Italy is getting older, and more people are over 100 than ever.
On Friday, Italy’s national statistics office said that the number of people over 100 hit a record high last year, this is because the average age of the country’s population is growing faster than in other countries in the European Union.
In its yearly report, ISTAT said that the number of people over 100 had tripled since the turn of the century. As of January of this year, there were almost 22,000 people over 100, most of whom were women.
At the other end of the age range, births dropped to a record low of 393,000 in 2022, this was the lowest number of births since Italy became one country more than 150 years ago.
Since 2014, the number of people living in Italy has slowly gone down, and helping and caring for a growing number of older adults is one of the biggest problems the country is facing right now.
Between the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2023, the average age in Italy went up from 45.7 to 46.4.
The number of people over 80 is expected to grow by 35% between 2021 and 2041, reaching over 6 million.
