Floods are an extremely widespread problem throughout Italy; it is enough to consider that 3.5% of the total population falls in the high risk scenario P3 (high hazard areas with Tr of 20 – 50 years) (ISPRA, 2018). One of the causes of these events is certainly urbanization, i.e. The permanent covering of the ground and the relative soil with non-permeable artificial material (Munafò et al., 2015), which leads to an alteration of the surface and underground water regime.

Representative of this situation is the case study of the city of Matera, which over the last few years has been affected several times by intense rainfall events that have caused serious problems for the population and a lot of damage. Not having, for the case study, data collected in-situ available against which to validate the hydrodynamic simulations, the results were compared of the simulations conducted with different two-dimensional hydrodynamic models, such as FLORA-2D (Cantisani et al., 2014) and LISFLOOD-FP (Bates, 2007) with the aim of researching operational procedures and tools for flood management in terms of both forecasting and warning and regional planning (ex ante).