Massiola is a town that is slowly dying and is the only one. The demographic reduction affects the whole of Italy. Will this crisis change the future of the country?
The black letters painted on the walls, pronouncing “the inn” and “the bar,” fade. Both have been closed for decades. Structural painting is also not being done: in one garden, a cement mixer was turned upside down, painted yellow and turned into a planter. Many homes are empty and have handwritten for sale signs on their front doors.
This is Massiola, a mountain village 772 meters above sea level, west of Lake Maggiore, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy.
It’s a lovely place. Narrow streets wind between terraced garden houses. The air smells of manure and wood smoke. But apart from the roar of the river in the valley and the ringing of bells in the distance, an eerie silence reigns. ” There’s no one left here,” said an elderly man. No young children have been born since 2015; 23 citizens were killed. Since the turn of the century, the population has fallen from 173 to just 117.
Massiola dies slowly and it’s easy to understand why. It is more suitable for a simpler age: the central road is so narrow that you have to park your car at one end. Phone reception is uncertain. In 2020 there was a landslide in the centre of the village and in its last shop. Since then, bread has been deposited for the population in a cupboard under the arcades of the parish church.
The scenario is very different in the first two decades after World War II. With a population of approximately 350, the village owned a sawmill and specialized in the manufacture of wooden spoons and pins for wine barrels. Nearby is a marble and tin mine. tin and aluminum factories closer to Omegna, a town further down the valley.
“Back then everything was different,” says Renzo Albertini, 74, the town’s simple mayor. “In the mid-1960s, there were two grocery stores, three bars, the hotel and two hundred sheep. Each family had a cow, at most one pig. . . »
But the marble quarry closed in the 1960s and demand for pins and spoons declined. The village school closed in the early 2000s as families slowly migrated down the valley to the larger cities. “No one works in the forests now,” Albertini says wistfully. “There’s no life here. ” Without young people, an elderly woman adds, “there is no future. “
Massiola is a prism through which to rehearse a slow-paced crisis affecting the whole of Italy: its “demographic winter”. The surprise was widespread in April when figures from Istat, the national statistics agency, revealed that Italy’s population had shrunk by 179,000 people in 2022. , a drop of 0. 3%. Deaths now far outnumber births, which fell below 400,000 a year for the first time last year. Shortly after the release of the figures, Elon Musk claimed that “Italy is disappearing. “According to the online education data page En Tuttoscuola, 2,600 Italian number one schools and nurseries have closed since the 2014-2015 school year. The number of schoolchildren is declining: there are expected to be 127,000 fewer schoolchildren nationwide this school year than last year.
Demographers 2. 1 consider that there is a golden ratio. It is the fertility rate, the average number of children born per woman, which allows the population of a country to remain solid (it is called the “replacement rate”). Italy’s fertility rate is now 1. 24. In some regions it is even lower: in Basilicata, in the south, it is 1. 09 and in Sardinia, 0. 95. Every year, the average age in Italy increases. It is currently 46. 4 and almost a quarter of Italians are 65 or older. The classic age pyramid – with a giant base of young people shrinking to just a few older people – now looks more like a ballot box; If existing trends continue, they will eventually reverse. Projections recommend that Italy’s population will fall from 59 million today to 48 million in 2070, while in the south and islands it will decline from 20 million to 14 million. As national pension systems become similar to a Ponzi scheme, requiring new participants to fund those left out of money, this imbalance will become an acute economic problem, requiring massive tax increases or drastic discounts on pensions. pensions.
Demographers and sociologists have long been aware of Italy’s birth rate challenge, but it has suddenly become a hot political factor. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni sees this as a challenge that touches on the instinctive values of the far right because it turns out to verify a conspiracy theory that Meloni and her party continually refer to: “ethnic substitution” or “the replacement marvelous”. Array In 2017, she said there had been “a planned and desired invasion” of immigrants, and a year later she repeated the anti-Semitic trope that George Soros “funds ethnic substitution. ” The absurd concept that a wealthy Jew intentionally contributes reasonably hard labor from the world’s emerging countries to cut costs, generate profits and undermine Christian values is widespread among politicians in Italy’s Brotherhood party. via Meloni. In April, Francesco Lollobrigida, spouse of Meloni’s sister and now Minister of Agriculture, linked the demographic crisis to this conspiracy theory, stating that it was necessary to address the birth factor because “we cannot give in to the concept of ethnicity. ” . substitution. Array Even the mainstream media is stoking this paranoia: Panorama, a news and lifestyle magazine, recently featured several black and brown faces under the headline “Italy without Italians. ”
The factor of births is also an issue that allows Meloni’s government to reaffirm a rigidly classical conception of the family. Meloni opens her political speeches by saying “I am a mother” and uses Mussolini’s old motto “Dio, patria, famiglia” (“Dio, patria, famiglia”). God, Country, Family”). For the Italian right, “family” and “life” have become talismanic words. The country’s “Family Day” was instituted in 2007 through a Catholic organization to oppose then-Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s law on equality for cohabiting and same-sex couples; He returned in 2015 and 2016 to oppose a similar law.
