The village we moved to in central Italy is lovely – old stone houses and olive trees on a hillside – but it is eerily deserted most of the time. A neighbour in his forties says that when he grew up here, it was full of children playing in the cobbled streets. There were about 350 people then, he tells me; now the population is precisely 42, and that includes the latest residents, me and my wife. The village is dying on its feet, becoming a perfectly preserved museum piece. My neighbour shakes his head and says how sad it is. There are many villages like this in Italy. First one house is boarded up, then another; the trattoria closes, after that the bakery and other shops, and then people leave all at once because the place isn’t what it was. Some mayors are famously offering newcomers houses for just €1. This makes almost no difference because of something that is happening across the whole country: Italians are not having as many babies as they used to.

At the peak of the post-war baby boom in Italy, in 1964, there were a million births. In 2008, 600,000 babies were born; last year it was 400,000. That’s a fall of a third in the past 15 years alone. The most important figure of all is this: there are now, on average, 1.24 births for every woman in Italy. That’s way below what would keep the population as it is: two babies who reach adulthood for every woman. The country is greying. You can see it. Italians have invented a word, umarells – ‘little men’ – to describe the old codgers standing hunched outside building sites, hands behind their backs, offering unwanted advice to the hardhats. For every Italian who joins the workforce, two retire. Schools are closing.

QOSHE - Low birth rates are a threat to humanity - Paul Wood
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Low birth rates are a threat to humanity

4 1
25.02.2024

The village we moved to in central Italy is lovely – old stone houses and olive trees on a hillside – but it is eerily deserted most of the time. A neighbour in his forties says that when he grew up here, it was full of children playing in the cobbled streets. There were about 350 people then, he tells me; now the population is precisely 42, and that includes the latest residents, me and my wife. The village is dying on........

© The Spectator


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