Will hitting the jackpot save an Italian village?
COVID-19 relief is a windfall, but it leads to other problems
LIVEMMO, Italy — The only full-time employee of Livemmo, a secluded mountain village of 196 residents in northern Italy, has a lot on his to-do list.
At 7:26 on a recent morning, he stamped his timecard, lifted the blinds and straightened up the town hall office. He drove the yellow school bus over fog-shrouded roads, picking up children in winter hats from surrounding hamlets, beeping at the curves slick with red autumn leaves and taking it slow around the bell towers. Back in the office, he paid a bill and answered emails.
Then he turned to his other task: helping the village spend nearly $21 million earmarked by Italy to save Livemmo from oblivion.
“It’s a huge job to spend all this money,” Marino Zanolini, 57, said of the bounty. “At the end, if something goes wrong, you know whose fault it will be.”
This year, Livemmo beat out dozens of villages in the Lombardy region for a share of about $200 billion in COVID-19 recovery funds set aside for Italy by the European Union. Italy has one of the oldest populations in Europe, and the combination of its paltry birthrate and the increased longevity of its booming population of older people has created an economic and existential crisis that has vexed successive governments.
Italy has allocated about $420 million in relief funds to reverse the aging and vanishing of 21 of its most threatened small villages — one in each major region or province. Livemmo, known
for its mountain walks, cow pastures and carnival parade featuring characters like a woman holding a man in a basket, won its region’s reinvigoration lotto with a proposal to evolve into a vibrant tourist destination.
Its pitch included spending for decent Wi-Fi, expanded tourist lodgings in its centuries-old stone homes and a network of expanded bike paths. It plans to convert a dirt field surrounded by yellow and blue plastic seats nailed into logs into a new sports complex with a synthetic turf, parking and locker rooms. It foresees the purchase of private warehouses to be converted into centers for local cheese, honey and woodworking artisans.
To make up for the loss of its lone doctor, who is retiring at the end of the month, it has also proposed telemedicine bracelets that monitor the vitals of the village’s aging residents. It has budgeted incentives to draw more families, busi
nesses and “creative startups in the sector of contemporary art, with particular focus on the theme of wood.”
“It’s a unique, once-in-alifetime and unimaginable opportunity,” said Giovanmaria Flocchini, the mayor of the town that includes the village of Livemmo. He considered the village part of a critical experiment for Italy, but also for aging societies across Europe, to prove that an influx of cash can save towns — and all of their cultural heritage and history — from depopulation and abandonment.
“I feel doubly responsible,” he said. “If it fails for us, it fails for everybody.”
But the village needs to start spending the money no later than July and finish by June 2026. Zanolini, who has been working for Livemmo for nearly 30 years and who likes to take lunch breaks at his parents’ house down the road, is worried about the tens of thousands of documents in the planning phase and then the tens of thousands of more
contracts to organize, digitally sign and pay out in the payment phase.
“Everything has to go through the town hall,” he said, adding, “90% of the time, I’m alone.”
Flocchini, who is also the president of a local association of administrators who helped draft the proposal, is negotiating with the regional and national governments to let him use about $800,000 of the funds over four years to hire professional consultants. In a part of the country with high employment, he is finding it hard to lure locals away from solid jobs 20 miles away for temporary jobs closer to home.
After a brief walk around the village, of the warehouses he envisioned as cultural centers and the 17th-century stone homes he imagined as charming tourist lodgings, the mayor returned to the town hall and watched Zanolini show a resident how to snap on the lid of her new garbage pail so it would not break in the cold. The mayor admired the town’s employee as a jack-of-all-trades, “but,” he said, “he can’t do this; it is not his job.”
As is the case with many small towns across Italy, he added, “I don’t deny that we’re having a tough time managing this.”
The deeper challenge, though, may be that a significant and senescing portion of the population does not want the money.
“There is not a lot of enthusiasm in one part of the population,” the mayor said, adding, “You can’t change the minds of 80-year-olds.” Or some 70-year-olds. “My fear is that the whole town will be changed. We’ll be invaded by people we don’t know,” Graziella Scuri, 73, an owner of one of Livemmo’s five restaurants, said as she spooned out homemade pasta doused in butter. She added that a defining character trait of the hardworking and often isolated locals was “we’re a little closed.”
Her son, Daniele Meschini, 38, questioned the wisdom of trying to transform a town of taciturn and aging mountain dwellers who cared most about having a doctor on call into a tourist attraction. “All these people who want to come look at goats!” he said. “I grew up with goats, so I find it absurd.”
About five years ago, with Livemmo worried about its nearly nonexistent birthrate and the loss of civic life, the town invested in a small grocery store. Daniela Guffi, 27, moved to the village to work in it because, she said, her mother came from Livemmo, she loved the mountains and thought it would be a good place to raise a family. As she finished stocking sambuca bottles above the counter, she said that she hoped for the best but that “we’re all a little skeptical because we know so little.”
The village had its charms, Guffi said, and tourists from Brescia and Milan, desperate to escape climate change’s extreme heat, sought refuge here in the summers. But yearround, she said, “It’s hard to be young here. In a couple is one thing. Alone is another.”
Partly out of necessity, Flocchini has pinned his hopes on Livemmo’s young, and families in particular, confident that some of them might buy the restaurants from aging owners or start businesses and have more children to keep the local school afloat.
Giulia Turrini, 33, who has two young children, operates a bed-and-breakfast in the historic town hall building. The village hopes to turn the stone cellar, currently filled with scrap metal, gas tanks and broken doors and baskets, into a showroom for local wines and cheeses. “The people my age will get the most out of this,” she said of the government money. “The older generation is more negative. They fear change.”