A 2012 survey pinpointing the number of tourists who visited each of Italy’s twenty regions has come up with some surprising results. The most visited destination, by an overwhelming majority, was Veneto, with a staggering 40,387,375 foreigners enjoying its canals and beauty in 2012 alone.
Claiming second place was Lombardia, with its capital Milan attracting the bulk of the tourists, for vocational and work reasons.
The region housing Italy’s capital, Lazio, fell into third place with 20,516,459 visitors, although Rome itself was unsurprisingly the most visited city in the whole country. The survey also noted Rome as the top Italian destination for Russian tourists, as well as being hugely popular with French, Spanish and Americans visitors.
It may come as a surprise that the region so often regarded as the most beautiful in Italy, falls so far down the list for tourists: the rolling Tuscan hills slid to fourth position. Florence itself was also the fourth most popular city destination after Rome, Venice and Milan.
It is equally unexpected that Italy’s islands Sicily and Sardinia were near the bottom of the list for tourists, taking 8th and 12th place respectively. Both mostly drew in visitors from the South of France, and England.
German tourists find their own little slice of Italy in Trentino-Alto Adige, with a massive 50 million each year descending onto the mountains in the north of the country. This is, however, hardly surprising for a region where German is spoken and which borders Switzerland and Austria.
The city of Bologna was labelled sixth most popular city for tourists, however the neighbouring region of Umbria surprisingly fell down the list into 13th most popular, with only 2,068,932 visitors in 2012. Meanwhile Campania took 7th place, with its major archaeological sites of Pompeii and Vesuvius, as well as its capital Naples, drawing in 7,976,125 tourists.
To view the interactive map, see http://www.corriere.it/reportages/cronache/2014/turismo/
