The average height of Italians increased significantly during the twentieth century, before stabilizing in recent years. According to Istat data, at the beginning of the twentieth century, boys 1.80 meters tall were a very rare exception, just 1.3%, and their average height was only 165 cm. Today, however, the average height is 177.8 centimeters for men and 164.5 centimeters for women.
Let’s see through Istat data how the height of Italians has changed over the years and what these changes depend on.
How tall Italians have become over the years
The historical series of Istat allow us to reconstruct the changes in the height of Italians for more than a century and a half thanks to the registers of those registered for military service. The average male height of those born in 1854 was 162 cm and what is most striking is the percentage, among these, of boys at least 180 centimeters tall: only 0.6%. More than a third (33.5%) were in fact no more than 1.60 meters tall, while the majority (52%) had a height between 160 and 170 cm, and only 14% exceeded 170 cm.
Fifty years later, in 1904, the average rose to 165 cm, and the boys over 1.80 meters doubled (1.3%), while the share of those taller than 1.70 meters reached 16%. We are still at low numbers, but they are advancing year after year.
Those born in 1951 were the first for whom both the average and median height exceeded the threshold of 170 centimetres. In 1960 the average reached 172.7 centimeters while in 1980 it was 174.6 cm and very tall boys (over 1.80cm) exceeded 20%. Since then, growth slowed until it stabilized.
But how tall are Italians on average today? According to the statistics of Ncd Risk Factor Collaboration (an international network of 800 researchers collaborating with the World Health Organization) the average Italian height of a man in 2016 was 177.8 centimetres, while that of women was 164.6 cm.
However, not everyone grows in the same way. The tallest people in Italy live in Friuli-Venezia Giulia: the average male is over 178 cm, and more than a third of young people are over six feet tall. Sardinia, however, is at the bottom of the ranking: only 8.4% over 180 cm. Calabria and Sicily precede it, where around 12% are over six feet tall. Curiously, Lazio is the only region where the height of the latest generations, instead of increasing, has actually decreased slightly.
At a global level, the data places Italy in twenty-ninth place (out of 179 countries) for men’s height and thirty-second place for women’s. We are therefore in the top 30, but far from the very first places. On the podium of the tallest in the world we find the Dutch with their average 182.5 cm, followed by Belgium (181.7 cm) and Estonia (181.6 cm). Among women, the Latvians (169.7 cm) came first, followed by the Dutch (168.7 cm) and the Estonians (168.6 cm).
The shortest men in the world are those from East Timor, who do not reach an average height of 160 cm (159.8 cm), followed by Yemen and Laos. The shortest women, however, come from Guatemala (here the average is 149.4 cm), the Philippines and Bangladesh.
What does height depend on?
When we are born we are on average about 50 centimeters long, but this measurement is destined to more than triple over the course of two decades. In fact, height is not definitive until after development, when the growth cartilages have healed (on average between 16 and 20 years).
But why is the average height growing? According to researchers, it depends on a combination of genetics and environment. For example, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, it was probably the combination of genes of Slavic and Germanic origin plus favorable conditions that created the highest population in Italy.
While the halt in average growth in recent years is probably due both to the reaching of a genetic limit and to geographical and cultural aspects: the average height in fact also depends on the population, and compared to the past in Italy we now have a greater influence than many other ethnic groups. Furthermore, if genes give us potential, but the context in the first years of life is unfavorable (poverty, malnutrition, stress, health problems) that potential will never be realized.
And if living in the city in the past represented an advantage due to the presence of more services, more food and more health, in recent years this gap has disappeared to the point of becoming a disadvantage. In fact, recent research published in Nature tells us that living in the city reduces growth slightly: stress, noise, pollution and junk food can in fact accelerate puberty and close the growth plates earlier.
