On Saturday nights in Oristano, a well-kept small town in Sardinia, a group of young couples in their late twenties and early thirties often meet for pizza.
“Many of us are unemployed but the one thing we all have in common is no children,” said Massimo Petretto, 29, who would love to start a family with his girlfriend, but like his friends, cannot afford it.
Petretto, who has a degree in communications, has applied for 30 jobs since the summer, to no avail. Like 71 per cent of all southern Italians aged 18 to 34, he is still living with his parents.
“With no job contract you can’t rent or certainly buy a house, and without that, children are unthinkable,” he said.
Sardinia is at the sharp end of an EU-wide fertility slowdown, with a paltry 0.95 births per woman, the lowest of any region in Italy and less than half the two births per woman a society needs to keep up its numbers.
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If nothing changes, officials expect the island’s population of 1.6 million to halve by 2050.
“The south of Italy needs to be watched because it is a laboratory for what could happen next across Italy and in Europe,” said Francesco Gaudio, an expert at Italy’s national statistics agency, Istat.
The country as a whole is doing little better: its fertility rate has dropped to 1.22 this year, according to Istat data from last week, down from 1.25 in 2021. Spain is the only large European nation with a lower birth rate, at 1.19, Eurostat data shows. Last year only 393,000 babies were born in Italy, a record low, down from more than a million in 1964. Things were rosier in England and Wales, with a fertility rate of 1.55 in 2021, according to the most recent ONS data.
The crisis has pushed Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, to make increasing the birthrate a key government policy, promising a billion euros in her annual budget this month to fund tax relief for mothers, and incentives for employers to hire them.
“Children and babies are life and hope, like the seeds you plant to grow a forest,” she said in June.
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But another new statistic suggests she may be too late in Italy’s south and island regions, especially Sardinia. Istat revealed this month that because of births dropping for decades, the number of 18-34 year olds — the age group most likely to have children — had dropped in Sardinia by 40 per cent in the past 20 years.
That has given Oristano a ghostly feel, said Petretto. “If we want to do something after a Saturday night pizza, everything is shut. The bowling alley closed eight years ago, the discos are down from three or four to just one,” he said, adding: “There is a melancholy, empty feeling here — Oristano is now for the old.”
That is a blow for the future of the town of 30,000, which dates back to the Middle Ages, has a 12th-century cathedral, its own variant of Sardinian dialect and is close to Is Arutas, a pink sand beach lapped by transparent water that draws visitors from all over Europe.
The same lack of buzz can be felt in small towns across southern Italy, which has lost three million 18-34 year olds in the last two decades, and across the EU, which has lost 16.6 million people in the age group in the same period.
In Sardinia’s rugged hinterland, villages risk extinction, including tiny Semestene, which is due to vanish in ten years after its population shrank from 700 in the 1950s to 129 today, with its most recent birth eight years ago.
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“It’s beautiful here and you live well, but our shop shut down last year and I cannot find anyone to reopen it,” said Antonella Buda, the mayor. “I am fighting against Semestene disappearing, but you can’t stop people leaving to find work.”
Emigration from the “mezzogiorno” — the seven mainland regions south of Rome, plus Sicily and Sardinia — has combined with lower birthrates to lower the head count further, with 34,500 leaving in 2020.
In her effort to put births back on the agenda, Meloni appeared on stage with the Pope at a May conference — both dressed in white — to urge Italians to procreate.
Critics object to Meloni injecting her hard-right ideology into the debate. She has blamed TV shows for not promoting the traditional family unit, which she believes is core to Italy’s traditions and identity. Any attempt to weaken the family, she claims, is part of a plot to make Italians lose their identity.
She has mostly kept quiet on the issue since taking power last year, but spoke at a September birth-rate conference in Budapest, claiming: “Without that identity, we are only numbers, unconscious numbers, tools in the hands of those who want to use us.”
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Her staunch defence of the family took a blow on October 20 when she announced she was dumping her partner — Andrea Giambruno, the father of her daughter — after he was overheard proposing a threesome to a female colleague at work.
Meloni also believes that taking in more migrants who can pay taxes and cover the country’s growing pension bill is not the solution. Italians, she said in Budapest, must simply have more children rather than “getting used to the idea that decline is a destiny”.
In Oristano, Petretto’s girlfriend Camilla Spiga, 29, said she would happily have two children but the €1,000 she earns a month stacking shelves at a food wholesaler is too little to cover the costs.
“I have interviewed for other jobs where they ask you, ‘Are you thinking of having children?’ You can be the best in the world, but they won’t take you,” she said. “We need two €1,500-a-month salaries to get a house to have a child, or else it’s a dog or cat — and even they cost.”
Paradoxically, when Italians were not just poor, but really poor in the last century, they had more, not fewer children. Children then were seen as a handy workforce to help the family survive, particularly when their parents were too old to toil in the fields.
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“My mother was one of ten children, who were needed to help on the family farm, while she became a cleaning lady and had two children,” said Spiga.
Today, children are viewed by city dwellers as a cost with no return, rather than an investment, with years of clothing, education and housing bills ahead.
In Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, the regional authority has decided the only way to ensure the survival of Sardinians is not the tax relief path chosen by Meloni but straightforward cash handouts to cover costs.
That means €600 a year per child, financial support for people buying and restoring properties in small towns and €20,000 grants for start-ups. “And we already pay for nursery places for all children,” said Quirico Sanna, the chief of staff to the regional president.
That could make the difference for Sardinia’s smallest village, Baradili, inland from Oristano, where the headcount is down to 78 from 125 a few years ago.
“We were due to disappear by 2025 but we’re fighting and now apparently we won’t vanish until 2050,” said Maria Anna Camedda, 51, the mayor.
Baradili was once a centre for wheat, wine and almond cultivation, but its school shut at the end of the 1980s. “Running a village like this can be demoralising when it seems no policy can reverse the population decline, and it’s not just us — we are just living through it first,” Camedda said. “But living here can be wonderful, and we are not giving up.”
