NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Municipalities of Italy

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Municipalities of Italy

In Italy, the comune, (plural comuni) is the basic administrative unit of both provinces and regions, and may be properly approximated in casual speech by the English word township or municipality. The Constitutional Court of Italy (Italian: Corte costituzionale della Repubblica Italiana) is the supreme court of Italy. ... The President of the Italian Republic is the head of State of Italy, and represents national unity. ... Giorgio Napolitano (born June 29, 1925 in Naples, Italy), an Italian politician and former lifetime senator, is the eleventh and current President of the Italian Republic. ... This is a list of Prime Ministers of Italy. ... (born August 9, 1939) is a centre-left Italian politician. ... The Parliament of Italy (Italian: Parlamento Italiano) is the national parliament of Italy. ... The Italian Senate (Italian: Senato della Repubblica, Senate of the Republic) is the upper house of the Parliament of Italy. ... The Italian Chamber of Deputies (Italian: Camera dei Deputati) is the lower house of the Parliament of Italy. ... The Court of Cassation (Corte di Cassazione in Italian) is the main court of last resort in Italy. ... Political parties in Italy are organized into two dominant political coalitions. ... Casa delle LibertÃ , or House of Freedoms in English, is an Italian right of center party alliance led by national media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. ... The Union (Italian: LUnione) is an Italian centre-left political party coalition. ... Elections in Italy gives information on election and election results in Italy. ... A general election for the renewal of the two Chambers of the Parliament of Italy was held on April 9 and April 10, 2006. ... A national general election was held in Italy on May 13, 2001 to elect members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic. ... The Constitution of Italy provides for legally binding referenda. ... The Regions of Italy were granted a degree of regional autonomy in the 1948 constitution, which states that the constitutions role is: to recognize, protect and promote local autonomy, to ensure that services at the State level are as decentralized as possible, and to adapt the principles and laws... In Italy, the province (in Italian: provincia) is an administrative division of an intermediate level, between municipality (comune) and region (Regione). ... The European Union or EU is a supranational and international organization of 27 member states. ... This article describes the foreign relations of Italy. ... This is a list of major political scandals in Italy: Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconis many corruption charges Tax evasion bribing members of the judicary immunity legislation Media manipulation fro political propaganda P2 scandal, 1980s Tangentopoli (diffuse corruption cases in national politics), early 1990s Categories: Incomplete lists | Politics of Italy... Information on politics by country is available for every country, including both de jure and de facto independent states, inhabited dependent territories, as well as areas of special sovereignty. ... The term township is used to denote a lower level territorial subdivision. ... A municipality or general-purpose district (compare with: special-purpose district) is an administrative local area generally composed of a clearly defined territory and commonly referring to a city, town, or village government. ...

Importance and function

The comune provides many of the basic civil functions: registry of births and deaths, registry of deeds, contracting for local roads and public works, etc. It is headed by a mayor (sindaco) assisted by a council of aldermen, the Consiglio Comunale. The offices of the comune are housed in a building usually called the Municipio, or Palazzo Comunale. Look up Civil in Wiktionary, the free dictionary The word Civil is derived from the Latin word civilis, from civis (citizen). Used as an adjective, it may describe several fields, concepts, and people: Civil death Civil defense Civil disobedience Civil engineering Civil law Civil liberties Civil libertarianism Civil marriage Civil... Registry has several meanings, all of which generally relate to its original or historical meaning as a written, official or formal record of information, or the place where such records are kept. ... Recorder of deeds refers to the government office that maintains records of transfers of real estate, as well as many other public documents. ... A council is a group of people who usually possess some powers of governance. ... An alderman is a member of a municipal legislative body in a town or city with many jurisdictions. ...

As of the 2001 census, there were 8,101 comuni in Italy; they vary considerably in area and population. This article is about the year 2001. ...

