Age and cause mortality structure in the Italian regions at the beginnings of the health transition: a research project

This paper aims at exploring Italian mortality structure (by age and cause of death) at the regional level in the last decades of the 19th Century. These years, corresponding to the beginning of the health transition process, were crucial in the Italian experience. The analysis is based on a careful exploitation of the volume “Statistica delle cause delle morti 1888”, published in 1890, by the General Directorate of Statistics. This volume is only one which offers for the Italian regions, before the second World war, death statistics classified according to both age and cause together. The principal objectives of this descriptive contribution are essentially to illustrate the territorial variation of mortality conditions in first phase of the health transition process as well as to underline the relevance and the complexities of the causes specific mortality analysis to explain the geographical mortality differentials in terms of age and sex.