82,579 – Fire had burned 82,579 hectares in Italy by mid-August, according to the EU’s European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), around 44 percent above the average for the past two decades.
The data counts only fires covering roughly 30 hectares or more, so the true area touched by flames is higher.
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413 – Italy recorded 413 large fires over the same period this year, against a 20-year average of 311.
The season began weeks early this year, with blazes in Piedmont and Tuscany in early spring amid hotter and drier temperatures than usual.
1 percent – Only about 1 percent of Italian fires are started by natural causes, such as lightning strikes, according to the environmental research institute Ispra. The rest are down to human action.
Around half of all fires are known to be deliberately set, according to the state forestry police, though it says the causes of around a quarter of fires are never confirmed.
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The civil protection department divides the human causes into deliberate ones: fires lit for profit - for example due to building speculation or to extend farmland - or revenge over measures like the setting up of a protected area, and careless ones, which it says are caused by the "irresponsible and careless behavior" of people who throw away cigarettes, fail to put out barbecues, and burn waste illegally.
72 percent – Most of what burns is not forest. 72 percent, or around seven in every 10 hectares that Italy loses to fire, is farmland or scrub rather than woodland.
This is because of land abandonment, according to Ispra. As people leave Italy's inland hills and mountains and the land there stops being farmed or grazed, it grows over with dry brush that catches easily, and there are fewer worked fields to slow a fire once it takes hold.
Over the past decade Italy has lost more agricultural land to fire than any other country in Europe.
20 – The number of people charged with causing fires in the Piedmont region this summer, where the forestry police have investigated 129 fires since June (against 35 in the same period last year). The force did not specify how many of those cases involved arson rather than negligence
There is no single national figure across Italy for the total number of people arrested or charged with arson, as exists in countries like France. The figures are reported by region or province - but they tend to appear low. In the province of Salento, southern Puglia, which has one of the highest overall rates of wildfires, just three people were arrested this year.
965 – Wildfires covered 965 square kilometres of Italy last year, close to double the 2024 total, according to Ispra.
Sicily, Calabria and Campania alone accounted for most of the forest area lost. It was among the worst years since records began in 2006, behind only 2007, 2017, 2021 and 2023.