Italy’s forests now cover more than 100,000 square kilometres, over a third of the country, and have overtaken the area it farms for the first time since the Middle Ages. That is according to Foreste in Comune, the first municipal-scale socioeconomic survey of Italy’s forest estate, promoted by the forest certification body PEFC Italia.
The crossover dates to 2020, though the municipal breakdown appeared only earlier this month, with woodland now reaching almost 11 million hectares, close to double the roughly 6 million hectares it covered in 1970. That growth returns Italy to a balance between forest and farmland last seen around a thousand years ago, before centuries of clearing cut national tree cover to a low near 12 per cent.
Most of the expansion comes not from planting but from the spontaneous return of forest to abandoned fields and pasture, concentrated across the mountains and high hills. Around 1.3 million farms have closed over the past two decades, three-quarters of them in these areas, taking some 850,000 hectares of cultivated land out of use.
Yet the forest boom has done little to loosen Italy’s reliance on imported wood, with the country still ranking among Europe’s three largest importers of timber and wood products even as its own woodland spreads. Italian forests remain largely unmanaged, a disconnect that leaves much of the new growth beyond the reach of the sawmills and furniture makers driving demand.
PEFC Italia describes the survey as a first step toward treating woodland as productive infrastructure rather than scenery, mapping where forests stand and how they tie into the communities around them. The report lets Italy read its forests “not only as an environmental component, but as strategic infrastructure,” said Antonio Brunori, the body’s secretary-general.
The new woodland is sharply uneven, with 495 “hyper-forested” municipalities — each more than four-fifths tree cover — holding almost 14 per cent of the national estate while housing barely 1 per cent of Italians. The extreme case is Marcetelli, a village of 56 residents in the province of Rieti, where forest covers 98.4 per cent of the land and generates close to €8 million a year in clean air, water regulation, soil protection and stored carbon.
The report is careful not to treat the spread of forests as an unbroken environmental win, noting that the loss of traditional farming erases the meadows, terraces, and mixed plots that centuries of cultivation have turned into habitat. As the mountains revert to woodland, the lowlands tighten into intensive monoculture, a double shift the authors warn is hollowing out biodiversity at both ends.
The exodus is not the whole story: 932 municipalities recorded net in-migration above 10 per 1,000 between 2021 and 2025, many of them heavily wooded. The data suggests that forest cover no longer signals decline; instead, it draws remote workers and new residents back to places long written off as marginal.
More than three-quarters of that forest sits in Italy’s 3,596 mountain municipalities, home to barely an eighth of the population, a concentration PEFC Italia president Marco Bussone calls the country’s natural capital. Bussone said Italy had become a forest nation “almost without our knowledge,” even as its industry continued to import the timber those mountains could supply.
