Rome (un)changing: persistence and peculiarities of its population

Abstract

Rome — the largest municipality in Italy and one of the largest European capitals — offers a revealing case for understanding how national demographic decline translates into urban change. Combining long-run census evidence with annual resident-population stocks, demographic-balance components, and a municipality-level analysis, the study shows that Rome’s recent trajectory broadly parallels the national pattern but with a delayed transition to decline. The decomposition of annual change indicates that natural decrease has become structurally negative, while migration plays a decisive role: international migration remains systematically positive, whereas internal mobility changes sign over time and is crucial in shaping shifts from growth to decline. As of 1 January 2025, Rome’s population structure is close to the national profile in terms of ageing, yet it differs from other large cities in its level of ageing and internationalisation, with a particularly small child population. Within the city, Rome’s 15 administrative subdivisions (“municipi”) exhibit extreme heterogeneity in size, population, growth and structure: only a small number of peripheral municipi continue to grow, while others — most notably the historic centre — experience marked decline.