There has been a sharp increase in the number of charities and political parties rooted in classical Catholicism that oppose abortion and civil unions: Pro Vita
Given that the Brothers of Italy are direct descendants of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, it is not unexpected that it has a comfortable place for its pronatalist policies: in his Ascension speech of May 26, 1927, Mussolini announced that the country deserves to increase its population from 40 million to 60 million. It was an attempt to gain the prestige of a wonderful country through sheer numerical strength: without a good enough population, Mussolini said, “you don’t build an empire, you build a colony. “”He imposed a tax on single men between the ages of 25 and 65, banned the sale of contraceptives, and created costs for marriages and births.
So far, the Meloni government has implemented few concrete pro-family policies: only halving VAT to 5% on diapers, powdered milk and child car seats. But every month, the rhetoric of births intensifies. In May, Meloni and Pope Francis shared the level (both dressed in white) at an annual collection of pro-family organizations, whose motto — “Quota 500,000” — is the purpose of annual births through 2033.
The occasion was arranged through Gigi De Palo, a sandal-clad Catholic father of five, who tells me about the “traumatic consequences” of the declining birth rate. “We have the ninth-largest GDP in the world, but in 20 years we’re going to be 25th,” he says. The pension formula is going to collapse, the health care formula is going to collapse. . . »
Fear that Meloni’s government would try to bring women back home and raise their children convinced many feminists to act. In November 2022, Agnese Vitali, a politically impartial professor of demography at the University of Trento, was scheduled to participate in a convention titled The Demographic Emergency in Italy, chaired by a journalist from the devout magazine Famiglia Cristiana. “All of a sudden,” Vitali says, “all these banners appeared that said, ‘I my body. ‘There were megaphones and chants. It was very unlikely to go ahead. A leaflet distributed to activists spoke of the “reactionary gender roles that patriarchal society imposes on us: to be wives and mothers who care for the homeland. “
Trento, in the far north of Italy, has a long history of radicalism (it was part of the country’s 1968 uprisings, comparable to those in Paris), so perhaps such protests were not unexpected. But something similar happened in May in a more publicized and probable situation. quieter context. At the Turin Book Fair, Family Minister Roccella will talk about her e-book A Radical Family, a conversion story that chronicles her journey from radicalism to archtraditionalism. She grew up in a family in the midst of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s; Her parents were active in the Radical Party and she considered herself a feminist. But Roccella, who believed herself to be an only child, gradually reconstructs the story of Simonetta, her younger sister, born prematurely and abandoned by her mother while she was still in an incubator. Simonetta died and her parents, busy and militant, did not rebury her body. Roccella was dismayed by a mother who felt a “radical revulsion” toward motherhood, and has since developed a convert fanaticism, moving from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
When he took the stage in Turin, activists stormed in, blocking his speech for hours as they chanted and waved banners. The feminist organization Non Una di Meno (“Not One Less,” referring to the refusal to conform to deadly violence opposed to women) was provided at both demonstrations. For this far-right government,” said Eleonora, one of the organization’s activists, “it’s absolutely ideological. “She argues that the war over births is a façade to roll back rights: “In the municipal councils run by the Brothers of Italy, the rights of paternity and maternity have been taken away from same-sex couples: they no longer have the automatic right to be born. When you stop by to see your child in the hospital, you can not pick them up from school. In June, a justice of the peace in Padua sent the court a list of 33 lesbian couples registered as parents since 2017, it is not easy for judges to erase the call of the non-biological mother from the registry. The case will go to trial in November.
