Because the touring brass band ended San Giovanni Lipioni’s annual vacation live performance with a rendition of Wham’s “Final Christmas,” the gray-haired villagers seated within the previous church of the central Italian hill city gazed dotingly on the few younger youngsters clapping to the music.
“Right now there’s a little motion,” Cesarina Falasco, 73, mentioned from the again pew. “It’s pretty. It’s completely different.”
San Giovanni Lipioni was recognized — if in any respect — for the invention in its countryside of a third-century B.C. Samnite bronze head, a uncommon Waldesian Evangelical neighborhood and an historical annual pageant with pagan roots that venerates a round cane garlanded in wild cyclamen flowers. (“It represents the feminine genital organ,” mentioned a tourism official, Mattia Rossi.)
However a long time of emigration have shrunk the inhabitants to 137 full-time residents, and in 2023, San Giovanni Lipioni turned the city with the oldest common inhabitants in Italy, a rustic with one of many oldest common populations on this planet. Whereas that nationwide designation has prompted existential angst — heightened by warnings from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (the nation was “destined to vanish” except it acquired busy) and Pope Francis (“the way forward for the nation is at stake”) — the city has embraced its creaky distinction as a lifeline.
An area affiliation seized the second to attempt to spur a actual property bonanza to revive and promote deserted homes. “What do we’d like? Folks!!” reads a presentation by the affiliation that particulars plans to “leverage media consideration to progressively appeal to new guests and sources” in 2024.
To lure new residents, the city is promoting what it has in abundance: quiet, but in addition, the affiliation says, an opportunity for immersion into an genuine small city with loads of “unused housing inventory with charming options.” There may be additionally, the presentation factors out, the Pavone mini-market promoting “groceries and important companies.”
Within the days after Christmas, as previous males within the native bar performed the cardboard sport Tressette below a tv exhibiting decades-old reruns, the city’s leaders ignored new information from the Italian Nationwide Institute of Statistics exhibiting their residence had slipped to fifth place (common age 64.2) in Italy’s old-age rankings, with a small city, Ribordone, within the northern Italian area of Piedmont (common age 65.5), taking the withered crown.
“There’s some pleasure in it,” Nicola Rossi, the mayor, mentioned of being the oldest city. He cited the earlier common age of 66.1 years in a rustic with a mean of 46.4 years. However to save lots of the city, he mentioned, “it doesn’t make sense to do issues just for the previous individuals.”
Whereas he’s banking on a soccer discipline and highway restore to attract younger individuals and {couples} working in close by factories, the affiliation sees a extra profitable repopulation in promoting summer time homes to foreigners and different out-of-towners.
“There’s a ‘For Sale’ signal — there’s one other one,” Carlo Monaco, an affiliation official, mentioned as he toured the city hours earlier than the vacation live performance. “This one is empty. Empty.” However so was the principle sq., the place Marilena Grosso watched her 7-year-old daughter, Marica, run to the life-size Nativity scene. Her 18-month-old son, Pietro, scampered by previous males on benches.
“At the very least you don’t have to fret about them getting run over,” she mentioned. “That’s the constructive aspect.”
Mr. Monaco climbed steep steps to the city’s drugstore, the place Daniela Palomba, the 39-year-old pharmacist, mentioned she and her husband had found the city on a web site of obtainable positions. She was pregnant on the time and unsure what to anticipate when she first arrived.
“My first response was, ‘Oh, God,’” she mentioned as her son, Raffaele, now 4, performed behind the counter subsequent to a number of orthopedic footwear. She mentioned that regardless of the abundance of deserted homes, she and her husband couldn’t discover a place to dwell on the town. “No warmth, and I didn’t need an previous wreck.” They ended up dwelling in an residence connected to the nursing residence.
