The black letters painted on the walls – announcing the “hostelry” and the “bar” – are fading to nothing. Both have been closed for decades. There’s no building work going on either: in one garden a cement mixer has been rotated upwards, painted yellow and turned into a plant pot. Many of the houses are empty and have hand-written For Sale signs on their front doors.
This is Massiola, a mountain village 772 metres above sea level, west of Lake Maggiore in the northern Italian region of Piedmont.
It’s a beautiful place. Alleyways snake between houses with terraced gardens. The air smells of manure and woodsmoke. But apart from the crash of the river in the valley below and the clang of distant cowbells, it’s eerily silent. “There’s no one here any more,” says one old man. No babies have been born since 2015; 23 residents have died. Since the turn of the century the population has dropped from 173 to just 117.
Massiola is slowly dying and it’s easy to see why. It seems better suited to a simpler age: the central road is so narrow, you have to park your car at one end. Phone reception is iffy. In 2020 a landslide crashed through the middle of the village and its last remaining shop. Since then, bread has been left for residents in a cupboard under the arches of the parish church.
It was very different in the first couple of decades after the second world war. With a population of about 350, the village had a sawmill and specialised in making wooden spoons and pins for wine barrels. There was a nearby marble mine, and tin, pewter and aluminium works closer to Omegna, a town farther down the valley.
“It was so different back then,” says Renzo Albertini, 74, the down-to-earth mayor of the village. “In the mid-60s there were two food shops, three bars, the hostelry, 200 sheep. Every family had a cow, most had a pig … ”
But the marble quarry closed in the 60s and the demand for wooden pins and spoons declined. The village school closed in the early 2000s as families slowly migrated down the valley into the larger towns and cities. “No one works the woodlands now,” Albertini says wistfully. “There’s no life here any more.” Without the young, an elderly woman adds, “there’s no future”.
Massiola is a prism through which to see a slow-motion crisis that is affecting the whole of Italy: its “demographic winter”. There was widespread shock in April when figures from Istat, the national statistics agency, revealed that the population of Italy had fallen by 179,000 in 2022, a 0.3% decline. Deaths now far outstrip births which last year, for the first time, fell below 400,000 a year. Shortly after the figures were released, Elon Musk opined that “Italy is disappearing”. According to the educational news site Tuttoscuola, 2,600 Italian primary and infant schools have closed since the 2014-15 academic year. The number of students is constantly falling: it’s predicted in this academic year there will be 127,000 fewer schoolchildren nationally than the previous year.
Demographers consider 2.1 a golden number. That’s the fertility rate, the average number of children born to every woman, that allows a country’s population to remain stable (it’s called “the substitution index”). Italy’s fertility rate is now 1.24. In certain regions, it’s even lower: in Basilicata, in the south, it’s 1.09 and in Sardinia, 0.95. Every year, Italy’s average age creeps up. It now stands at 46.4 and almost a quarter of Italians are 65 and over. The traditional population pyramid – with a wide base of youngsters thinning to a point of a few elders – now looks more like an urn; if current trends continue, it will eventually be inverted. Projections suggest Italy’s population will fall from 59 million now to 48 million by 2070, with numbers in the south and islands thinning from 20 to 14 million. Given national pension provisions are like a Ponzi scheme, requiring new contributors to finance those who take money out, this imbalance will become an acute economic problem, requiring either huge tax hikes or drastic pension cuts.
