Re-defining the Boundaries of Major Italian Cities

The processes of spatial polarisation and territorial integration that have taken place in Italy since the 1950s have not been accompanied by corresponding institutional adaptations, generating the current huge discrepancy between the functional and political-administrative organisation of the territory. As argued in the paper, this institutional lock-in is rooted in a mistaken conceptualisation of territorial integration, which has focused on the identification of "travel-to-work areas", rather than on the formation of inter-municipal territorial systems which have the nature of cities de facto - larger and structurally different from the legal cities. The paper corroborates this thesis by focusing on the eight largest Italian cities de jure, identifying, on the basis of both functional and morphological features, the corresponding cities de facto.