Is Tuscany a city? Italy's regions, provinces and city names explained

The short answer

Tuscany is not a city. It is one of the twenty regions the Italian Constitution lists in Article 131, where it appears under its Italian name, Toscana.[1] Its capital is Florence: Article 2 of the Tuscan regional statute names Firenze as the regional capital, where the regional council and executive normally meet.[2] Italy's national tourism portal calls Florence "the Tuscan capital" too.[5]

Florence, Pisa and Siena are three separate towns inside Tuscany. ISTAT, Italy's statistics institute, lists each as its own municipality and as the chief town of its own province or metropolitan city.[3] Planning "a trip to Tuscany" therefore still means choosing a town; the Florence, Pisa or Siena guide compares them.

The four layers: state, region, province, comune

Article 114 of the Constitution says the Republic is made up of the comuni (municipalities), the provinces, the metropolitan cities, the regions and the state.[1] From a traveller's point of view, the layers nest like this:

• Region (regione). Twenty of them, listed in Article 131.[1] Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, Lombardy, Veneto and Sicily are regions.
• Province or metropolitan city. ISTAT's list places every municipality in a unit between the comune and the region: an ordinary province, an autonomous province, a metropolitan city, a free consortium of municipalities in Sicily, or, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, a former province kept only for statistics.[3]
• Comune. The municipality, and the level at which a town or city has its own official name and boundary. ISTAT counted 7,894 from 21 February 2026, after Castegnero and Nanto in the province of Vicenza merged into one.[4]

The metropolitan city is the layer most easily confused with the city itself. ISTAT records Tivoli as a separate municipality inside the Metropolitan City of Rome, with Rome as that unit's chief town; Pompei and Ercolano are separate municipalities in the Metropolitan City of Naples in the same way.[3] Being in the same metropolitan city as Rome does not put Tivoli in Rome, and XTOUR never treats it as if it did.

Tuscany in numbers

The Tuscan statute lists the region's territory as ten provinces: Arezzo, Firenze, Grosseto, Livorno, Lucca, Massa Carrara, Pisa, Pistoia, Prato and Siena.[2] ISTAT's current list keeps the same ten units but records Firenze as a metropolitan city rather than a province, and counts 273 municipalities across them. The difference is one of date, not of substance: the edition of the statute that the Regional Council publishes is dated February 2012, and ISTAT's notes date the switch from province codes to metropolitan cities to 1 January 2015.[2][3]

ISTAT also places Tuscany in its "Centro" (Central Italy) group of regions, one of five statistical divisions alongside the North-west, North-east, South and Islands.[3]

Why the same place has two names

XTOUR uses the English names English-speaking travellers search for. Italian official sources use Italian ones, and for six of XTOUR's twelve Italian cities the two differ, while a seventh, Bolzano, has a bilingual official name.[3]

Every one of the twelve is flagged in ISTAT's list as the chief town of the unit in the last column.[3]

Two names trip readers up more than the rest. Venice is in the Veneto region, as is Verona; Friuli-Venezia Giulia, despite the word "Venezia" in its name, is a different region, whose former provinces are Gorizia, Pordenone, Trieste and Udine. And Bolzano has a bilingual official name, Bolzano/Bozen: ISTAT's notes say municipalities in the province of Bolzano/Bozen take an Italian and a German name joined by a slash.[3]

Even official texts spell the regions differently

Article 131, the article that creates the regions, names three of them in a form other official texts no longer use: "Valle d'Aosta", "Trentino-Alto Adige" and "Abruzzi". Article 116 of the same Constitution, which the Constitutional Court's edition notes was replaced in 2001, uses the bilingual "Valle d'Aosta/Vallée d'Aoste" and "Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol".[1] ISTAT's list uses those bilingual forms and calls the third region "Abruzzo".[3] All of these are names for the same regions; the table above uses the forms in ISTAT's current list.

Five regions with special autonomy

Article 116 gives five regions special forms and conditions of autonomy under their own special statutes: Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sardinia, Sicily, Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol and Valle d'Aosta/Vallée d'Aoste. It also says Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol is made up of the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano, and ISTAT's list records Bolzano/Bozen and Trento as autonomous provinces rather than ordinary ones.[3][1] ISTAT notes that the EU's NUTS statistical classification has no level-2 "Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol" region; the two autonomous provinces appear in its place.[3]

Boundaries also still move. ISTAT's classification page records a new territorial arrangement for Sardinia, with a Metropolitan City of Sassari and new provinces, in force for statistics from 1 January 2026.[4]

Why XTOUR plans by city, not by region

A region is too large to be a base, and a region's name says nothing about which sites are where. Tuscany contains 273 municipalities, and Florence, Pisa and Siena are three separate ones among them.[3] XTOUR's reading is that the useful decision is which town to stay in, so its Italian destinations are towns and cities, each recorded under its own municipality. The Italy travel guide sets out what each base is for; Italy lists them all.

What XTOUR does not tell you

XTOUR does not publish distances, travel times or transport between towns in the same region, and being in the same region or metropolitan city says nothing about how far apart two places are. It does not publish region-level or province-level pages. Administrative boundaries change, as Sardinia's 2026 reform shows, so ISTAT's classification page is the place to check a current boundary or name.