Demographers and sociologists have long been aware of the problem of Italy’s birthrate but it has suddenly become a hot political topic. Prime minister Giorgia Meloni sees in it an issue that speaks to the gut values of the far right because it appears to confirm a conspiracy theory that Meloni, and her party, repeatedly refer to: “ethnic substitution” or “the great replacement”. In 2017 she said there had been “a planned and desired invasion” of immigrants, and a year later repeated the antisemitic trope that George Soros “finances ethnic substitution”. The absurd idea that a rich Jew deliberately brings in cheap labour from the developing world to reduce costs, increase profits and undermine Christian values is widely held among politicians in Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party. In April, Francesco Lollobrigida, who is the partner of Meloni’s sister and now minister for agriculture, linked the demographic crisis to this conspiracy theory, saying the issue of births needed to be addressed because “we cannot give in to the idea of ethnic substitution”. Even the mainstream media stokes this paranoia: Panorama, a current affairs and lifestyle magazine, recently put on its cover various black and brown faces under the title “Italy without Italians”.
The births issue is also a topic that allows Meloni’s government to reassert a rigidly traditional concept of family. Meloni frequently opens political speeches by saying “I am a mother” and uses Mussolini’s old slogan of “Dio, patria, famiglia” (“God, fatherland, family”). For the Italian right, “family” and “life” have become talismanic words. The country’s “Family Day” was instituted in 2007 by a Catholic umbrella organisation to oppose then-prime minister Romano Prodi’s equality legislation for cohabiting and same-sex couples; it returned in 2015 and 2016 to oppose similar legislation.
There has been a sharp rise in charities and political parties rooted in traditional Catholicism that oppose abortion and civil partnerships: Pro Vita & Famiglia (“pro-life and family”), Culle per la Vita (“cradles for life”), Il Popolo della Famiglia (“the people of the family”) and Difendere la Vita con Maria (“defend life with Mary”, which creates cemeteries for aborted foetuses where graves are marked with the names of shamed mothers). The membranes between these organisations and the government are porous: Family Day’s founder, Massimo Gandolfini, is now Meloni’s drug tsar; its former spokesperson, Eugenia Roccella, is the newly created minister for family, births and equal opportunities. The label is misleading: she opposes civil unions, IVF, abortion and same-sex parenting. “Abortion is a great contradiction for women,” she said recently, “because it is a free choice but also a wound.”
As Brothers of Italy is a direct descendant of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist party, it’s hardly surprising it has a soft spot for his pro-natalist polices: in his Ascension Day speech of 26 May 1927, Mussolini announced the country had to increase its population from 40 million to 60 million. It was an attempt to acquire great-nation status through sheer force of numbers: without an adequate population, Mussolini said, “one doesn’t build an empire, one becomes a colony”. He introduced a tax on unmarried men aged between 25 and 65, banned the sale of contraceptives and created prizes for weddings and births.
So far there have been few concrete pro-family policies from Meloni’s government: only the halving of VAT to 5% on nappies, milk powder and child car seats. But every month the births rhetoric is ramped up. In May Meloni and Pope Francis shared a stage (both dressed in white) at an annual gathering of pro-family organisations, whose slogan – “Quota 500,000” – is the target number for annual births by 2033.
The event was organised by Gigi De Palo, a sandal-wearing Catholic and father of five, who tells me about the “traumatic consequences” of falling birthrates. “Our GDP puts us at ninth place in the world, but in 20 years’ time, we’ll be 25th,” he says. “The pensions system will collapse, the health system will collapse … ”
Fears that Meloni’s government is attempting to return women to stay-at-home, child-rearing roles has convinced many feminists to take action. In November 2022, Agnese Vitali, a politically neutral professor of demography at the University of Trento, was due to take part in a conference entitled The Demographic Emergency in Italy, chaired by a journalist from the religious magazine Famiglia Cristiana. “Suddenly,” Vitali says, “there were all these banners announcing, ‘I decide about my body.’ There were megaphones and chants. It was impossible to go ahead.” One flyer distributed by the activists spoke of “the reactionary gender roles patriarchal society imposes on us: to be wives and baby-making mothers for the fatherland”.
