By Gavin Jones

ROME, Dec 9 (Reuters) - President Sergio Mattarella is consulting with a total of 23 get-togethers to help him find a successor to outgoing Primary Minister Matteo Renzi, exhibiting how little improvement Italy has manufactured in reducing politics fragmentation.

On Friday, Mattarella met separately with groups that few Italians have even heard about, like the Thought and Action Party, the Civic Innovators Party and one known only as "Fare!", which would approximately translate as the "Doing" get together.

The political panorama is even more fragmented than it looks. Several of the delegations positioning discussions with the president are in reality mini-coalitions and the total number of actions in parliament is around 40.

The first group to emerge from the meetings in Mattarella's sumptuous Rome palace on Friday recounted their come across in German. They represented the Austrian minority in the South-Tyrol boundary region.

One of the bigger players, the North Group, which polls show is Italy's third most popular party at about 13 percent, said it favoured a snap election somewhat than creating a fresh federal with anything other than a short-term caretaker role.

"We must vote at the earliest opportunity," Giancarlo Giorgetti, the League's deputy secretary, said after his ending up in Mattarella.

The president's consultations will continue on Saturday, including with Renzi's Democratic Party (PD), which includes more parliamentarians than every other bloc.

The fragmentation of politics into countless get-togethers and factions is one of the reasons Italy has had 63 governments within the last 70 years.

Until the early on 1990s an electoral system of proportional representation (PR) was generally blamed for h? s? đ?ng k? nh?n hi?u allowing small functions to prosper, yet since genuine PR was scrapped in 1993 the fragmentation has only received worse.

To protect their lifetime at elections, little parties combine into wide-ranging coalitions, but then often splinter again and change labels and allegiance after the new parliament has been produced.

At exactly the same time, specific parliamentarians move freely between parties from one election to another, often changing the make-up of the majority backing the federal government.

Within the first 1 . 5 years of the current parliament, 116 of the 315 senators elected in 2013 changed their political colours.

The reason for Italy's latest political turmoil was Renzi's decision to resign after failing woefully to get popular support for constitutional reforms aimed at increasing government stableness. Critics said one weakness was that his proposal does nothing to prevent party-swapping.

Renzi's own centre-left federal government was propped up in parliament by centre-right splinter organizations that left behind Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party after the last election, including the New Centre-Right (NCD) led by Angelino Alfano.

Alfano and the NCD will meet Mattarella on Saturday, as will Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement.

(Additional reporting by Steve Scherer, editing by Robin Pomeroy)