Something quietly historic happened in Italy around 2020 C.E.: woodland overtook farmland in total coverage for the first time in roughly 700 years. A report released in June 2026 C.E. by Italy’s National Union of Mountain Municipalities and Entities confirmed the milestone, putting Italy’s forest cover at approximately 60,000 square miles — more than the country’s combined agricultural land. It is a reversal centuries in the making, and its dividends fall overwhelmingly to the natural world: more carbon pulled from the air, cleaner water, expanding habitat for returning wildlife, and vast stretches of wild, walkable beauty reclaiming the Italian mountains.
At a glance
- Italy forest cover: Forests now stretch across approximately 60,000 square miles of the Italian peninsula, surpassing agricultural land for the first time since the Middle Ages.
- Ecosystem services: In Marcetelli, a mountain town where trees now cover 94% of the land, the forest’s free work storing carbon and filtering air and water is valued at roughly $9.5 million a year — from a single municipality.
- Wildlife habitat: Recovering populations of bears, wolves, wild boar, and red deer are gaining room to roam as woodland reclaims Italy’s Alpine and Apennine highlands.
Why more forest is good news
The clearest winner in Italy’s woodland comeback is nature itself. Every acre of returning forest is a working carbon sink, drawing climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it away in wood and soil. The same trees clean the air, filter and slow the flow of water through mountain watersheds, and anchor slopes against erosion and landslides — the kind of quiet, unglamorous ecological labor that keeps a whole landscape healthy.
The report put a price on that labor in one place. In Marcetelli, a small municipality in the Rieti Province where 94% of the land is now covered in trees, the natural services the forest provides — carbon storage, water and air filtration, and erosion prevention — would cost an estimated $9.5 million a year if industrial systems had to replace them. That is the value of a single town’s trees. Scaled across Italy’s mountain regions, the free ecological work these forests perform is enormous — and it grows with every year the woodland spreads.
Beyond the balance sheet is something harder to price: beauty. Hillsides that were once cleared and terraced are closing back into continuous canopy, restoring the kind of wild, forested landscapes that draw walkers and naturalists — and that simply make a place richer to live in. It is part of a broader pattern of climate progress across Europe, where rewilding, both deliberate and accidental, is reshaping land use in ways that carry real carbon and biodiversity benefits.
Wildlife returns to the mountains
More forest means more room for the animals that depend on it. Italy’s recovering wolf and bear populations stand to benefit directly from the expansion of connected, undisturbed habitat across the mountains — the space these species need to hunt, den, and range. Wild boar and red deer are spreading into the widening woodland as well, part of a broader thickening of the food web that healthy forests support.
Italy’s mountain regions are where nearly all of this is concentrated. The 3,598 municipalities in the Alpine and Apennine zones account for three-quarters of the country’s total forested area while housing just 13.5% of the national population — meaning these are large, lightly populated expanses where wildlife has genuine room to recover.
How the forests came back
Italy’s woodland recovery is, in large part, a story of rural depopulation running in reverse for nature. For roughly two decades, young Italians left mountain villages and rural plains for major cities. As farming families moved out, marginal pastureland and terraced fields were abandoned — and nature moved in.
Geography made this especially likely. The Alps, the pre-Alpine hills, the Po Valley, and the Apennines running the length of the peninsula create vast highland zones where small-scale agriculture was always economically marginal. As demand for crops and pasture from those areas fell, land that had been cleared for centuries was left to return to woodland. The forests simply filled the gap.
New life in the hills
The recovery is not only ecological. The same rural zones that emptied over the past 20 years are beginning to attract new residents. Since 2021 C.E., 932 Italian municipalities recorded a positive net migration of 10 per 1,000 inhabitants, and a significant share of them sit in heavily forested areas — a sign that intact woodland, and the slower, greener life it offers, is becoming a draw rather than a liability. Many of these towns have continuous habitation records reaching back to medieval times, so their revival carries cultural weight alongside the ecological gains.
The new forest is also seeding a rural economy built around nature rather than against it: eco-tourism, sustainable forestry, and wildlife-based recreation. For travelers chasing that woodland, the data offers a map — among Italy’s five most densely forested municipalities, two lie in the province of Perugia in Umbria and two in Udine in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region near the Slovenian border, both areas where woodland tourism is already taking root.
What the milestone doesn’t resolve
The gains are real, but not evenly shared. The new forests are, in many cases, growing over the agricultural landscapes that long defined rural Italian life, and the fading of traditional farming and pastoralism carries genuine cultural costs an ecological ledger cannot fully capture. The recovery is also geographically lopsided, concentrated in the Alpine and Apennine highlands rather than spread across the whole country. Even so, the direction of travel is one ecologists, climate scientists, and rural planners have every reason to welcome: a country that cleared its forests over millennia is, for the first time since the Middle Ages, letting them grow back.
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