In its first year of existence, Meloni’s coalition has already drafted four anti-abortion bills, adding one outlining the legal rights of the fetus that, if passed, would end abortion. Surrogate births are already banned in Italy, but Meloni’s government has drafted a law that also prohibits the search for surrogate mothers abroad. The government has been outspoken in its contempt for any family bureaucracy outside the classical norms. Roccella opposes the “commodification of gametes” and “transhumanism” (the use of generation for humanity): “I am right-wing,” he says, “because I fight for the preservation of the human condition. “
The birth debate sits on the dividing line of the culture wars: one side worries about the erosion of rights, while the other laments the rise of Cancel Culture and the idea of policing. After the protests, Roccella complained that there was “less and less freedom of idea and speech: some things you can no longer say, or even think. “
Downstream from Massiola is Verbania, a sleepy town nestled in a triangle pointing towards Lake Maggiore, and the capital of a province that saw a 12. 8% drop in births in 2022. “It makes me dark,” says Magda Verazzi, a right-wing wing activist. Equal Opportunities and Youth Policy Advisor, who wears light-coloured garments and a bright smile. “There is this selfishness in which the child is perceived as a limitation. We are obsessed with our motorist’s physical appearance, social standing, car. She doesn’t have children and it almost seems self-deprecating. But he laughs and says to all the dogs in the square: “We have replaced the love of young people with the love of animals. “
The left-wing mayor, Silvia Marchionini, sees the lack of modernity in Italy as an obstacle for young families: “Everything here is outdated: the school schedule, the extracurricular activities, the lack of parity between men and women. For Marchionini, who also has no children, the lack of births reflects a deep malaise in Italy: “There is a distrust of the future, this resentment of having to do something with oneself. It’s a country in trouble. If the right comes to power, it’s not because there’s joy in the air. “
Numerous statistics confirm his view that the birth rate is a barometer of well-being. In the midst of the Covid pandemic, which hit Italy hard, there were 14. 7% fewer births in January 2021 compared to the same month in 2020. The hospital in Trieste recorded a 20% reduction in births after the lockdowns. ” Italy is a nervous and pessimistic country,” says a woman in her sixties I know. “He’s not cheerful anymore and everyone else is, so don’t have what his parents had. “
But if pessimism seems to be an effective contraceptive, so too is extravagant draping. Many of the older people I talk to despise the way young parents pamper their only and beloved child. “It’s part of the provincial mentality of Italians,” says Roberta. a retired instructor with a son and a grandson. ” Your child wants to have the right shoes and all the right curtains. Of course, parents can’t have more than one.
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Regardless of economic issues, many young women simply don’t need to worry. Alessia, 32, works at a car rental company and lives with her boyfriend. He earns €1,300 (£1,100) after tax and pays €300 in rent. “I don’t need to have children,” she says. I’m not interested in that, but even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I struggle to make ends meet with just one dog.
Out of six close friends in their early thirties, only one has a child. “Relationships are more volatile than they used to be,” he says. “And we’re not like our mothers: we need a spouse by our side, not a husband for whom you have to cook each and every night. There are many other attractive features, besides having children.
There is a transparent consensus among demographers on what they want to do to counter the falling birth rate in Italy. And it’s the opposite of a classic family return. ” For decades,” says Francesco Billari, rector and professor of demography. at Bocconi University in Milan, “there has been a positive correlation between women’s participation in the labour market and fertility. In countries and regions with greater gender equality in the labour market, fertility is higher.
All statistical knowledge suggests that birth rates are emerging where there are progressive social policies: in Sweden, with its many maternity and paternity leaves and social security benefits, the fertility rate is 1. 84. Germany, which in the mid-1990s had a fertility rate similar (1. 3) to Italy today, now has a fertility rate of around 1. 6. “In addition to increased benefits and tax cuts,” says Billari, “Germany has promoted access to childcare, extended school hours, and parental leave. In short, it has particularly boosted work-life balance, especially for women who in the past were forced to choose between having children and working.
Speculation that progressive policies inspire births is demonstrated through statistical differences within Italy itself. In the autonomous province of Bolzano, near the Austrian border, €200 is paid in the form of a childcare allowance for children under the age of three. Here the fertility rate is 1. 65, a figure closer to Denmark (1. 72) than to most Italian countries. Vitali points out that Bolzano has a 67. 5% source of childcare.
These figures convince many experts that the challenge is not what it seems at first glance. Linda Laura Sabbadini, director of Istat and former president of the G20 Women 20, says: “I am convinced that the real emergency is not the birth rate: it is women and young people. We have one of the lowest percentages of women hired: 51. 3%, compared to more than 70% in Germany and the UK and 68% in France. Even for those who work, the demanding situations of raising young people are considerable: Italy has very few free places in kindergartens.
Research shows that Italian women express the same preference for having the same number of children as northern Europeans (the average is just over two), so demographers conclude that there are clear barriers to achieving their desires. The most obvious thing is that Italians stay in their father’s house until adulthood: men only leave at the age of 31 and women at 29 (the figure for Sweden, for both sexes, is 19). As British minister David Willetts once quipped: “Living at home with your parents” Italy holds the European record for the highest age to be a first-time mother (31. 4 years), and if you start late, you’re unlikely to have many children.
Most young Italians don’t leave the house because they simply can’t. The average net monthly salary in Italy is €1,501 and starting salaries are even lower. Rents continued to rise, last year, by as much as 12% nationwide. According to Istat, another 5. 6 million people in Italy suffer from “absolute poverty”, while Eurostat estimates that more than 20% of Italians are at risk of poverty.