For example, the comune of Rome (Lazio) has an area of 1,285.30 km² and a population of 2,546,804, and is both the largest and the most populated comune in Italy; Fiera di Primiero, in the province of Trento, is the smallest comune by area, with only 0.10 km², and Morterone (province of Lecco) is the smallest by population, with only 33 inhabitants. Nickname: The Eternal City Motto: SPQR: Senatus PopulusQue Romanus Location of the city of Rome (yellow) within the Province of Rome (red) and region of Lazio (grey) Coordinates: Region Lazio Province Province of Rome Founded 21 April 753 BC Mayor Walter Veltroni Area - City 1,500 kmÂ² (580 sq mi... Lazio (Latium in Latin) is a regione of central Italy, bordered by Tuscany, Umbria, Abruzzo, Marche, Molise, Campania and the Tyrrhenian Sea. ... Fiera di Primiero is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Trento in the Italian region Trentino-South Tyrol, located about 60 km east of Trento. ... In Italy, the province (in Italian: provincia) is an administrative division of an intermediate level, between municipality (comune) and region (Regione). ... Trento (Italian: Provincia autonoma di Trento, German: Autonome Provinz Trient) is an autonomous province in the autonomous Trentino-South Tyrol region of Italy. ... Country Italy Region Lombardy Province Province of Lecco (LC) Mayor Elevation 1,070 m Area 13. ... Lecco (It. ...

The density of comuni varies widely by province and region: the province of Bari, for example, has 1,564,000 inhabitants in 48 municipalities, or over 32,000 inhabitants per municipality; whereas the Aosta Valley has 121,000 inhabitants in 74 municipalities, or 1,630 inhabitants per municipality — roughly twenty times more communal units per inhabitant. There are inefficiencies at both ends of the scale, and there is concern about optimizing the size of the comuni so they may best function in the modern world, but planners are hampered by the historical resonances of the comuni, which often reach back many hundreds of years, or even a full millennium: while provinces and regions are creations of the central government, and subject to fairly frequent border changes, the natural cultural unit is indeed the comune, — for many Italians, their hometown: in recent years especially, it has thus become quite rare for comuni either to merge or to break apart. A province is a territorial unit, almost always a country subdivision. ... Look up Region in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The stemma of Provincia di Bari Bari (It. ... The Aosta Valley (in Arpitan: Val dOuta, French: VallÃ©e dAoste, Italian: Valle dAosta) is a mountainous and very silly and smelly region in north-western Italy. ...

Subdivisions

A comune usually comprises:

a principal town or village, that almost always gives its name to the comune; such a town is referred to as the capoluogo (“head place”, or “capital”) of the comune; the word comune is also used in casual speech to refer to the town hall.
other outlying areas called frazioni (singular: frazione, abbreviated Fraz., literally “fraction”), each usually centred on a small town or village: for fuller details, see the article Frazione. These frazioni have usually never had any independent historical existence, but occasionally are former smaller comuni consolidated into a larger. They may also represent settlements which predated the capoluogo: the ancient town of Pollentia, for instance, today known as Pollenzo, is a [[frazione]] of Bra. In recent years the frazioni have become less important. Yet smaller places are called località (literally “localities” and often, as in the phonebook, abbreviated Loc.).

Some few frazioni are more populated than the capoluogo; and very occasionally, due to unusual circumstances or to the depopulation of the latter, the town hall and its administrative functions move to one of the frazioni: but the comune still retains the name of the capoluogo. A frazione, in Italy, is the name given in administrative law to a type of territorial subdivision of a comune; for other subdivisions, see municipio, circoscrizione, quartiere. ... The ancient town of Pollentia on the left bank of the Tanaro is known today as Pollenzo, a fraction of Bra in the Province of Cuneo, Piedmont. ... Bra is a town and comune of Italian region of Piemonte, 44°42N 7°51E, at 290 m (951 ft) above sea-level, with 28,300 inhabitants as of the 2003 census. ...

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Subdivisions

See also

Importance and function