The forensic application of mtDNA typing requires large databases which are regionally well defined. To further this aim, we have typed mtDNA in a sample of 111 French and 106 Sicilians. The French were typed for both hypervariable segments (HVR1 and HVR2) of the mtDNA control region, whereas the Sicilians were only typed for HVR1, but in addition for the coding region RFLP markers for mtDNA groups H, I, J, K, L, M, T, U, V and X. In both samples, the predominant sequence type by far was the Cambridge reference sequence. Comparing HVR1 sequences, we found that the French sample was twice as diverse as the Sicilian sample as measured by sequence matches. A further set of sequence match comparisons including the French, Sicilian, and the published British mtDNA samples, demonstrate that sequence matching probabilities within samples differ by less than a factor of 2 from the matching probabilities between samples.