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Recent studies on changes in precipitation intensity encompassing North America have found evidence for an increase in the relative amount of precipitation contributed by heavy and extreme rainfall events in the last 80 years. Within this context, the purpose of this paper is to verify whether such a signal can also be detected in northern Italy, where daily precipitation data are available from the beginning of the 19th century. The analysis is performed by applying the non-parametric Mann–Kendall test to mean anomaly series obtained through averaging the anomalies of some precipitation intensity statistics over five stations: Genoa (1833–1998), Milan (1858–1998), Mantova (1868–1997), Bologna (1879–1998) and Ferrara (1879–1996). It provides evidence that in northern Italy, the number of rainy days has a stronger and more significant negative trend than the corresponding precipitation amount, both on a yearly basis and in all of the seasons. As a consequence, precipitation intensity has a positive trend. The increase in precipitation intensity causes a significant positive trend in the proportion of total precipitation contributed by heavy precipitation events (i.e. daily precipitation >25 mm and daily precipitation >50 mm). The trend is mainly caused by the last 60–80 years, and is particularly evident in the periods of 1930–1945 and 1975–1995. The increase in precipitation intensity is connected to a modification of the distribution of daily precipitation values in a year, with trends that grow from the lower to the upper percentiles, and up to 4 mm/100 years for the 95th percentile. Copyright © 2000 Royal Meteorological Society [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]