The rediscovery of the villages: depopulation and the revival of lesser Italy

To speak of the rediscovery of villages in Italy means reckoning with an awkward number: depopulation. Between 2014 and 2024 the inland areas lost around 5% of their residents, falling to 13.3 million inhabitants after years of slight growth. In 2023 alone, 341 municipalities recorded not a single birth, and the birth rate in the most peripheral zones fell to 5.8 per thousand. ISTAT projections speak of a further -8.7% by 2043, with almost 90% of the inland municipalities of the South destined to decline. Legambiente estimates that small centres have lost more than 700,000 inhabitants in a decade.

Behind the figures lie shuttered houses, merged schools, silent squares. But there is also a geography worth travelling carefully, because it tells both the wound and the attempts to stitch it back together.

The ghost towns

The most extreme point of depopulation is the ghost towns. In Basilicata, Craco was abandoned after the landslides of the 1960s and is today the most visited and photographed uninhabited village in Italy, the set of dozens of films. In the Cilento, Roscigno Vecchia was emptied from the early twentieth century because of the instability of the ground: of the roughly 1,200 inhabitants of 1902, what remains is a square with its trough-fountain, rechristened "the Pompeii of the twentieth century". In Sicily, Poggioreale Antica stopped on the night of the 1968 Belice earthquake. In Abruzzo, Buonanotte was emptied by a landslide, while in Lazio the old Celleno of red tuff was left behind because of the instability of the crag. These are places that teach much about how and why a town dies: earthquakes, landslides, emigration.

Stories of revival

The word "revival", however, is not mere rhetoric. The emblematic case is Venzone, in Friuli, razed to the ground by the 1976 earthquake (the Orcolat, 989 victims). Instead of relocating the inhabitants elsewhere, the community chose to rebuild "as it was and where it was": using the technique of anastylosis, the fallen stones were numbered and put back in their place. The cathedral, some 9,500 blocks, was completed in 1995. In 2017 Venzone won the title of Borgo dei Borghi, becoming the manifesto of the "Friuli Model".

More recent, and different, is the redemption of Molise. In Civitacampomarano, with just over 400 inhabitants, the CVTà Street Fest conceived by Alice Pasquini has since 2016 brought over 90 murals and around 25,000 visitors a year to a nearly deserted village. Many emigrants have returned to open businesses; in 2026 the permanent gallery No Panic opened, funded by the PNRR call for villages. Art as a demographic engine, not as decoration.

The one-euro houses

Then there's the economic lever of the "one-euro houses", born in Salemi in 2008 from an idea by Oliviero Toscani. The most cited model is Gangi, in the Madonie mountains: the mayor surveyed 600 abandoned buildings and handed them over at a symbolic price, on condition that they be renovated. The result: thousands of applications, even from abroad, and the title of Borgo dei Borghi 2014. Mussomeli has passed 200 sales, Sambuca di Sicilia has drawn buyers from all over the world. These are not gifts: whoever buys must start building work within precise deadlines, and those who underestimate the costs and the bureaucracy often give up.

Finally, there's the path of hospitality. Sutera, in the hinterland of the Caltanissetta province, reopened empty houses to refugees: children fill the classrooms once more, and an asylum seeker even took part in the living nativity scene, the event that brings thousands of people into the village. On the Calabrian side, experiences like Riace and Camini have followed the same intuition: integration as a tool against abandonment.

The villages that hold on

Alongside the extreme cases, there remain the villages that simply hold on and deserve a mindful visit: Aliano, the town of Carlo Levi's internal exile among the Lucanian badlands; the Rabatana of Tursi, a quarter of Arab origin clinging to the clay; Castelmezzano among the spires of the Lucanian Dolomites; Bisaccia and Bovino in the Apennines between Campania and Apulia; and Sauris, a German-speaking linguistic island of Friuli that built its own survival on the scattered-hotel model.

The rediscovery of villages doesn't end in a photogenic weekend. Visiting them with real awareness, sleeping there, buying in the shops is the most concrete way a traveller can affect those numbers: turning depopulation, at least in part, into presence.

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