Farther up the hill, the city’s Metropolis Corridor sits throughout from facades adorned in “For Sale” indicators. Inside, two worker clock playing cards sat in a metallic rack that had room for 25. Alessandra Bologna, 33, a metropolis clerk, opened a start registry from 1852, its slanted script documenting the start of 31 infants. In 1950, when the city had 1,000 individuals, the city recorded 30 births. Then she pulled out the 2022 registry exhibiting one start, and turned empty web page after empty web page. “Now,” she mentioned, “there’s at all times extra deaths.”
It wasn’t at all times this fashion, defined Franco Monaco, 84, who had turned the storage of his home, which additionally bore a “For Sale” signal, into the “Museum of Peasant Tradition.” Beneath previous hanging suitcases labeled “for emigrants” and surrounded by century-old farming gear and different memorabilia, together with wool caps and Mussolini calendars, he recalled when the city was stuffed with youngsters.
“These had been households that had 10, 11, 12 youngsters,” he mentioned. He pointed at a doll in a metal child crib hanging from the ceiling. “These cribs had been out within the countryside,” he mentioned. “I used to be born behind a stack of hay.”
Folks have lengthy left the fields to work within the metalwork manufacturing facility or Amazon warehouse in San Salvo, about 40 minutes east towards the Abruzzo area’s Adriatic coast, the place the mayor works in a glass manufacturing facility. At a lookout level, he traced the road of the Trigno river, separating the city from the Molise, the usually missed area that villagers prefer to crack jokes about.
Beside him stood Ferdinando Giammichele, an investor within the Group Cooperative with ambitions of turning the native bar right into a restaurant. He lived in London for years however mentioned he returned to Italy for a extra tranquil life, although he lives in Rome, the place he works for an power firm. He identified the big white windmills spinning on former farmland to offset electrical prices and mentioned the city’s previous buildings have additionally been repurposed.
“This was my faculty,” he mentioned, pointing on the nursing residence. “Now it’s the hospice.”
Because the temperature dropped, the entourage of town’s promoters walked to Pavone, the small grocery. A crimson “For Sale” signal hung below a wreath and a handwritten signal on the door knowledgeable prospects that the following day can be the shop’s final.
Surrounded by drastic markdowns, Giovanni Grosso, 43, mentioned he and his spouse had determined to present the shop a shot to deliver extra life to the city. They invested and misplaced their financial savings.
“It makes me cry,” he mentioned, as his eyes watered. He referred to as the city “all speak” about supporting younger households, saying villagers wouldn’t pay a number of cents extra for pasta in his retailer. He had been provided a job, like so many earlier than him, working development in Bologna. “My mom lives right here,” he mentioned. “She says: ‘What are you doing right here? Go away.’”
A pickup truck stuffed with brass horns drove by on its approach as much as the church, reverse a wall of demise notices for locals, nearly all named Rossi or Grosso or Monaco. Beneath statues of saints, Mr. Grosso’s son Santiago, 4, pretended to conduct the band because it performed Christmas hits and the Italian nationwide anthem. Afterward, Santiago went residence to a small constructing subsequent to the nursing residence, the place the pharmacist’s household additionally has their residence. His mom was feeding his 5-month-old brother, Ettore, one of many city’s two births in 2023.
“It’s not simple for them as a result of they’re at all times saying, ‘I’m bored,’” Marisa Pavone, 32, mentioned as her older son put away Monopoly items. She mentioned {that a} pediatrician visited solely as soon as every week and that the closest nursery faculty closed this 12 months as a result of it had enrolled solely three youngsters. She had imagined injecting life by delivering pizzas or home made sweets from the shop, the place she labored till the evening Ettore was born, however there wasn’t a lot demand. She largely made birthday desserts for previous individuals within the nursing residence.
She mentioned the household would more than likely transfer to Bologna for a brand new begin, which might significantly cut back the variety of youngsters on the town and shift the common age upward, giving San Giovanni Lipioni a robust probability to reclaim the title of Italy’s oldest city.
“I’m unhappy to shut,” she mentioned, kissing the child on his cheek, including: “Should you attempt to keep and make investments, you lose. We misplaced, and the entire city misplaced.”
