Italy away from the masses: five regions almost nobody knows
Trend story · ISTAT 2022, retrieved 2026-10-05 · Index 2.0, as of 25/08/2026
Of 55.1 million arrivals from abroad that ISTAT counted in Italy in 2022, 11.8 percent fell to the province of Venice alone and 41.9 percent to the five most popular provinces. The province of Isernia counted 2,117 in the whole year. If you want a calmer Italy, it lies in between: in Molise, Abruzzo, Basilicata, Marche and Umbria.
- Foreign arrivals 2022
- under 51,000
- 51,000 to 120,000
- 120,000 to 280,000
- 280,000 to 590,000
- 590,000 and above
The four most popular provinces, foreign arrivals 2022
Venice
6,474,186
Bolzano
5,210,219
Rome
4,911,979
Naples
1,796,264
Minimum: the province of Isernia with 2,117 foreign arrivals.
Do you know that feeling of standing on St Mark's Square and not seeing the Doge's Palace for all the selfie sticks? Italy has a handful of places where half the world arranges to meet, and the figures of Italy's statistics office ISTAT show how lopsided that is. Of 55.1 million arrivals from abroad that ISTAT counted in Italy in 2022, the province of Venice alone accounted for 6.5 million, Rome for 4.9 million and Naples for 1.8 million arrivals. The province of Isernia in Molise recorded 2,117 over the entire year.
The map above shows exactly that: the darker a province, the more arrivals from abroad. The five darkest patches, Venice, Bolzano, Rome, Milan and Verona, take in 41.9 percent of all foreign arrivals between them, the ten most popular provinces 57.9 percent. The rest of the country shares what is left, and that is a lot of Italy.
That it bunches up like this has to do with geography. The province of Venice is more than the lagoon: it also includes the beach resorts of Jesolo, Caorle, Cavallino-Treporti and San Michele al Tagliamento, and in 2022 these four together recorded 21.7 million overnight stays, almost twice as many as the city of Venice itself. Part of it is probably habit: you go where everyone goes, and then tell everyone about it.
The effects have been visible in Venice for years. Cruise giants above a size limit may no longer enter the basin in front of St Mark's Square, in spring and summer 2026 day visitors pay an entry fee on certain days, and in 2019 the historic centre was still home to 52,996 people, a number that has been falling for decades.
At HolidayHub we measure how full a region's beds are in summer, Italians included. There too, Südtirol, Venedig with Venetien and Emilia-Romagna lead, with 59, 49 and 48 percent occupancy between June and August (crowding index 2.0, as of 25/08/2026).
Italy is big, and there is plenty of room between the dark patches on the map. We picked five regions where fewer than a quarter of arrivals come from abroad. The order is not a ranking; we chose by the figures and by what there is to see. How full the summer beds are there is shown on each card.
Coast, mountains and heritage are all there too. You just have to drive a few provinces further than the figures above suggest.
Where to go instead
Five regions we would send you to.
Molise
Summer occupancy
14.8 %
Only 8.8 % of guests here come from abroad.
- Molise has been a region of its own only since 1963, after the Aosta Valley the smallest in the country, a good half of it mountains.
- The province of Isernia, the minimum on our map, has existed since 1970.
- On the Adriatic lie 35 kilometres of sandy coast, behind which the land climbs into the mountains.
Abruzzo
Summer occupancy
27.4 %
Only 11.8 % of guests here come from abroad.
- Around a third of Abruzzo is protected, spread over three national parks.
- The Corno Grande in the Gran Sasso massif is, at 2,912 metres, the highest peak of the Apennines; on its flank lies the Calderone, Europe's southernmost glacier.
- Abruzzo National Park is home to around a hundred Marsican brown bears, the park's emblem.
Basilicata
Summer occupancy
34.6 %
Only 20.8 % of guests here come from abroad.
- The cave dwellings of Matera, the Sassi, have been a World Heritage Site since 1993.
- The region has only a narrow share of the Tyrrhenian coast.
- Castelmezzano and the abandoned town of Craco also lie within the region.
Marche
Summer occupancy
33.0 %
Only 15.6 % of guests here come from abroad.
- The name comes from the medieval border marches of the Empire: there were the March of Ancona, the March of Fermo and the March of Camerino.
- Between the Adriatic and the Apennines; Monte Vettore reaches 2,476 metres.
- Loreto is one of the most important pilgrimage sites of the Catholic world; in the north, the Duchy of Urbino existed as a state of its own until 1631.
Umbria
Summer occupancy
26.6 %
Only 24.2 % of guests here come from abroad.
- Umbria is the only region of Italy with neither a sea coast nor a border with another country.
- Lake Trasimeno, at 128 square kilometres, is the country's fourth-largest lake.
- Perugia is the capital; Assisi and Orvieto also lie within the region.
Sources and data dates
Every attribution on this page, gathered in one place.
- Arrivals and overnight stays
ISTAT, dataflow 122_54_DF_DCSC_TUR_7, year 2022, retrieved 2026-10-05, licence CC BY 4.0. Municipal overnight stays: ISTAT, Annuario Statistico Italiano 2023, chapter 19, Prospetto 19.6.
- Province boundaries
Eurostat GISCO, NUTS 2024, scale 1:10 million. © EuroGeographics for the administrative boundaries.
- Terms arrivals and overnight stays
TEHA Group (The European House Ambrosetti), Rapporto Strategico sul Turismo Sostenibile e i Patrimoni dell'Umanità, November 2024, p. 20 (methodological note).
- Summer occupancy
HolidayHub crowding index 2.0, as of 25/08/2026; bed occupancy June to August per travel region.
- Facts about the regions
Wikipedia (German edition), licence CC BY-SA 4.0, checked against the revisions listed: Molise (266009067), Abruzzen (269885107), Basilikata (266488232), Marken (266035441), Umbrien (266009060), Venedig (271012260), Übertourismus (270474557).
- Photos
Molise: Photo by Loris Albanese on Unsplash · Abruzzo: Photo by Maurizio Delladio on Unsplash · Basilicata: Photo by Vincenzo De Rosa on Unsplash · Marche: Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash · Umbria: Photo by Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash
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Citing
These numbers may be reused with attribution, always with the version and the data date — without both, a number cannot be checked.
ExampleHolidayHub, trend story “Italy away from the masses: five regions almost nobody knows”, ISTAT 2022 and crowding index 2.0, as of 25/08/2026