In many Italian villages, there are houses waiting. Doors that haven't been opened for years, windows with shutters closed. Inside, often, there's old furniture, photographs on the wall, some forgotten object. The owners live far away, in Buenos Aires, Sydney, Toronto, Frankfurt, and that house has become for them a thought that returns at Christmas, a sense of guilt that occasionally surfaces, the symbol of something that can neither be left behind nor taken back. Those houses, closed for so many years, are the physical traces of a history, the history of families who left, who built elsewhere, who never returned, and they are also, potentially, the starting point of a new story.
The Comuni Project was born, among other things, to imagine that new history.
Italy is a country slowly emptying, one village at a time. This isn't breaking news, and it's not a sudden catastrophe: it's a long, silent process, almost imperceptible up close. You notice it when the café in the town square closes. When the last elementary school in town can no longer provide classes. When the family doctor retires and there's no replacement. When your neighbors can be counted on one hand, and most are already gray. More than 5.000 Italian municipalities have fewer than 2.000 inhabitants. Many of these, every year, lose someone without gaining anyone. It's no one's fault—or perhaps it's everyone's fault, of collective choices that over time have concentrated resources, services, and opportunities in the big cities, leaving the inland areas to survive on what's left. The question is whether there's still a chance to reverse the trend. And the answer, in many cases, is yes.
The call that never goes away
There's something extraordinary that unites millions of people around the world: the memory of a place they've never seen, yet feel like their own. It's the town where their grandfather grew up, which he spoke about his entire life with a mix of nostalgia and pride. It's the dialect their grandmother spoke to her friends on the phone, which her grandchildren understood without ever having studied it. It's the aroma of food that's still prepared today, thousands of kilometers away, with the same ingredients and the same words as in the past.
This bond—affective, identity-building, almost physical—doesn't fade with the passing of generations. It transforms, adapts, becomes more subtle. But it remains. And at certain moments in life, when a child is born, when a parent is lost, when one approaches retirement, when one feels the need for something authentic in a world that seems increasingly anonymous, this bond resurfaces with unexpected strength.
These are the people the Comuni Project would like to speak to.
Return Stories
Carmen is sixty-two years old and has lived in Rosario, Argentina, her whole life. Her grandfather left a small town in Basilicata in 1923, with a cardboard suitcase and her cousin's name written on a piece of paper. Carmen has never seen Italy. But she raised her children on her grandfather's stories, cooked the recipes he brought with him for decades, and kept the faded photograph of the house where he was born. Last year she made the trip. She found the house. It had been closed for thirty years, but the neighbor across the street still had the keys, "just in case." Carmen cried on the doorstep. Then she went inside.
Marco is thirty-six years old, works for a tech company in London, and his contract allows him to work from anywhere in the world with a good connection. His great-grandparents were from a village in Campania. He's never had a strong connection to Italy, but something—perhaps the weariness of the city, perhaps the need for a different pace—pushed him to explore the idea. Today, he lives in that village for six months a year. He bought a house to renovate, learned a few words of dialect, and started to get to know the neighbors.
Silvana is seventy-eight years old and lives in Melbourne. Her husband died three years ago. Her children are grown and have families of their own. She's decided she wants to spend at least a month a year in the town where she was born and left at twenty. Not to actually return—she knows that's impossible—but to avoid completely losing that connection.
These stories aren't exceptions. They're the rule, for those who know how to look for them.
What can a municipality do?
A municipality can't stop depopulation with a resolution. But it can do something important: it can say it exists. That the village exists, that it's alive, that it's waiting. That there are available homes, welcoming people, a community that hasn't yet given up hope.
Il Municipalities Project It helps administrations do exactly this: to build a message of openness and take it where it can be heard, through diaspora channels, within communities of Italians abroad, and on platforms where those who feel the call of their roots seek answers. These are concrete things: helping municipalities map abandoned homes and establish a dialogue with distant owners; supporting reception policies for new residents, making the bureaucratic process less daunting; designing initiatives that create opportunities for encounters between those arriving and those who stayed behind, because the return only works if there is a community willing to welcome it. The LivingLabs, spaces for listening and participatory planning where residents, together, imagine the future of their village. Not plans drawn up from above, but visions built together, taking into account those who are here now and those who might return.
It's not about filling empty houses
Repopulation, therefore, means reconnecting threads that history had broken, restoring a place to its former status as a vibrant community, giving people searching for their roots the chance to truly find them. Not as tourists, not as passing guests, but as people who choose to belong, even partially, even temporarily, to that place and that history. When this happens, something happens that goes far beyond demographics. A school class that doesn't close. A bar that reopens. A village festival that regains its former audience. A house that stops waiting. These are the things that change a village.
