How big is Italy?

Italy is a country in southern Europe, made up of a long peninsula reaching into the Mediterranean Sea and many islands, including Sicily and Sardinia. At its longest, it stretches about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles), from Vetta d'Italia on its northern border in the Alps to Capo delle Correnti at the southern tip of Sicily. Italy covers about 302,000 square kilometers (117,000 square miles).

Size

ISTAT, Italy's national statistics institute, gives the country's greatest length as 1,200 kilometers, from Vetta d'Italia to Capo delle Correnti. Measured as a straight line between those two points on ISTAT's own map of Italy's borders, the distance comes to about 1,185 kilometers, which rounds to the same figure. The line runs mostly north to south, along the length of the peninsula.

Italy is narrower from west to east. Its westernmost point, in Piedmont, and its easternmost, in Apulia, are about 12 degrees of longitude apart, which at the latitude of central Italy is a little under 1,000 kilometers (600 miles). Some of Italy's small islands lie farther south than Sicily. Measured to the farthest of them, Italy spans about 1,290 kilometers from north to south.

Size comparisons

Italy's length is almost exactly the width of Pluto's moon Charon, which is 1,212 kilometers across.
California, next to Italy in the explorer, covers about 1.4 times Italy's area. Its longest straight line, from corner to corner, is about 1,340 kilometers, a little longer than Italy's.
Running the length of Italy would take about 28 marathons of 42.195 kilometers (26.2 miles) each.
About 11 lengths of Italy laid end to end would reach across Earth, which is 12,742 kilometers wide.

Mountains, hills and plains

Most of Italy is high ground. ISTAT classes 41.6 percent of the country as hills and 35.2 percent as mountains, which leaves only 23.2 percent, less than a quarter, as plains.

Italy is divided into 20 regions. The largest is Sicily, at 25,824 square kilometers (9,971 square miles). Sardinia, at 24,106 square kilometers, is the third largest, after Sicily and Piedmont.

A long coastline

Italy's coastline is far longer than the country itself. ISTAT measures it by adding up the seaward edges of the small areas it uses to count the population, and gets 9,337 kilometers (5,802 miles). That is almost eight times Italy's length.

Sardinia has the longest coast of any region, at 2,157 kilometers, followed by Sicily at 1,784 kilometers and Apulia at 1,103 kilometers. Sardinia's coast alone is nearly twice Italy's length.