<P> Although Italian provides different words for city (città), town (paese) and village (villaggio, old - fashioned, or frazione, most common), no legal definitions exist as to how settlements must be classified . Administratively, both towns and cities are ruled as comuni / comunes, while villages might be subdivisions of the former . Generally, in everyday's speech, a town is larger or more populated than a village and smaller than a city . Various cities and towns together may form a metropolitan area (area metropolitana). A city, can also be a culturally, economically or politically prominent community with respect to surrounding towns . Moreover, a city can be such by Presidential decree . A town, in contrast, can be an inhabited place which would elsewhere be styled a city, but has not received any official recognition . Remarkable exceptions do exist: for instance, Bassano del Grappa, was given the status of "città" in 1760 by Francesco Loredan's dogal decree and has since then carried this title . Also, the Italian word for town (paese with lowercase P) must not be confused with the Italian word for country / nation (Paese usually with uppercase P). </P> <P> In Japan city status (shi) was traditionally reserved for only a few particularly large settlements . Over time however the necessary conditions to be a city have been watered down and today the only loose rules that apply are having a population over 50,000 and over 60% of the population in a "city centre". In recent times many small villages and towns have merged in order to form a city despite seeming geographically to be just a collection of villages . </P> <P> The distinction between towns (machi / chō) and villages (mura / son) is largely unwritten and purely one of population size when the settlement was founded with villages having under 10,000 and towns 10,000--50,000 . </P> <P> In Latvia, towns and cities are indiscriminately called pilsēta in singular form . The name is a contraction of two Latvian words: pils (castle) and sēta (fence), making it very obvious what is meant by the word--what is situated between the castle and the castle fence . However, a city can be called lielpilsēta in reference to its size . A village is called ciemats or ciems in Latvian . </P>

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