Trento, in the far north of Italy, has a long history of radicalism – it was the centre of the country’s 1968 uprisings, comparable with those of Paris – so perhaps such protests were unsurprising. But something similar happened in May in a more high-profile and seemingly sedate setting. At the Turin book fair, family minister Roccella was due to talk about her book A Radical Family – a strange conversion story that recounts her journey from radicalism to arch-traditionalism. She grew up in a family at the coalface of the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s; her parents were active in the Radical party and she considered herself a feminist. But Roccella, who thought she was an only child, slowly pieced together the story of Simonetta, her younger sister, born prematurely and abandoned by her mother when still in an incubator. Simonetta died and the busy, campaigning parents didn’t return to bury the corpse. Roccella was appalled by a mother who had a “drastic repulsion” towards maternity, and she has since developed the fanaticism of a convert, moving from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia to Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
As she took the stage in Turin, activists burst in, blocking her speech for hours by singing, chanting and holding up banners. The feminist group Non Una di Meno (“Not one less”, a reference to the refusal to accept the often fatal violence against women) was present at both protests. “For this far-right government,” says Eleonora, one of the group’s activists, “this is completely ideological.” She maintains that the battle for births is a front for rolling back hard-won rights: “In city councils run by Brothers of Italy, the paternity and maternity rights of same-sex couples have been withdrawn – they no longer have the automatic right to go and see their child in hospital, they can’t pick them up from school.” In June, a magistrate in Padua sent a court a list of 33 lesbian couples registered as parents since 2017, demanding judges erase the non-birth mother’s name from the register. The case will be ruled on in November.
In its first year, Meloni’s coalition has already drafted four anti-abortion bills, including one recognising the legal rights of the foetus that, if passed into law, would in effect end abortion. Surrogate births are already outlawed in Italy, but Meloni’s government has drawn up legislation to make it illegal to seek surrogate mothers abroad, too. The government has been candid about its disdain for all forms of family outside traditional norms. Roccella opposes the “marketisation of gametes” and “transhumanism” (the use of technology to enhance humanity): “I’m rightwing,” she says, “because I fight for the conservation of the human condition.”
So the births debate sits on the faultline of the culture wars: one side frets about the erosion of rights while the other laments the rise of cancel culture and the thought police. After the protests, Roccella complained there was “less and less freedom of thought and expression: some things you can no longer say, or even think”.
* * *
Downhill from Massiola is Verbania, a sedate town nestling on a triangle of land pointing into Lake Maggiore, and the capital of a province that recorded a 12.8% drop in births in 2022. “It makes me gloomy,” says Magda Verazzi, a rightwing councillor for equal opportunities and youth policies, who wears bright clothes and a ready smile. “There’s this egotism in which a child is seen as a limitation. We’re fixated on physical appearance, social position, the car we have, our career.” She is childless and it sounds almost like self-criticism. But she laughs and points at all the dogs in the piazza: “We’ve replaced love of children with love of animals.”
The businesslike, leftwing mayor of the city, Silvia Marchionini, says Italy’s lack of modernity militates against young families: “Everything here is outdated: school hours, after-school activities, the lack of parity between men and women.” Marchionini, who also doesn’t have children, believes the lack of births reflects a profound malaise in Italy: “There’s a distrust of the future, this grievance that it’s impossible to make anything of yourself any more. This is a country in distress. If the right comes to power, it is not because there’s joy in the air.”
Many statistics bear out her point that birthrates are a barometer of wellbeing. In the midst of the Covid pandemic, which hit Italy hard, there were 14.7% fewer births in January 2021 than in the same month in 2020. One hospital, in Trieste, experienced a 20% decrease in births after the lockdowns. “Italy is a nervous and pessimistic country,” says one sixtysomething woman I meet. “It’s no longer cheerful, and the young are so angry that they don’t have what their parents had.”
But if pessimism appears an effective contraceptive, so is extravagant materialism. Many of the older people I talk to are scornful of how young parents spoil their cherished only child. “It’s part of the provincial mindset of Italians,” says Roberta, a retired teacher with one child and one grandchild. “Your child has to have the right shoes, all the right material things. So of course parents can’t afford to have more than one.”
