This year, Livemmo beat out dozens of other villages in the Lombardy region for a share of about €200 billion in Covid recovery funds set aside for Italy by the European Union. Italy has one of the oldest populations in Europe, and the combination of its paltry birthrate and the increased longevity of its booming population of older people has created an economic and existential crisis that has vexed successive governments.
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To make up for the loss of its lone doctor, who is retiring at the end of the month, it has also proposed telemedicine bracelets that monitor the vitals of the village’s aging residents (€183,000). It has budgeted incentives to draw more families, businesses and “creative start-ups in the sector of contemporary art, with particular focus on the theme of wood” (€1.46 million).
“It’s a unique, once-in-a-lifetime and unimaginable opportunity,” said Giovanmaria Flocchini, the mayor of the town that includes the village of Livemmo. He considered the village part of a critical experiment for Italy, but also for aging societies across Europe, to prove that an influx of cash can save towns — and all of their cultural heritage and history — from depopulation and abandonment. “I feel doubly responsible,” he said. “If it fails for us, it fails for everybody.”
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The deeper challenge, though, may be that a significant, and senescing, portion of the population does not want the money in the first place.
“There is not a lot of enthusiasm in one part of the population,” the mayor said, adding, “You can’t change the minds of 80-year-olds.”
Or some 70-year-olds.
“My fear is that the whole town will be changed. We’ll be invaded by people we don’t know,” Graziella Scuri, 73, an owner of one of Livemmo’s five restaurants, said as she spooned out homemade casoncelli pasta doused in butter. She added that a defining character trait of the hard-working, and often isolated locals was “we’re a little closed.”
The Washington Post ran this story by Chico Harlan in October titled, "Italy has 334 Most Beautiful Villages. Can Their Beauty Survive?" Here's an excerpt:
At this point I’ve been to dozens of hill towns across Italy, including 20 on the Most Beautiful List, and often I get the impression that their residents are the last courageous holdouts, fighting for something that is already half gone.
No matter how small the village, they host festivals and summer concerts that go late into the night. They offer daily gatherings for cards and aperitivi at the central piazza.
But there are also so many abandoned homes — the result of more than a century of rural depopulation. Who wouldn’t want to live in a storybook medieval town on a hill? But also: How many of us actually could?
This is from journalist Harlan's visit to the village of Abbateggio, in the Abruzzo region:
With excitement, another Abbateggio man, Giacinto De Thomasis, took me on a tour through the oldest part of the village, cutting this way and that, through little passageways he said he knew from playing hide-and-seek as a child. We came to a narrow stairwell that sliced between two homes, and at the end of the stairs there was nothing but a drop-off and a green panorama — the end of town. De Thomasis pointed out the fortified exterior of the village.
“This area,” he said, “used to be a castle.”
But whatever it used to be, the houses on either side of the stairwell were now in disrepair. Same with a home across the street, its old wooden door swung half-open, decades of rubble inside. Up and down the street hung For Sale signs, and even the properties that looked tidy from the outside, De Thomasis said, were nothing more than “shells.”
“No water. No electricity. Unlivable,” he said.
He knew because he’d been looking to buy. And he’d been looking to buy because he hadn’t lived in Abbateggio for decades — having been effectively forced out, at age 19, by a dearth of available jobs.
Another story about rural population loss and rural aging in Europe, this one out of Spain, is here.
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