These monetary difficulties are even greater for those in the “fertility range. “Italy has the highest proportion of NEETs (neither employed, in school nor in training) aged 15-29 in the EU: 23. 1%, compared to 13. 1% (in Portugal and Spain, countries superficially comparable to Italy, the figures are 9. 5% and 14. 1%). The lack of job opportunities and meritocracy has also led to a brain drain: the number of living Italians has doubled to just about 6 million since 2006.
One of the wonderful paradoxes of the scenario is that, according to sociologist Chiara Saraceno, the low birth rate is due precisely to the predominance of the family circle in Italy. “The family circle remains a strong institution,” he says, “from which economic solidarity and a redistribution of care are expected. Social policies take this solidarity for granted, or even impose it. This overburdens families and reduces the autonomy of younger generations. “The country, he says, is caught in a spiral in which families are forced to fill the social protection gap, worrying about the elderly or the first child who doesn’t have a daycare to attend, and have less preference for creating and caring for children. For several children.
The problem has a solution, but it is politically cumbersome. “Births can’t solve this imbalance,” Sabbadini says. It’s demographically impossible. Let’s say we have two young men consistent with one woman: those young men will become employees in 20 or 25 years. And in the meantime? We want immigrants. She believes the government is ignoring the maximum apparent and undeniable remedy. ” They just come up with demagogic words that don’t reflect reality. Only with more working-age immigrants will the population increase: “Resolve without delay and guarantee the payment of pensions for an ageing population. Angela Merkel had the same problem, she understood it and took in a million Syrians. “
A few minutes’ drive from Maggiore is a smaller lake, Orta, with a monastery on the island. In front of this island is Orta San Giulio, an amazing town with a medieval atmosphere thanks to its narrow alleys and old buildings. Orta made headlines in 2019 when, despite a population of 1,322, it recorded no new births and 29 deaths. Since then, the population has declined by 160 people.
The independent mayor, Giorgio Angeleri, is a jovial guy who is proud of his city. But he is aware that tourism is a blessing combined, driving up prices and scaring away cash-strapped youth. “Our challenge is to prevent Orta from installing a theme park,” he says. Keeping schools open is a component of this strategy: “We are offering free buses for students, as well as free preschool and after-school activities. » The municipality covers part of the school meals and finances 60% of the cost of the summer camps. A deposit of €500 is also paid to all newborns.
Despite this, Angeleri (“unfortunately childless”) is aware that he is leading a rearguard action. “People are selfish now: they think first and foremost of themselves. They need to work, grow, travel, study, and The idea of getting married, let alone starting a family, doesn’t come naturally to them. Contrary to those who think that poverty is the main factor inhibiting the birth rate, Angeleri thinks that wealth does too: “Here everyone else is doing very well. “-Off. They don’t have financial problems and don’t need to complicate their lives by having a child.
Angeleri believes that an increasing proportion of the Italian population will be foreigners. “It’s inevitable. When I called municipal tenders for cleaning contracts, all the companies hired only foreigners: South Americans, Albanians, Ukrainians. All the caregivers who take care of Our elderly, all the other people who work in agriculture – all the dairy farmers, fruit pickers and butchers – are all foreigners. “
Having grown up in Peru (he moved to Italy as a teenager), this scenario doesn’t worry him: “Global is circular, and hybridization improves the human race,” he says cheerfully. But demographers worry that the sudden popularity of their issue may simply obstruct practical bipartisan policies. Billari. Al turning the birth rate dilemma into a right-wing rallying cry, Saraceno says, Meloni’s government is “introducing an ideological tax into the issue. “
“It almost makes me need to not have any more children,” says Silvana, a window shoppering mother whose son sleeps in his stroller. She describes herself as “left-wing” and says anyone who has more than two children is now ultra-Catholic or far-right. Immigrants are also skeptical of being used simply to fill a void. Solomon, a sublime salesman from Ghana, laughs slightly when asked if it wouldn’t be possible to give a warmer welcome to immigrants because of the demographic problem: “You know, if we are only allowed to pay pensions for the elderly here, it’s not a smart idea. A real welcome. ” Many of his friends, he says, receive cash payments through their Italian employers, so more immigration wouldn’t solve the public finance crisis anyway.
The challenge for Roccella and Meloni is to convince Italians that the birth emergency is an apolitical factor affecting the entire country. Possibly only then will the Italian demographic winter turn into spring.
Tobias Jones lives on Parma. Su most recent book, The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River, is published through Bloomsbury for £12. 99. For The Guardian and The Observer, ask for your copy in Guardianbookshop. com. Shipping fees may apply.