Quite apart from cashflow problems, many young women just don’t want the hassle. Alessia, 32, works in a car rental firm and lives with her boyfriend. She earns €1,300 (£1,100) after tax and pays €300 towards rent. “I don’t want to have children,” she says. “It doesn’t interest me. But even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to. I struggle to get to the end of the month with just a dog.”
Of six close female friends in their early 30s, only one has a child. “Relationships are more unstable than they were in the old days,” she says. “And we’re not like our mothers – we want a partner by our side, not a husband you have to cook for every night. There are so many other enticing options instead of having children.”
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There’s a clear consensus among demographers about what needs to be done to reverse Italy’s plummeting birthrate. And it’s the opposite of a reversion to the traditional family. “For decades now,” says Francesco Billari, rector and professor of demography at Milan’s Bocconi University, “there has been a positive correlation between female labour market participation and fertility. In countries and regions where there is greater gender equality in the labour market, fertility is higher.”
All the statistical evidence suggests that birthrates rise where there are progressive social policies: in Sweden, with its ample maternity and paternity leave and social welfare provision, the fertility rate is 1.84. Germany, which in the mid-90s had a similar fertility rate (1.3) to Italy’s current figure, now has a rate of about 1.6. “In addition to the strengthening of allowances and tax rebates,” Billari says, “Germany has pushed access to nurseries and extended school hours and parental leave. In short, it has significantly improved the work-family balance, especially for women previously forced to choose between having children and working.”
The hypothesis that progressive policies encourage births is confirmed by statistical differences within Italy itself. In the autonomous province of Bolzano, near the border with Austria, €200 is given as childcare benefit for children under three, there’s help for first-time homebuyers and efficient educational and health services. Here the fertility rate is 1.65, a figure closer to Denmark (1.72) than most of Italy. Vitali points out that Bolzano has a nursery provision of 67.5%.
These figures convince many experts that the problem is not what it first appears. Linda Laura Sabbadini, a director at Istat and a former chair of the G20’s Women 20 group, says, “I’m convinced the real emergency isn’t the birthrate: it’s about women and young people. We have one of the lowest percentages of employed women – 51.3% compared with more than 70% in Germany and the UK, and 68% in France.” Even for those in work, the challenges of raising children are steep: Italy has very few free nursery places.
Research repeatedly shows Italian women express the desire to have the same number of children as northern Europeans (the average is just over two), so demographers conclude that there are clearly obstacles to fulfilling their wishes. The most obvious is that Italians stay in the parental home well into adulthood: males on average don’t leave until 31 and women at 29 (the figure for Sweden, for both sexes, is 19). As the former UK minister David Willetts once quipped, “Living at home with your parents is a very powerful contraception.” Italy holds the European record for the highest age of first-time mothers (31.4) – and if you start late, you’re unlikely to have many children.
Most young Italians don’t leave home because they simply can’t afford to. The median net monthly wage in Italy is €1,501 and starting salaries are even lower. Rents continue to rise, in the past year by 12% across the country. According to Istat, 5.6 million people in Italy suffer from “absolute poverty”, while Eurostat calculates that more than 20% of Italians are at risk of poverty.
Those financial headwinds are even stronger for those in the “fertility range”. Italy has the highest proportion of Neets (not in employment, education or training) aged 15-29 in the EU: 23.1%, as against 13.1% (in Portugal and Spain, countries superficially comparable with Italy, the figures are 9.5% and 14.1%). The lack of job opportunities and meritocracy has led to a brain drain, too: the number of Italians living abroad has doubled to almost 6 million since 2006.
One of the great paradoxes of the situation is that, according to the sociologist Chiara Saraceno, birthrates are low precisely because the family is so predominant in Italy. “The family is still a strong institution,” she says, “from which economic solidarity and care redistribution are expected. Social policies take this solidarity for granted, sometimes even impose it. This overburdens families and reduces the autonomy of younger generations.” The country, she says, is caught in a spiral where families are forced to pick up the slack in social welfare provision, looking after elderly people or a first child who has no nursery to attend, and thus have less desire to create, and care for, multiple children.
