An updated and homogeneous earthquake data set for Italy compiled by joining the Italian Macroseismic Database DBMI15 and the Engineering Strong-Motion (ESM) accelerometric data bank. The database has been compiled through an extensive procedure of selection and revision based on two main steps: 1) the removal of several earthquakes in DBMI15 because the data source has been considered to be largely unreliable in the estimation of the macroseismic intensities and 2) the extraction of all the localities reporting intensity data which are located within 3 km from the accelerograph stations that recorded the data. The final data set includes 519 recordings from 65 earthquakes and 227 stations in the time span 1972-2016. The events are characterized by moment magnitudes in the range 4.1-6.8 and depths in the range 0-55 km. Here, we illustrate the data collection and the properties of the database in terms of recording, event and station distributions as well as macroseismic intensity points. Furthermore, we list the most relevant features of engineering interest showing several statistics with reference to the most significant metadata (such as moment magnitude, several distance metrics, style of faulting etc).