Is Palermo walkable?

This page covers Palermo: 629,000 people.

59/100Typical walking score where people live. It mixes the walk to eight daily needs with how pleasant the streets are.

68%Palermo is better than this share of places where people live, across the 20 countries on the map.

20thBy typical score, of the 39 cities in Italy on this site.

In Palermo, the walk to groceries is the strong point: 5 minutes for the typical building, better than most of Europe. The walk to a school is the weak point: 10 minutes for the typical building, about typical for Europe. Walking is easiest in Vucciria (score 84) and hardest in Ciaculli (score 29): a gap of 55 points.

The walk to eight daily needs

The typical walk is the middle value: half of the buildings in Palermo have a shorter walk, and half have a longer one. The words compare it with every place where people live in the 20 countries on the map, so the same minutes get the same word everywhere.

Need	Typical walk	Compared with Europe	Buildings with one within 20 min
Groceries	5 min	Better than most	92%
Food and drink	5 min	Better than most	89%
Shops	4 min	Better than most	94%
Health	8 min	Better than most	80%
School	10 min	About typical	76%
Parks	7 min	About typical	88%
Culture	15 min	About typical	63%
Public transport	3 min	Better than most	96%

Compared with the rest of the country

The map is cut into six-sided cells 55 m across, and every cell that a street passes through gets a score: we call these street cells. We sort all 13,208,252 street cells in Italy from hardest to easiest to walk, then cut the list into five equal groups, called fifths. In Palermo, 73% of the street cells are in the most walkable fifth, more than the 20% of an average place.

Share of the street cells in Palermo in each fifth. The dashed line marks 20%, the share every fifth has in Italy.
Fifth of the street cells in Italy	Bar	Palermo
Most walkable fifth		73%
Second fifth		13%
Middle fifth		4%
Fourth fifth		4%
Least walkable fifth		6%

The city at a glance

Each of the 2,571 hexagons groups the street cells within about 145 m of its centre and takes the shade of their middle fifth. The line is the boundary this page uses.

See Palermo on the map

On the map, click any street to see its score and the walk to each need.

The most and least walkable areas

Each street cell takes the name of the nearest neighbourhood, village or town on OpenStreetMap, up to 1.5 km away. We rank the 22 areas where people live: each has at least 200 street cells and 500 buildings, and at least a quarter as many buildings per street cell as Palermo as a whole, so ports, hill parks and farmland drop out. Click a name to open it on the map.

Most walkable

Numbers 1 to 5 on the map. In the top fifth: share of the area’s street cells in the most walkable fifth in Italy.
Area	Typical score	In the top fifth
Vucciria	84	100%
Arenella	71	76%
Villaggio Santa Rosalia	70	98%
San Lorenzo	70	100%
Uditore	66	100%

Least walkable

Letters A to E on the map.
Area	Typical score	In the top fifth
Ciaculli	29	29%
Molara	32	61%
Villagrazia	34	59%
Borgo Nuovo	37	78%
Inserra	37	41%

Cities like Palermo

These three cities come closest to Palermo in number of people and typical score, from any of the 20 countries. Palermo scores higher than 1 of them and lower than 2.

City	Country	People	Typical score
Glasgow	United Kingdom	624,000	61
Helsinki	Finland	674,000	61
Copenhagen	Denmark	559,000	58

What this page covers

This page uses the boundary of Palermo as Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, draws it. About 629,000 people live there (2025 figure). Inside it we scored 12,292 street cells with 69,034 buildings in them.

Every number here comes from the same scores as the map. The score runs from 0 to 100. The walk to eight daily needs on real streets makes up 60% of it, and how pleasant the streets are makes up 40%. The comparison with Europe counts every place by its buildings, 163,668,724 buildings in all. How the score works.