Evidence of economic regularities and disparities of Italian regions from aggregated tax income size data

•The economical size distribution of the Italian cities over the quinquennium 2007–2011 is discussed.•The presence of regularities among the data is detected.•Yearly data are proven to be well fitted by a 2-parameters Lavalette law.•The occurrence of distortions generated by the outliers (the so-called king and king plus vice-roy effects) is also explored.•The analysis is performed either at a national as well as at local (regional and provincial) level.

This paper discusses the size distribution–in economic terms–of the Italian municipalities over the period 2007–2011. Yearly data are rather well fitted by a modified Lavalette law, while Zipf–Mandelbrot–Pareto law seems to fail in this doing. The analysis is performed either at a national as well as at a local (regional and provincial) level. Deviations are discussed as originating in so called king and vice-roy effects. Results confirm that Italy is shared among very different regional realities. The case of Lazio is puzzling.