The battle for births: how the far right are exploiting Italy’s ‘demographic winter’

Massiola is a village slowly dying, and it’s not the only one. Dwindling populations are affecting the whole of Italy – will this crisis reshape the country’s future?

The black letters painted on the walls – announcing the “hostelry” and the “bar” – are fading to nothing. Both have been closed for decades. There’s no building work going on either: in one garden a cement mixer has been rotated upwards, painted yellow and turned into a plant pot. Many of the houses are empty and have hand-written For Sale signs on their front doors.

This is Massiola, a mountain village 772 metres above sea level, west of Lake Maggiore in the northern Italian region of Piedmont.