Introduction

The Moody's Analytics Global Metropolitan Areas product consists of historical estimates and forecasts for major cities worldwide, extending our expertise with U.S. metro areas.  Inconveniently, there is no globally accepted standard for a "metropolitan area," i.e., a cluster of one or more geographic subdivisions strongly integrated by economic and commuting activity.  Whenever possible, we use the definition(s) provided by each nation's geographic authority, or proposed by a supernational body; otherwise, we define our own.

We were able to utilize ISTAT (the Italian statistical agency) for definitions for four metro areas, each of which uses a single NUTS 3 area.  For the remaining areas we resorted to the ESPON Project 1.4.3, which promulgated Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) each based on one or more NUTS 3 areas.

References

• Eurostat: NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics)
• ISTAT: Codes of municipalities, provinces and regions:
  • Introduction (English)
  • Lists (Italian)
• ESPON: Project 1.4.3 Study on Urban Functions (2007)
• Moody's Analytics: Official geographic structure for Italy
• Moody's Analytics: Subnational data summary for Italy

Table 1 of 1. Metropolitan areas in Italy.  Each area is an aggregate of one or more NUTS 3 regions.  Italy has a national geo code of IITA, all codes for its geographic subdivisions use IITA as a prefix, and all Moody's Analytics metro areas feature the letter M.  Each of the 11 areas is identified as IITA(underscore)M(letter)(letter)(letter), and may be retrieved en masse by using the basket geo wild card IITA_M^^^.