Could Remote Working Revive Italy’s Dying Villages?
Italy’s small towns and villages have been hemorrhaging residents for decades as dire job opportunities have pushed inhabitants to move to cities or even abroad. The boom in working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, however, could mean a reversal of this trend. Small towns are seeing an influx of new residents and homeowners looking to take advantage of slow, countryside living.
The now-famed €1 house auctions that have enticed remote working freelancers from around the globe are also helping to save these towns from drastic depopulation. Local councils are seizing the opportunity to help lure new country dwellers by offering high-speed internet and monetary incentives. But the question remains over how sustainable this trend will be beyond the pandemic.
The Decline Of The Small Town
Small towns may frequently trump cities for serenity, a healthy lifestyle, and strong communities, but the collision of their restrictive job opportunities and geological disasters has pushed residents to up sticks to cities or further afar. Italy’s most famous “dying town”, Civita di Bagnoregio, was devastated by an earthquake in 1695 and continued to decline inexorably as remaining inhabitants left in droves to find work in cities or abroad. The town’s permanent residents now number around 10.
According to a 2016 study by Italian environmental association Legambiente, there are some 2,500 villages like this in Italy that are on the road to extinction. Particularly in the traditionally impoverished south, both towns and big cities have suffered a severe demographic decline as Italians emigrated abroad from the late 19th century up to the mid-1970s, and a slower but continued loss of residents up to the present day.
Carmelo Ignaccolo, a Ph.D. student in urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one such Italian who left his hometown in Sicily to go abroad. “This is not a place that I left because I had a bad relationship with it, but I think it is a place that cannot offer you the same amount of opportunities and international exposure that being based in Shanghai, New York, Nairobi can give you,” he says.
Italians Rediscover Country Living
Despite the flight of small-town residents to cities, the advantages of country living over city life have not been forgotten. Coronavirus lockdowns that trapped city dwellers in restrictive apartments seemed to make village life extra appealing.
Even amid the restrictions and lockdowns of the pandemic, small towns at least provide attractive vistas, fresh air, and more space for social distancing. Some small communities even became famed for their “COVID-free” status, becoming a haven of safety particularly for elderly residents.
Many Italian urbanites have been enticed by village life and the normalization of remote working has allowed them to downsize from city to town. In the northern region of Emilia Romagna, regional authorities established a fund to assist young people investing in a house in one of the area’s 119 historic mountain towns. The scheme, called Bando Montagna, can offer applicants up to €30,000 for the purchase or restoration of a house in designated mountainous areas. The scheme received over 2000 applications, although just 340 could be approved.
Luca Lelli and his partner, who used to live in an apartment in the city of Imola, are one of the couples who chose to leave the city behind and embrace bucolic country life. Speaking to CNTraveler, Lelli said, “It’s going to be an opportunity to start afresh, slow down.”
Young Italians Return Home
The phenomenon of working from home has also seen young Italians living in cities around the world return to their home country. Italy has had a particular problem with skilled workers, many with university degrees, resorting to moving abroad due to Italy’s debilitating levels of unemployment and exhausting bureaucratic systems. This so-called “brain drain” is costing the country dearly, but the pandemic seems to be reversing the worrying trend. The New York Times reports that “In the past year, the number of Italians aged 18-34 returning home increased 20 percent over the previous year.”
Ph.D. student Ignaccolo is one of the many young Italians to have relocated back home. Instead of spending lockdown sharing a small apartment in Cambridge in the States, he decided to return to his hometown in Sicily for a few months. And he’s not the only one. “I’m realizing that there are so many people who took a similar decision. By word of mouth I hear about people working from Italy for the US, London, Shanghai, and Nairobi,” he says.
Italy’s €1 Homes Lure Foreigners
Also contributing to the repopulations of Italy’s small towns is the extraordinary success of the auctions of €1 houses by villages seeking to boost their populations. Small towns have been putting abandoned properties on the market for a pittance and buyers across the globe are snapping them up. Sambuca di Sicilia, for example, has auctioned off 16 properties over the last couple of years, with several other homes bought through private sales. Hollywood actress Lorraine Bracco is one of Sambuca’s new homeowners, and her renovation project was filmed for the TV series “My Big Italian Adventure”.
Town councils hope to ensure the scheme won’t just result in a plethora of holiday properties only used for a few weeks a year by offering incentives for those who take up residency in the town. In Troina in Sicily, for example, the local council is offering to subsidize restoration costs for new property owners who choose to register their residency in the town. Grants of up to €15,000 are available for those who purchase and commit to renovating the lowest priced properties.
Small Towns Offer High-Speed Internet And Rent Reduction
Seeing hope for their moribund towns, local councils are trying to sweeten the deal for potential new inhabitants. The historic town of Santa Fiore in Tuscany, for example, has launched a project to advertise itself as a remote working hotspot. The Santa Fiore Smart Village initiative sees the town offering a fiber optic internet connection and reductions on rent. Monterubaglio in Umbria, with a tiny population of 652, is collaborating with remote working company Smartway to equip the town with high-speed internet. It is also offering deals for long term rentals.
Italian association South Working, which hopes to stimulate remote working in Italy’s less economically developed south, is mapping out locations with access to a high-speed internet connection. It hopes to promote the benefits of working remotely, at least some of the time. This in turn could assist communities that are suffering from poor economies and obsolete housing in need of refurbishment.
Ph.D. student Ignaccolo is assisting the association with mapping the network of remote working hubs. “It was a nice idea of combining work but also local support for communities which have been left behind, especially in southern Italy,” says Ignaccolo. Many of these co-working spaces are in cities, but some have already been identified in smaller towns including Troina, which is conveniently currently auctioning off some of its properties for the iconic €1 price tag.
Will The Love Of Country Living Last?
The real question is how sustainable this trend will prove to be. Those remote workers who are temporarily escaping their offices in big cities like London will have to return at some point. But Ignaccolo suggests it should be a case of being open to the idea of intermittent remote working. “It’s a moment to change the traditional way of thinking. The idea of being static is not something that young professionals seeking an international career like in general. Rather than saying we want people back, we need to accept that if you want to keep the brain active you need to give the flexibility to spend time in different places.”
This way, workers and students can combine time in global cities, to forge in-person connections and enjoy international exposure, with periods in a less conventional working environments to conduct work remotely while engaging with local communities. “I hope the final message that this phenomenon and this pandemic is going to give to governments and policymakers in Italy is that we should not focus our energy only on saying to young international professionals come back and stay forever. Instead, people should be able to come in and out. It might be more beneficial for both the country and the people who are doing that.”
Ignaccolo acknowledges he is missing the academic dynamism of being on a university campus, but that he enjoys having this period to focus on his independent academic research. “It would be great to have the best of both worlds,” he says.