Italy's unemployment rate shot up above 10% in March and hit 10.2% in April as the euro zone's third largest economy struggles with a recession.
It is the highest level of unemployment Italy has seen since the National Institute of Statistics began compiling monthly figures in January 2004.
The national institute of statistics also revised up its estimate of the unemployment rate for March from 9.8% to 10.1%
According to seasonally adjusted figures, the number of people seeking work rose to 2.615 million in April, which represents a rise of 1.5% compared to a month earlier and a leap of 31.1% on a 12-month basis.
However, the unemployment rate among 15-24 year olds dropped in April from 35.9% to 35.2%. As the figures are based on people actively seeking work, the drop may just indicate some of Italy's young have dropped off the unemployment rolls, having given up finding work in the crisis-hit country.
Unemployment has shot up in Italy since last summer when Rome, which was caught in the grip of the euro zone debt crisis, launched severe austerity programmes to reassure skittish markets and saw its economy begin to shrink.
The country officially entered recession at the end of 2011 and output dropped by a further 0.8% in the first quarter of 2012. Istat said the average unemployment rate for the first quarter of 2012 was 10.9%, a rise of 2.3 percentage points on a year earlier.
