Tag: Italy

Overseas visitors to Italian Regions

I confess I am not a fan of this Sankey diagram, but since the topic is kind of interesting I thought I’ll share it with you anyway… Ah, those times when you could just decide to pack your stuff and head off someplace…

This distribution diagram show visitors from non-European countries to different Italian regions in 2012. It is from a 2014 report ‘DATATUR trend e statistiche sull’economia del turismo’ (trends and statistics on the tourism economy) by the Italian Federation of Hotels and Tourism (Federalberghi).


The report has a number of these figures, distinguishing areas/countries of origin and destination regions. This diagram splits non-European visitors by country of origin and links them to the Italian destination regions. Data is from the National Italian Statistics Office (Istat).

All the crossing streams in the middle really create visual mess. Spaghetti diagram (as some people have labelled this type of distribution diagram) seems to be an appropriate term here.

What we can see is that in 2012 the largest group of non-European visitors to Italy were from the United States (34%), followed by tourists from Japan and China. And Americans like to travel to the Lazio region (Rome), to Tuscany (Florence, Pisa, Siena, …) and the Veneto region (Venice).

There is a newer report to be found on the Federalbergi website with diagrams based on 2017 data, if you want to check out any major shifts in tourists choice of destination…

Italy Energy Flows 2004

Came across the below Sankey diagram showing the energy balance for Italy in 2004. This diagram is from the website of the Italian company InterEnergy.

The setup of the Sankey diagram is similar to the other national energy flow diagrams I have shown in previous posts here on the blog, such as this one for Spain, these two for the United Kingdom, or here for the United States.

The breakdown on the left side shows the fuel types: natural gas (‘Metano’), oil (‘Petrolio’), coal (‘Carboni’), and the renewable energy sources in green. The separate grey flow shows energy imports. Both, percentage values in reference to the primary energy content, as well as absolute figures (in Mtep – million tons of petroleum equivalents, ‘milioni di tonnellate equivalenti di petrolio’ in Italian) are given. Part of the fuels is consumed directly in the different final use sectors (‘usi finali’), a part is used to generate electric energy (blue), and heat (orange). Some of the heat is used through cogeneration, but the major part is lost.

Visualizing Social Conditions

Came across densitydesign’s images on flickr and was really fascinated by the visualizations presented there.

Density Design is a research framework and an experimental laboratory, born as a laboratory course in the final year of the Master Degree Course in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano.

One of their recent projects was on social conditions and poverty in Italy. Some of the visualizations that were created in the course of this project resemble Sankey diagrams, and this is why I thought I should share them with you.




The designers had several dimensions of information they wanted to put into the visualization of statistical data on poverty in Italy. The four shown above chose bands of proportional widths to display the numbers rather than pie charts. In contrast to Sankey diagrams these are not flows, because they are not directed. The works by Luca Rossi (2nd above) and Elena Capolongo (4th above, my personal favourite) try to link the quantities to regions using a map of Italy.

A nice followup project would be to display the migration movements from Southern Italy to the North and abroad due to the social conditions, as previously reported about here.

Density Design has kindly granted permission to show these visualizations here. Read the summary (Project progress report 01. Economic statistic & Communication Design) and learn about their other projects on the Density Design blog. I am adding them to the blogroll too.