There is a solution to the problem, but it’s politically fraught. “Births can’t resolve this imbalance,” Sabbadini says. “It’s demographically impossible. Let’s say we do arrive at two children per woman: those children will become workers in 20, 25 years. And in the meantime? We need immigrants.” She believes the government is ignoring the most obvious and easy remedy. “They just come out with demagogic phrases that don’t reflect reality. Only with more migrants of working age will the population grow immediately and guarantee the pension payments of a rapidly ageing population. Angela Merkel had the same problem, understood it and welcomed a million Syrians.”
* * *
A short drive from Maggiore is a smaller lake, Orta, with an island monastery. Opposite that island is Orta San Giulio, a stunning town with a medieval feel, thanks to its narrow alleys and ancient buildings. Orta made headlines in 2019 when, despite a population of 1,322, it registered no new births, and 29 deaths. Since then, the population has fallen by 160.
The independent mayor, Giorgio Angeleri, is a jovial man who is proud of his town. But he’s aware that tourism is a mixed blessing, pushing up prices and pushing out cash-strapped youth. “Our challenge is to avoid Orta becoming a theme park,” he says. Keeping schools open is a big part of that strategy: “We lay on free buses for pupils, free pre- and post-school activities.” The town council pays for a proportion of school meals and finances 60% of the cost of summer camps. There’s also a €500 bond given to all newborns.
Despite that, Angeleri (“unfortunately childless”) is aware he’s fighting a rearguard action. “There’s an egotism to people now – they think primarily about themselves. They want to work, grow, travel, study, and the idea of getting married, let alone starting a family, doesn’t come naturally.” Unlike those who think poverty is the main factor that inhibits the birthrate, Angeleri believes affluence does, too: “The people here are very well-off. They haven’t got economic problems and they don’t want to complicate their lives by having a child.”
Angeleri believes an ever-greater percentage of the Italian population is bound to be made up of foreigners. “It’s inevitable. When I’ve run council tenders for cleaning contracts, all the companies employed only foreigners – South Americans, Albanians, Ukrainians. All the care workers looking after our elderly, everyone who works in agriculture – all the dairy farmers, fruit-pickers and butchers – they’re all outsiders.”
Having grown up in Peru (he moved to Italy as a teenager), he’s unworried by this situation: “The world is round and hybridisation improves the human race,” he says happily. “All this talk about ethnic substitution is just a distraction.” But demographers are concerned that the sudden popularity of their subject may impede sensible, bipartisan policies. “Precisely because becoming a parent is a life-changing, long-term choice, it’s crucial that policies are perceived as stable and not influenced by changes in government,” Billari says. By turning the birthrate dilemma into a rightwing war cry, Saraceno says, the Meloni government “introduces an ideological charge to the issue”.
“It almost makes me not want to have another child,” says Silvana, a window-shopping mother whose one child is asleep in her pram. Describing herself as “leftwing”, she says anyone with more than two children is seen now as ultra-Catholic or far-right. Immigrants, too, are sceptical of being used simply to plug a gap. Solomon, an elegant shop assistant who is originally from Ghana, guffaws lightheartedly when asked if there might be a warmer welcome for immigrants because of the population issue: “You know, if they allow us here just to pay old people’s pensions, it’s hardly a genuine welcome.” Many of his friends, he says, are paid by their Italian employers in cash, so greater immigration would hardly resolve the crisis in the public finances anyway.
The challenge for Roccella and Meloni is to persuade Italians that the births emergency is an apolitical issue that affects the entire country. Perhaps only then will Italy’s demographic winter turn into spring.
• Tobias Jones lives in Parma. His latest book, The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River, is published by Bloomsbury at £12.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
