Istat data reveal thirty years of declining social interaction: fewer get-togethers at home, more people living alone

There is one statistic in Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic that stands out more than all the others. In 1975, 42 per cent of Americans said they invited friends or relatives round at least once a month. In 2026, the figure is 12 per cent. Over half a century, that’s a drop of 70 per cent. It is not just dinner with the good napkin that has disappeared: face-to-face socialising in general has declined. Americans visit friends less often, organise fewer parties, spend more time at home and, thanks to streaming, smartphones and personalised entertainment, have created a form of leisure that no longer requires the company of others.

And in Italy? The correct answer is: we cannot prove that ‘dinner at home’ has declined, because there is no equivalent Italian time series. But we can verify something very similar. Istat has reconstructed thirty years of daily life. In 1993, 72.9 per cent of Italians aged six and over saw one or more friends at least once a week. By 2023, this figure had fallen to 58.8 per cent: a drop of fourteen percentage points. At the same time, the number of people who see their friends only a few times a month or during the year has increased. This is not a snapshot of the pandemic: the graph shows a long-term decline that began well before Covid. The trend affects almost everyone. Among men, the proportion seeing friends weekly fell from 78 per cent to 62.9 per cent; among women, from 68.1 per cent to 54.9 per cent. Even among 6–24-year-olds, the figure dropped from 94.5 per cent to 83.5 per cent. The South remains more sociable than the North-West: 64.2 per cent compared with 54.7 per cent.

It is not yet the American ‘social desert’. In 2023, 71.5 per cent of Italians aged 14 and over say they have friends they can rely on in times of need – over four percentage points more than a decade earlier. In short, friendship does not seem to be dying out. It seems to be becoming less frequent. More solid in theory, more intermittent in practice. We care for one another, we keep in touch, we help each other out when needed, but we see each other less often. Here, the Italian story begins to resemble the one recounted by The Atlantic. Not because Netflix has put an end to carbonara dinners with friends, but because the structure of life has changed. In 1993–94, single-person households accounted for 21.1 per cent; today they make up over 37 per cent. Couples with children, who used to make up almost half of all households, have fallen below 30 per cent. And even when we have more free time, it doesn’t necessarily mean we spend it together.

This is precisely the most compelling part of Thompson’s article. Modernity has not necessarily robbed us of time; it has given us increasingly easy alternatives to the hassle of coordinating with others. A dinner party involves phone calls, scheduling, shopping, cooking, tidying the house, fitting in the children’s timetables, remembering allergies and the very real risk that the evening will be a bit of a let-down. A screen asks for nothing. Perhaps this is the key for Italy too. We haven’t suddenly become misanthropes. We’ve simply built a life in which being alone takes less effort than being together. The interesting question, then, isn’t whether dinners with friends are a thing of the past. It’s asking ourselves when we began to regard them as a chore rather than a pleasure. And whether the real poverty of our time isn’t having more and more ways to fill an evening and fewer and fewer opportunities to set a table.