In Italy, the comune (plural comuni) is the basic administrative division of both provinces and regions, and may be properly approximated in casual speech by the English word township or municipality.
It is headed by a mayor (sindaco) assisted by a legislative body, the Consiglio Comunale, and an executive body, the Giunta Comunale. Mayor and members of Consiglio Comunale are elected together by resident citizens: the coalition of the elected Mayor (who needs an absolute majority in the first or second round of voting) gains the three fifths of the Council's seats. The Giunta Comunale is chaired by mayor who appoint others members, called assessori. The offices of the comune are housed in a building usually called the Municipio, or Palazzo Comunale. Since the start of 2009 there have been 8,100 comuni in Italy; they vary considerably in area and population.
For example, the comune of Rome (Lazio) has an area of 1,285.30 km² and a population of 2,726,539, and is both the largest and the most populated comune in Italy; Fiera di Primiero, in the province of Trento, is the smallest comune by area, with only 0.15 km², and Morterone (province of Lecco) is the smallest by population, with only 33 inhabitants. The smallest non-alpine comune in Italy is Montelapiano, the fourth is Carapelle Calvisio, both in the mountainous region of Abruzzo.
The density of comuni varies widely by province and region: the province of Bari, for example, has 1,564,000 inhabitants in 48 municipalities, or over 32,000 inhabitants per municipality; whereas the Aosta Valley has 121,000 inhabitants in 74 municipalities, or 1,630 inhabitants per municipality – roughly twenty times more communal units per inhabitant. There are inefficiencies at both ends of the scale, and there is concern about optimizing the size of the comuni so they may best function in the modern world, but planners are hampered by the historical resonances of the comuni, which often reach back many hundreds of years, or even a full millennium: while provinces and regions are creations of the central government, and subject to fairly frequent border changes, the natural cultural unit is indeed the comune, – for many Italians, their hometown: in recent years especially, it has thus become quite rare for comuni either to merge or to break apart.
Many comuni also have a Polizia Municipale (municipal police) which is responsible for public order duties. Traffic control is their main function in addition to controlling commercial establishments to ensure they open and close according to their license.
A comune usually comprises:
Sometimes, a frazione might be more populated than the capoluogo; and very occasionally, due to unusual circumstances or to the depopulation of the latter, the town hall and its administrative functions move to one of the frazioni: but the comune still retains the name of the capoluogo.
In some cases, a comune might not have a capoluogo but only some 'frazioni': in these cases, it is called a "comune sparso" (sparse municipality) and the frazione which houses the town hall is called "sede municipale" (compare county seat).