There is a different way to celebrate a centenary. You can choose rhetoric, or you can choose the future. For its hundredth anniversary, Istat has decided to do something that looks ahead and focuses on who will inherit those numbers: girls and boys.
Thus was born the Istat 2026 national statistical poster competition, the first edition of an initiative that invites Italian high school and university students to transform data into a visual story. The idea is only apparently simple: use official statistics to tell how your territory has changed over the course of a century.
In a time when numbers flow quickly in headlines and social feeds, stopping to interpret them means learning to read reality with greater awareness.
One hundred years of history of your territory
The theme chosen for this first edition is powerful and identifying: “One hundred years of history of your territory”. This is not an abstract scholastic exercise, but a journey into the concrete transformations of cities, provinces, neighborhoods and communities.
How has the population changed? How have work, education, families and the local economy evolved? What phenomena have marked the social landscape in the last hundred years? The answers are kept in Istat’s historical statistical sources, which become living material to be reworked in graphic form.
The competition follows the organization of the ISLP International Statistical Poster Competition, in which Istat has participated since 2010, bringing Italy into a global context in which data dialogues with creativity.
There are two categories of participants:
secondary schools;
universities (three-year degree courses).
Each team will have to create a poster capable of combining methodological rigor, communicative clarity and graphic quality, adhering to the regulations, guidelines and evaluation criteria available on the official website of the initiative.
Registrations open on February 11, 2026, the deadline to register is March 16, while the posters must be sent by April 8.
An educational experience that goes beyond the competition
Behind the Istat 2026 Poster Competition there is not just a competition, but a growth path. A webinar dedicated to the use of historical statistical sources is planned for teachers and students of the registered teams, which will take place by the end of February. The instructions for participating will be sent directly to the referring teachers.
There is also a practical guide available to teachers and students on the poster creative process, a concrete tool for orienting themselves between the choice of data, construction of graphs and organization of information.
Each participant will receive a certificate of participation, a formal recognition that enhances the commitment and experience gained.
To register one or more teams, the referring teachers must complete the form available on the official competition page. Each teacher can register multiple teams from the same school.
A release is required for each enrolled student, separate for minors and adults. The collection of the releases is the responsibility of the referring teacher and the documents must be kept without sending them to Istat. The posters must be sent to the dedicated address ufficio-poster@istat.it, in compliance with the technical specifications indicated in the regulation.
The Istat Centenary and the Istat100 visual identity
Entering the heart of the celebrations, Istat invites you to always use the official logo of the Istat100 Centenary in all content related to the institution, to guarantee coherence and strength to the visual identity of this symbolic year.
Ready-to-use social cards are also available with details and deadlines of the competition, designed to facilitate the diffusion of the initiative among students and teachers with the official tag @istat_it and the hashtag: #Istat100. All information, regulations, guidelines and the registration form are available on the official competition page published on the Istat website.
Ultimately, telling one hundred years of history through a poster means carrying out a valuable exercise in active citizenship. It means discovering that behind every graph there are people, collective choices, social changes. It means understanding that statistics is not distant from everyday life, but passes through it.
And perhaps, while selecting an indicator or building an infographic, someone will discover that reading data is a way to better understand the world they live in.
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