How sad – Italy’s demographic suicide

“Over the past two years I’ve travelled all over Italy,” writes Sean Thomas in The Telegraph. “Especially the South and the islands – the places where every travel writer is bound to notice the picturesque decay alongside the ancient splendour. And yes, I’ve noticed it. The crumbling palaces, the overgrown quaysides, the villages already shut up for the day by lunchtime. In the deep South, you expect it. It’s part of the charm. And Italy and the Italians still know how to be charming. But over the past month I’ve been elsewhere. First in the supposedly wealthy north-east. Then the wealthy industrial heartland south of Milan, the flat lands where Italy’s manufacturing takes place. And, I confess, I was shocked. Because the chaos and decay of the south are spreading across the whole of the Bel Paese.”

The first thing you notice is the roads. Goodness me, what a mess. You can’t travel between two towns without coming across a pothole every hundred metres. Once you’ve noticed the dilapidated roads, you start to see everything else. The abandoned factories with their skylights smashed in. The shabby, dying shopping centres. Graffiti almost everywhere. This is the face of European decline, and the figures speak for themselves. Italy is the only major economy where real wages are lower than they were in 1990. Per capita GDP has remained virtually stagnant since the introduction of the euro. Car production – in the land of Fiat, Alfa and Lancia – has plummeted to 1950s levels. Meanwhile, China has swallowed up the textiles, shoes and furniture that once made ‘Made in Italy’ a source of pride. And underlying all this is something even more stark: Italy is running out of Italians.

Last year, the country recorded 355,000 births – an all-time low and down by almost 40 per cent compared with 2008 – against 652,000 deaths. This represents a natural loss of almost 300,000 people: the equivalent of the entire population of Verona being wiped out every year. With a fertility rate of 1.14 and a median age of 49.1 years, Italy is the oldest country in the EU. What appears to be decline might simply be the reality of a very old country: too few young workers to patch up the roads, too few young families to fill the shops, too few taxpayers to pay for it all. Italy could be the future of every Western nation that fails to have children and fails to compete with China. I ended my latest stay in Italy in a station café full of young people, in a small village bathed in moonlight near Piacenza.

It was Sunday evening. It was the World Cup final. Italy, of course, weren’t playing. The Azzurri are now the first world champions in history to miss three consecutive World Cups. They haven’t kicked a ball in a final tournament since 2014, and this time they didn’t even manage to qualify for a 48-team tournament. The bar was therefore full of young Italians who can barely remember their country ever competing in a World Cup. Yet they turned up all the same. And they resignedly watched other nations battle it out in the final – with a mixture of beer-fuelled apathy and feigned excitement. Then, at the final whistle, they said goodbye and exchanged little kisses – and dispersed in silence, into the stifling darkness, along the winding, potholed streets.”