There are nearly 60 million people who call Italy home. Italy has the fifth-highest population density in Europe at 196 persons per square kilometer. Although Roman Catholicism is the majority religion (85 percent of native-born citizens are nominally Catholic), there are Protestant and Jewish communities and a growing Muslim immigrant community.

Language and Dialects

Language: Italian (Italiano) is a Romance language currently spoken by some 66 million people, of whom the vast majority live in peninsular Italy (including the Republic of San Marino). France, including Corsica, has about 260,000 Italian speakers and Switzerland more than 500,000 (the canton of Ticino). For a large portion of these speakers, standard Italian is not the language of the home, where dialectal forms are used. It is estimated that there are some 700,000 speakers in Brazil and 600,000 in Argentina.

Dialects: The northern dialects include the Gallo-Italian dialects (Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, Emilian-Romagnol); as the influence of a Celtic substratum is discernible, some linguists consider them separate languages pertaining to the Gallo-Romance subgroup. The other northern group of dialects, spoken in northeastern Italy, is called Venetan (including Venetian, Veronese, Trevisan, and Paduan dialects, etc.). Istrian, which is spoken on the peninsula now divided between Croatia and Slovenia, with a tiny portion belonging to Italy, is sometimes considered yet another northern Italian dialect, or an independent language of the Balkano-Romance subgroup. The Tuscan dialects (including those of Corsica) are often held to a linguistic group of their own, while in the south and east three broad dialect areas are grouped loosely together: (1) the dialects of the Marche (Marchigiano), Umbria, and Rome; (2) Abruzzian, Apulian, Neapolitan, Campanian, and Lucanian; and (3) Calabrian and Sicilian, which are believed by some to be influenced by the Greek once spoken there (ans still survives in isolated pockets on the southern portion of the peninsula).

Sources
www.italchamber.org
Ethnologue
CIA World Fact Book