Italy Aerial Orthophoto — Cloud-Native Zarr

A seamless, country-wide mosaic of the Italian national orthophotos (AGEA), re-published as a cloud-native Zarr v3 array so you can read any area of Italy directly from object storage — no download of the full dataset, no tile server, no GIS stack required.

Published by MindEarth.

Open the RGB preview in the viewer

About MindEarth

MindEarth is a geospatial data and AI company. We turn raw Earth-observation and geographic data into analysis-ready, cloud-native datasets and the tooling to use them at scale. This dataset is part of our effort to make high-value public geodata easy to access with standard open-source tools (Python, Zarr, xarray, GDAL, QGIS).

Questions, feedback, or collaboration: https://mindearth.ai

Dataset at a glance

Resolution disclaimer

The AGEA orthophotos are produced at 20 cm/px, and the original full-resolution imagery can be downloaded from the Geoportale AGEA. This dataset is built instead from AGEA's Web Mercator (EPSG:3857) WMTS tile service, whose finest zoom level (z18) corresponds to about 40–48 cm/px on the ground in Italy. If you need the full 20 cm detail, use the original data from the Geoportale.

Basilicata is available only at about 180 cm/px, so it is upsampled ×4 to the level-0 grid (bilinear for colour, nearest-neighbour for the alpha band). It has no extra detail and looks blurrier than the rest.

Preview

An RGB preview is available in the MindEarth Zarr viewer.

Where is the data

The data is served through the Source Cooperative data proxy, which does not support directory listing over plain HTTP. Use the S3-style store below (it works anonymously) rather than a plain HTTP store.

Quick start (Python)

Only the chunks you actually touch are downloaded.

Get a bounding box (lon/lat → pixels)

The array is in EPSG:3857, so convert your WGS84 bbox to metres first. Because y is stored north → south, slice it from ymax down to ymin.

Display it:

Mask no-data pixels with the alpha band (subset.sel(band=3) == 0, or img[..., 3] == 0).

Already have bounds in EPSG:3857?

Save the subset as a GeoTIFF

Coarser preview of a large area

Reading a large bbox at full resolution is expensive (0.6 m/pixel). For an overview, subsample with a stride:

Notes and caveats

• Imagery years vary by area. Because of the priority mosaic, neighbouring areas may come from different years (2024, 2023 or 2022). Seams and colour differences between years are expected; the mosaic is not radiometrically balanced.
• Rendered RGBA, not raw imagery. The values come from AGEA's rendered 8-bit tile service, so they are display imagery, not calibrated reflectance, and not suitable for quantitative radiometry. For the original 20 cm orthophotos, see the Geoportale AGEA.
• Array padding. The stored array is padded to a multiple of the shard size; the valid data extent is in the group attribute valid_shape. Padding is alpha = 0.
• Georeferencing. The pixel grid origin and size are in the group attribute transform ([res, 0, left, 0, -res, top], affine order as in rasterio) and in the x/y coordinate arrays.

Source, licence and attribution

This dataset is derived from the Ortofoto AGEA orthophotos of the 2022, 2023 and 2024 flights (20 cm ground resolution). They are produced and owned by the Agenzia per le Erogazioni in Agricoltura (AGEA) and published by AGEA under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

Source data. The imagery was retrieved from AGEA's public WMTS services. The records of the Italian National Spatial Data Catalogue (RNDT) list these services as the official distribution resources:

• 2022 flight: Liguria, Toscana, Marche, Abruzzo, Puglia, Sicilia, Sardegna. RNDT record agea:OI:ORTOIMMAGINI:m004 (record). WMTS: https://geoportale.agea.gov.it/image/rest/services/AgEA/Ortofoto_AgEA_2022/ImageServer/WMTS
• 2023 flight: Autonomous Provinces of Trento and Bolzano, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Umbria, Lazio, Campania, Basilicata. RNDT record agea:OI:ORTOIMMAGINI:m005 (record). WMTS: https://geoportale.agea.gov.it/image/rest/services/AgEA/Ortofoto_AgEA_2023/ImageServer/WMTS
• 2024 flight: Valle d'Aosta, Piemonte, Lombardia, Veneto, Molise, Puglia. RNDT record agea:OI:ORTOIMMAGINI:m006 (record). WMTS: https://geoportale.agea.gov.it/image/rest/services/AgEA/Ortofoto_AgEA_2024/ImageServer/WMTS

The source datasets fall within the scope of Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 on High-Value Datasets (geospatial category). Acquisition dates vary by region according to the flight year.

Changes made. The source data has been modified. The tiles were retrieved between 2026-09-01 and 2026-10-15 at zoom level 18 (EPSG:3857), mosaicked into a single grid and converted to Zarr v3. Where flights overlap, 2024 takes priority, then 2023, then 2022 (for example, for Puglia the 2024 flight is used where available). Basilicata is upsampled ×4 (see above). AGEA did not take part in producing this dataset.

Licence. This dataset is released under CC BY 4.0. You can reuse it as that licence allows, provided you credit both AGEA as the source and MindEarth as the producer of this derived dataset. The original AGEA terms are at https://geoportale.agea.gov.it/legal-notes.

Required attribution:

Contains orthophotos © AGEA – Agenzia per le Erogazioni in Agricoltura, voli 2022–2024, CC BY 4.0, modified by MindEarth.

No endorsement, no warranty. AGEA does not endorse this dataset or any use made of it. Both the source data and this dataset are provided "as is", without any guarantee of accuracy, completeness, currency or fitness for a particular purpose, and neither AGEA nor MindEarth is liable for any use of them.