Northern Italy is a cultural and geographical region, without any administrative purpose, used to indicate the northern part of the Italian state, also informally referred as Il Nord, Settentrione or Alta Italia. It consists of 8 regions in northern Italy: Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino Alto-Adige. According to the 2011 census, its population was 27,213,372. For statistic purposes, the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT) uses the term Northwest Italy and Northeast Italy for identifying two of the five statistical regions in its reporting. These same subdivisions are used to demarcate first level Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) regions ("NUTS 1 regions") within the European Union, and the Italian constituencies for the European Parliament.