The smartest city remains Florence, large centers with an advantage in digital services
The ranking of the most digital municipalities in Italy in 2022 confirms Florence in the lead, followed in second place by Milan and in third place by a group of cities with equal merit: Bergamo, Bologna, Cremona, Modena, Roma Capitale and Trento. Among the smartest cities, 10 are metropolitan capitals (out of a total of 14), almost all of them in the Centre-North, testifying to the persistence of a certain delay in the South and in the smaller realities despite the fact that there is a trend towards recovery.
These are the main results of the new edition of ICity Rank, the research by Fpa (a company of the Digital360 group) presented on 29 November during the Forum Pa Città event. The ranking of the 108 provincial capitals, which each year is included among the parameters of the survey Sole 24 Ore’s quality of lifeexamines the digital transformation of territories and is obtained as the arithmetic mean of eight sector indices, which summarize 35 indicators based on 150 variables: online services, social channels, enabling platforms, open data, openness, public wi-fi, municipal apps and internet of things (IoT).
The 26 “digital” cities accelerate
Scrolling through the ranking, in ninth position we find the ex aequo of Cagliari and Genoa, in 11th Parma and Turin, in 13th Brescia and Venice, in 15th Palermo, Prato, Reggio-Emilia, Rimini and Verona, in 20th Bari, Cesena and Pisa, Padua at the 23rd, Lecce, Siena and Vicenza at the 24th. Together with the municipalities on the podium, these urban centers make up the group of 26 “digital cities”, capable of using new technologies in a widespread, organic and continuous way. Another 75 are instead in an intermediate stage in the digital growth path and seven at the bottom of the standings, at a critical level with an index below 30 (Rieti, Avellino, Benevento, Foggia, Agrigento, Enna and in last place Isernia).
The sprint of some towns in the South
On a general level, in fact, we are witnessing a decisive acceleration in the average level of digitization and a rebalancing which has led to shortening the distances from the top also by different realities between the cities of the South and the smaller towns. Among the most significant growth cases, Messina, which improved by 34 positions during 2022 (from 62nd to 28th), L’Aquila, Cuneo, Imperia and Trapani, which gain 16 points.
Cagliari, Palermo and Bari are confirmed at the top among the cities of the South. After Lecce, also Messina, Naples and Pescara are now close to entering the digital cities. “In 2022 we witnessed a strong digital acceleration of Italian cities, on the one hand thanks to the consolidation of enabling platforms such as Spid, PagoPa, AppIo, on the other to central financial and operational support”, comments Gianni Dominici, general manager of Fpa.