[LINK] "Pristine but desolate, the Italian villages facing extinction"

[rfmcdonald]

I've been meaning for some time to link to Max Rossi and Lisa Jucca's Thomson-Reuters article chronicling the decline of an Italian village, as out-migration and a low birth rate take their toll.

It's perhaps especially noteworthy that this village is in the northwestern region of Liguria, around Genoa. This region's population has shrunk by a quarter-million people since 1971, with recent trends including a surplus of deaths over births not quite compensated for by immigration.

Gorreto, population: 105, was always small, but now the tiny village, nestled in a river valley in northern Italy, is on the brink of extinction.

Most of the remaining residents are over 60 and the primary school attended by Mayor Sergio Capelli, 72, closed about 30 years ago - a stark example of the nationwide demographic decline as Italians live longer and have fewer babies.

"To witness the slow death of the valley makes me sad," says Capelli, a retired railway engineer who hopes to attract people to the town by organizing cultural events. "I am trying to save all these villages," he says.

[. . ..]

The Val Trebbia area is an extreme example of the demographic problem in Italy, whose median age of 44.2 is the world's fourth highest, after Monaco, Japan and Germany, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Longer life expectancy and falling fertility rates have meant Italy's population has been steadily ageing for decades. But the longest and harshest economic crisis since World War Two has made matters worse.

As unemployment has risen to a record 12.7 percent, much higher among younger people, immigration has fallen by a third since 2007. At the same time, emigration, of mainly young highly-educated Italians, has doubled.

[. . .]

Younger immigrants - mainly from Romania - are beginning to move to the Val Trebbia area, finding jobs helping the elderly or in manual labor like brick-laying.

A quarter of the children attending the primary school of the town of Rovegno that now serves the whole Trebbia Valley have immigrant parents. The only child born in Gorreto last year was the daughter of a Romanian couple who moved there in 2009. Another baby, born the previous year, left as his family moved away.

"Maintaining the school is costly. But without the school this valley would simply die," says Marcella Delle Piane, a literature teacher who has spent 26 years at the school.