In Italy, the competition is steep. Ravenna’s boast of making the Unesco World Heritage List — the town has eight Early Christian churches and monuments with mosaics — will not hold much sway with the selection panel. Nearly two-thirds of the other cities vying for the title, which include Lecce, Syracuse and Mantua, can make the same claim.

For L’Aquila, the central Italian city devastated by an earthquake in 2009, organizers think that becoming the capital of culture would give a much-needed boost to the city’s reconstruction, which is struggling to take off. In Palermo, winning the competition is seen as a way of dealing a fresh blow to the Mafia.

Matera, the city of stone dwellings in the Basilicata region perhaps best known to film audiences as the set for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” is plugging itself as a southern success story. “It’s important for Italy to show that it is possible to recover pride in the growth of the south,” said Paolo Verri, the director of the organizing committee there. A city like Pisa, also in the running, “has always been extraordinary,” whereas Matera has overcome extreme poverty in the last century, he said. “Symbolically it would be an important victory.”

An Italian official discounted rumors that this year the application had been limited to 180 pages to curtail Italian loquacity. “You can imagine what it’s like when every city is free to do what it wants,” said Leila Nista, project manager of the Focus Point at the Culture Ministry, which oversees the contest.

As part of the application process, candidate cities developed catchy slogans, like Lecce’s “Reinventing Eutopia,” Taranto’s “Dolphins making love in the seas of Taranto,” presumably a reference to the marine mammals that find sanctuary there, or Aosta’s “Interaction, integration, sharing” along with a logo that recalls a stylized version of Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.

Key to success is the support of local institutions and the public authorities for the candidacy, especially in terms of funding. But lack of funding has not deterred some of the candidates, notably Grosseto and the Maremma, in southwest Tuscany, which refused institutional backing. “Authorities are admitted surreptitiously: the aim is to promote every human and economic resource on a voluntary basis, in sincere participation, without pride. Power is a fashion,” read the application drafted by the promoters of the candidacy — a graphic artist and a musician-writer.