Physiology of the depopulation of villages
Why telling a young person to go and live in a depopulating village is an act of cruelty.
One of the constant litanies on Facebook and the websites of rural and mountain areas is the eulogy on the beauty of historic villages and of country life. Slow-paced, in contact with nature, healthy, quiet, immersed in an unchanging landscape and representing all the various interpretations of well-being.
The world’s largest museum of virtual nostalgia. Photographic galleries of landscapes, medieval streets, empty historic centres, old people in front of their doors, ploughed fields and bell towers. Hundreds of shares fed by the cheerleaders and philanthropists of places lost to memory that we do not even recollect. Places that we will never visit however many likes they get; we won’t remember them or feel any desire to read up on their history.
Paradoxically, Italy has hundreds of villages abandoned to the care of local residents, often incorporated into other municipalities and slowly slipping into oblivion. Perhaps waiting for nature to take over again and replace the ancient walls. There are many reasons why historic villages are becoming depopulated, especially in the Alpine and Apennine regions, and we will try to analyse some of them. However, I am sure that anyone who has actually experienced life on the periphery of production centres will be able to add others.
One of the responses I have heard to this trend is to build factories to repopulate villages that will no longer exist in twenty years’ time. Even acknowledging the beauty and the quality of life that can be experienced in a historic village, I must admit that it will be impossible to go back to living at any distance from a city unless we clarify some non-negotiable quality of life values.
A young man or woman aged 30–40 would never go and live in the mountains to work in a factory. They wouldn’t choose to make a radical change to work in a factory that failed to respect contemporary requirements linked to health, physical and mental stress and the forms of subalternity that people often experience in physically demanding work environments. Secondly, and more importantly, to thrive in the marketplace these companies would need to be completely automated, using robots to do much of the work now done by humans. No factory today is ready for such a change. There is a lack of basic services like doctor’s surgeries, accident and emergency departments, specialist doctors, pharmacies: if you suffer from a chronic condition, going to live somewhere with poor transportation is extremely risky.
Road networks are lacking. Many historic villages are difficult to reach. You need a car because they are not always served by buses, or in any case not on a daily basis. You will sometimes find that the train or road network has either not been conceived to protect the feudal strongholds of the old aristocracy from extinction or that parts of the rail network have been abandoned for decades. Often there is only one access road and if a road collapses or there is a flood or landslide you are cut off or forced to sneak across at your own risk.
Living in a village is extremely expensive. Far more so than living in a city. You have to own a house with a good central heating system and have firewood to burn; and buying or sourcing it costs money. You must always have a survival kit at hand in case you are snowed in. This means having an easily accessible storage space where you can keep everything from water to tinned food, detergents, firewood, batteries, candles and anything else you might need if you get cut off.
Often these villages have no shops, not even a bakery or a coffee bar. Shopping means waiting for the market lorry that passes through once a week. Or having a son or daughter or neighbour willing to go into a better-supplied village to buy you what you need, and this means paying through the nose because the prices in the only shop are as high as in a luxury ski resort.
You need to know the area like the back of your hand, because things that we urbanized city folk do distractedly or automatically may be dangerous. Like sitting down near watering troughs, washing your laundry at an outdoor tub, having a picnic near a viper’s nest without realizing it.
There is no phone coverage. Transhumance routes were once outposts for trade, religious cults, eating habits, the manufacture of utensils, dialects and all those forms of cultural production that we still glimpse today in pilgrimage routes, culinary traditions and the linguistic similarities between some dialects. We owe all this to those great motorways of pastoral knowledge that traversed Italy for centuries. Our own transhumance routes pass along virtual paths, digital connections and the shared platforms that have taken the place of the old sheepfolds or shepherd’s shelters.
The production of knowledge and information, or more simply our identity, takes place on the internet. This is true of personal and corporate identities.
No connection, no party!
The relational goods or the rare humanity that we have to relearn. If you don’t say hello to your neighbour in Milan, why should you greet your 80-year-old neighbour who doesn’t understand what you’re saying and whom you will probably end up having to help? Who hasn’t understood whose grandchild you are and that you exist in a constant state of temporal disjunction? Living with old people is difficult, and this is something else we must acknowledge. However young, good-looking and physically strong you are, being made the tribal chief of a village that might as well be Italy’s largest geriatric ward isn’t much fun.
There is a lack of culture. Aside from shearing sheep, making lace, cleaning the oven, gathering mushrooms, making apple jam and collecting wild herbs, things you usually only do when the weather is nice. Either you choose to become a walking, talking piece of intangible heritage or an anchorite stylite in hipster dress.
Why some historic villages depopulate. This is a result of economic changes in areas affected by various phases of migration to different places taking place between the late 19th century and the 1970s in many Italian provinces. Changes in lifestyle, world wars, catastrophes like landslides and floods and disastrous sequences of earthquakes. An impoverishment of trade networks and changes in consumption patterns. Literacy, etc… but one of the taboos we come across most often is mixophobia. That is what they call it now, an elegant way to avoid saying we are racist. Many of these valleys could be saved and repopulated by the thousands of people currently awaiting redistribution on Italian territory. They are refugees from Syria and numerous other countries, which they have fled to escape torture, war, death and all sorts of violence. These are people, families, who only want a normal, tranquil life in a country with human rights like Italy. They are people who have life and work experience and who would enrich us with their labour and their culture. I come from Palermo and grew up with all the countries of Africa on my doorstep, so I find it impossible to comprehend certain fears. Also, it needs to be said, the underlying rule is if you shut yourself off you die!
Political choices. Many small towns, historic villages and hamlets are absorbed into other municipalities when the number of residents falls below a certain number. This entails a lack of representation or unofficial representation by committees that have no institutional standing but are linked to the local festival, and that continue to meet even though their members no longer live in the village. This is equivalent to the last rites for the village, which will suffer in terms of maintenance, cultural activities and services, but also in terms of representation.
Few residents equals few votes.
What to do? I too love historic villages, I live in one, I love them, I wear the local costume, in a word I care about them. I know that in twenty years’ time they will no longer exist. I will have had the most formative experience of my life, I can say that I had living fossils as grandparents, rooted in an archaic and harsh land. I can say that I lived and was faithful to my values, and ethnography will preserve a trace of this period that is going extinct, but then what? Faced with the overwhelming pace of modernization, you survive if you embrace change:
1) Bring phone connections and broadband internet to remote areas and the historic centres of villages and small towns;
2) Turn schools and disused industrial buildings into hubs for companies or start-ups, communities, spaces for coworking and innovation;
3) Renovate houses in accordance with contemporary needs and advertise them on websites like Airbnb or platforms where they are easy to book.
4) Make these places genuinely and safely accessible.
5) Create residential structures for international digital nomads.
We need to rediscover the term localization, meaning “personalizing”.
