An Italian city full of elderly people wants to feel young again

As the traveling brass band closed San Giovanni Lipioni's annual holiday concert with a rendition of Wham's “Last Christmas,” the gray-haired villagers in the old church of the central Italian hill town watched in admiration as the few young children clapped to the music.

“Today there is a bit of movement,” said Cesarina Falasco, 73, from the back bench. “It's beautiful. It's different.”

San Giovanni Lipioni was once – if at all – famous for the discovery in the countryside of a Samnite bronze head from the third century BC, a rare Waldesian Evangelical community and an ancient annual spectacle with pagan roots that venerates a circular stick wreathed with wild cyclamen flowers. (“It represents the female sexual organ,” said a tourism official, Mattia Rossi.)

But decades of emigration have reduced the population to 137 full-time residents, and in 2023 San Giovanni Lipioni became the city with the oldest average population in Italy, a country with one of the oldest average populations in the world. Although that national designation has caused existential anxiety – amplified by warnings from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (the country was “destined to disappear” unless it got busy) and Pope Francis (“The future of the country is at stake”) – the city has embraced its creaky distinction as a lifeline.

A local association seized the moment to make an attempt real estate bonanza restoring and selling abandoned houses. “What do we need? People!!” reads a presentation from the association detailing plans to “leverage media attention to gradually attract new visitors and resources” by 2024.

To attract new residents, the town is selling what it has in abundance: tranquility, but also, says the association, a chance to be immersed in an authentic town with plenty of “unused housing stock with charming features.” There is also, according to the presentation, the Pavone mini market where 'groceries and essential services' are sold.

In the days after Christmas, as old men in the local bar played the card game Tressette under a television showing decades-old reruns, the city's leaders ignored new data from Italy's National Institute of Statistics showing that their house had fallen fifth had fallen (average age 64.2) in the Italian old age rankings, with a small town, Ribordone, in the northern Italian region of Piedmont (average age 65.5), taking the withered crown.

“There is a certain pride in being the oldest city,” Nicola Rossi, the mayor, said. He cited the previous average age of 66.1 years in a country with an average of 46.4 years. But to save the city, he said, “there is no point in doing things just for the old people.”

While investing in a soccer field and road repairs to attract young people and couples to work in nearby factories, the association sees a more lucrative repopulation through the sale of summer homes to foreigners and other out-of-towners.

“There's a 'For Sale' sign — there's another one,” said Carlo Monaco, an association official, as he toured the city hours before the holiday concert. “This one is empty. Empty.” But so was the main square, where Marilena Grosso watched her seven-year-old daughter Marica run to the life-size nativity scene. Her 18-month-old son, Pietro, was chased by old men on benches.

“At least you don't have to worry about them getting run over,” she said. “That's the positive side.”

Mr. Monaco climbed steep stairs to the town's drugstore, where Daniela Palomba, the 39-year-old pharmacist, said she and her husband discovered the town on a website with available jobs. She was pregnant at the time and wasn't sure what to expect when she first arrived.

“My first reaction was, 'Oh, God,'” she said as her son Raffaele, now four, played behind the counter next to a selection of orthopedic shoes. She said that despite the abundance of abandoned houses, she and her husband could not find a place to live in the city. “No heat, and I didn't want an old ruin.” They ended up in an apartment next to the nursing home.

Further up the hill is the city's Town Hall, opposite facades adorned with 'For Sale' signs. Inside, two employee clock cards sat in a metal rack that could hold 25 babies. Alessandra Bologna, 33, city clerk, opened a birth register from 1852, with cursive script documenting the births of 31 babies. In 1950, when the city had a population of 1,000, the city recorded 30 births. Then she pulled out the 2022 register, which showed one birth, and turned blank page after blank page. “Now,” she said, “there are always more deaths.”

That was not always the case, explains 84-year-old Franco Monaco, who had transformed the garage of his house, which also had a 'For Sale' sign, into the 'Museum of Peasant Culture'. Beneath old hanging suitcases labeled “for emigrants” and surrounded by centuries-old agricultural implements and other memorabilia, including woolen hats and Mussolini calendars, he remembered a time when the city was full of children.

“These were families with ten, eleven, twelve children,” he said. He pointed to a doll in a steel baby crib hanging from the ceiling. “These cribs were in the countryside,” he said. “I was born behind a pile of hay.”

People have long since left the fields to work in the metalworking factory or the Amazon warehouse in San Salvo, about 40 minutes east toward the Adriatic coast of the Abruzzo region, where the mayor works in a glass factory. At a vantage point, he followed the line of the Trigno River, which separated the city from the Molise, the often overlooked region that villagers like to joke about.

Next to him was Ferdinando Giammichele, an investor in the Community Cooperative with the ambition to turn the local bar into a restaurant. He lived in London for years but has returned to Italy for a quieter life, although he lives in Rome where he works for an energy company. He pointed to the large white windmills that spin on former farmland to offset electricity costs and said the city's old buildings have also been repurposed.

“This was my school,” he said, pointing to the nursing home. “Now it's the hospice.”

As the temperature dropped, the entourage of the city's promoters walked to Pavone, the small grocery store. A red “For Sale” sign hung beneath a wreath, and a handwritten sign on the door informed customers that the next day would be the store's last.

Surrounded by drastic price cuts, Giovanni Grosso, 43, said he and his wife decided to give the store a chance to bring more life to the city. They invested and lost their savings.

“It makes me cry,” he said, his eyes watering. He called the town “all talk” about supporting young families, and said villagers would no longer pay a few cents for pasta at his shop. He, like so many before him, had been offered a job as a construction worker in Bologna. “My mother lives here,” he said. “She says, 'What are you doing here? To leave.'”

A pickup full of brass horns drove by on the way to the church, opposite a wall of obituaries for locals, almost all of them named Rossi, Grosso or Monaco. Beneath statues of saints, Mr. Grosso's son Santiago, 4, pretended to conduct the band as it played Christmas hits and the Italian national anthem. Then Santiago went home, to a small building next to the nursing home, where the pharmacist's family also has their apartment. His mother nursed his five-month-old brother Ettore, one of the city's two births in 2023.

“It's not easy for them because they always say, 'I'm bored,'” said Marisa Pavone, 32, as her eldest son put Monopoly pieces away. She said that a pediatrician only visited once a week and that the nearest kindergarten was closed this year because only three children were enrolled. She had imagined injecting life by delivering pizzas or homemade sweets to the store, where she worked until the night Ettore was born, but there wasn't much demand. She mainly made birthday cakes for old people in the nursing home.

She said the family would most likely move to Bologna for a fresh start, which would significantly reduce the number of children in the city and increase the average age, giving San Giovanni Lipioni a great chance to take the title of Italy's oldest city to win back.

“I'm sorry I have to close,” she said, kissing the baby on the cheek and adding, “If you try to stay and invest, you'll lose.” We lost, and the whole city lost.”