Central Italy (Italian: Italia centrale or Centro Italia) is one of the five official statistical regions of Italy used by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), a first-level NUTS region with code ITI, and a European Parliament constituency. As of 2025, it has over 11 million inhabitants.

Central Italy encompasses four of Italy's twenty regions, including Lazio, Marche, Tuscany, and Umbria. The easternmost and southernmost parts of Lazio (Cittaducale, Amatrice, Sora, Cassino, Isola del Liri, Sperlonga, Fondi, Gaeta, and Formia districts, as well as the islands of Ponza and Ventotene) are sometimes connected to southern Italy (the Mezzogiorno) for cultural and historical reasons since they were once part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and southern Italian dialects are spoken. As a geographical region, central Italy may also include the regions of Abruzzo and Molise, which are otherwise considered part of Southern Italy for sociocultural, linguistic, and historical reasons.

Central Italy is crossed by the northern and central Apennines and is washed by the Adriatic Sea to the east, by the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Ligurian Sea to the west. The main rivers of this portion of the territory are the Arno and the Tiber with their tributaries (e.g. Aniene), and the Liri-Garigliano. The most important lakes are Lake Trasimeno, Lake Montedoglio, Lake Bolsena, Lake Bracciano, Lake Vico, Lake Albano, and Lake Nemi. From an altimetric point of view, central Italy has a predominantly hilly territory (68.9%). The mountainous and flat areas are equivalent to 26.9% and 4.2% of the territorial distribution respectively.

For centuries before the unification of Italy, which occurred in 1861, central Italy was divided into two states: the Papal States and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

The Papal States, officially the State of the Church, were a series of territories in the Italian Peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the pope from 756 until 1870. They were among the major states of Italy from the 8th century until the unification of Italy, between 1859 and 1870. The state had its origins in the rise of Christianity throughout Italy and, with it, the rising influence of the Christian Church. By the mid-8th century, with the decline of the Byzantine Empire in Italy, the papacy became effectively sovereign. Several Christian rulers, including Frankish kings Charlemagne and Pepin the Short, donated further lands to be governed by the Church.

During the Renaissance, the papal territory expanded greatly, and the Pope became one of Italy's most important secular rulers as well as the head of the Church. At their zenith, the Papal States covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio, which includes Rome; Marche; Umbria; Romagna; and portions of Emilia. Those holdings were considered to be a manifestation of the temporal power of the pope, as opposed to his ecclesiastical primacy. By 1861, much of the Papal States' territory had been conquered by the Kingdom of Italy. Only Lazio, including Rome, remained under the pope's temporal control. In 1870, the pope lost Lazio and Rome and had no physical territory at all except the Leonine City of Rome, which the new Italian state did not occupy militarily despite its annexation of Lazio. In 1929, the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, the head of the Italian government, ended the "Prisoner in the Vatican" problem involving a unified Italy and the Holy See by negotiating the Lateran Treaty, signed by the two parties. The treaty recognized the sovereignty of the Holy See over a newly created international territorial entity, a city-state within Rome limited to a token territory that became the Vatican City.

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was an Italian monarchy that existed, with interruptions, from 1569 to 1860 and replaced the Republic of Florence. The grand duchy's capital was Florence. In the 19th century, the population of the grand duchy was about 1,815,000 inhabitants. Having brought nearly all Tuscany under his control after he had conquered the Republic of Siena, Cosimo I de' Medici was elevated by a papal bull of Pope Pius V to Grand Duke of Tuscany on 27 August 1569. The Grand Duchy was ruled by the House of Medici until the extinction of its senior branch in 1737. While not as internationally renowned as the old republic, the Grand Duchy thrived under the Medici and bore witness to unprecedented economic and military success under Cosimo I and his sons until the reign of Ferdinando II, which saw the beginning of the state's long economic decline, peaking under Cosimo III.

Francis Stephen of Lorraine, a cognatic descendant of the Medici, succeeded the family and ascended the throne of his Medicean ancestors. Tuscany was governed by a viceroy, Marc de Beauvau-Craon, for his entire rule. His descendants ruled and resided in the Grand Duchy until its end in 1859, barring one interruption, when Napoleon Bonaparte gave Tuscany to the House of Bourbon-Parma (Kingdom of Etruria, 1801–1807) and later annexed it directly to the First French Empire. After the collapse of the Napoleon in 1814, the Grand Duchy was restored. The United Provinces of Central Italy, a client state of the Kingdom of Sardinia, annexed Tuscany in 1859. Tuscany was formally annexed to Sardinia in 1860 as part of the unification of Italy after a landslide referendum in which 95% of voters approved.