dry summers and mild, wetter winters, while the Po Valley in the north is genuinely continental — cold, foggy winters and hot, humid summers, quite unlike the Mediterranean coast at the same latitude.

The mountains are a third climate

The Alps and Dolomites have heavy winter snowfall and short, cool summers, cold enough in most years to carry a ski season that brings a large share of the north’s winter visitors. The Apennines hold snow too, and the ski resorts of Abruzzo sit two hours from Rome.

When the rain comes

Autumn is the wettest season nationwide and summer the driest in the south, while the north spreads its rain more evenly through the year. Genoa and the Amalfi coastline are prone to violent, very local autumn storms — a nubifragio in the forecast means a great deal of water in a short time, and in steep coastal towns that matters.

Summer heat, and what it has become

Inland cities are the hot ones. Florence, Bologna and Rome regularly pass 35°C in July and August, with the high-pressure systems that produce it now arriving earlier and staying longer than they did a generation ago. Air conditioning is far from universal in older accommodation, and the coast and the hills are where Italians themselves go.

Two winds worth knowing

The scirocco brings hot air and Saharan dust north across the south and the islands, sometimes colouring the sky. The bora falls cold and hard on the north-east, and in Trieste it is strong enough that the city has ropes strung along some streets.

Italy runs from the Alps to within sight of Africa, and that range is why it holds more recorded species than any other country in Europe. The Alpine arc, the Apennine spine down the length of the peninsula, the Mediterranean coasts and the two large islands are four different worlds, and the mountains act as a corridor that connects them rather than a wall that divides them.

The Apennines are the least famous and the most important part of that. Their forests were never fully cleared, and the unbroken chain of woodland let large mammals survive in central Italy through centuries when they disappeared from most of western Europe. National parks now protect long stretches of it, along with the Alpine massifs, the Po basin wetlands and a network of marine protected areas around the coasts and islands.

Sardinia and Sicily are separate stories again. Both have been islands long enough to evolve their own species, and Sardinia in particular holds plants and animals found nowhere else.

Three large mammals define Italian wildlife, and all three are recoveries rather than relics. The wolf was never reintroduced here: a remnant Apennine population survived the twentieth century and spread north on its own, and wolves are now back in the Alps. The Alpine ibex came closer to disappearing -- every ibex in the Alps today descends from the single surviving population in what is now Gran Paradiso. The Marsican brown bear did not recover: fewer than a hundred survive in and around Abruzzo, and it remains one of Europe's most precarious animals.

Chamois, red and roe deer, and marmots are the everyday mountain animals, and wild boar are abundant enough to be a nuisance in farmland and increasingly in city suburbs.

The birds are where a visitor is most likely to notice something. Golden eagles hold the mountains; the bearded vulture, exterminated from the Alps, was reintroduced from the 1980s and breeds there again. Italy sits on a major migration route between Europe and Africa, so the wetlands fill twice a year with birds that are only passing through, and flamingos, herons and egrets are now ordinary sights in the coastal lagoons.