In Italy, a province (provincia) is an administrative division of intermediate level between a municipality (comune) and a region (regione).

A province is composed of many municipalities (comune), and usually several provinces form a region. The region of Aosta Valley is the only exception being the province coincident with the region.

The three main functions devolved to provinces are:

There are 110 provinces in Italy. Lombardy has the most provinces, with 12. The number of provinces in Italy has been steadily growing in recent years, as many new ones are carved out of older ones.

Each province is headed by a President assisted by a legislative body, the Provincial Council, and an executive body, the Provincial Executive. President and members of Council are elected together by resident citizens: the coalition of the elected President (who needs an absolute majority in the first or second round of voting) gains the three fifths of the Council's seats. The Executive is chaired by the President who appoint others members, called assessori.

Italy ⁱ/ˈɪtəli/ (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic or the Republic of Italy (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a unitary parliamentary republic in south-central Europe. To the north, it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia along the Alps. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia–the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea–and many other smaller islands. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. The territory of Italy covers some 301,338 km² (116,347 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 60.6 million inhabitants, it is the fifth most populous country in Europe, and the 23rd most populous in the world.

Rome, the capital of Italy, was for centuries a political and religious centre of Western civilisation as the capital of the Roman Empire and site of the Holy See. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Italy endured numerous invasions by foreign peoples, from Germanic tribes such as the Lombards and Ostrogoths, to the Byzantines and later, the Normans, among others. Centuries later, Italy became the birthplace of Maritime republics and the Renaissance, an immensely fruitful intellectual movement that would prove to be integral in shaping the subsequent course of European thought.