Who will sit in the piazza?

So I’ve been wondering what will happen to these little towns in Italy I’m in in the next 5-10 years.

I’m in a very small town called Nova Siri this week. 400-500 people left, most of them old people. I was in another one called Grumento Nova last week.

These towns still have their charm, but they’re what people now call boring. One or two bars/cafés for the whole town. Everyone meets in the city centre every day. You see the same people, sitting in the same places, having the same conversations. But boring isn’t actually boring. Maybe in the age of social media and fast internet and capitalistic culture it is, but in real life, it’s just “life”. Have we become incapable of seeing the beautiful in the mundane? In normal day to day life?

I’m in a filmmaking residency called Cinemadamare (commissioned by the Italian Ministry of Tourism and the local municipalities to create films in towns around Italy). We hop around small European towns for three months, making lots of films in each every week. But more on that later.

When we got here, everyone was looking at us. Everyone was ready. They’re all talking. When anything happens around town, everyone knows.

This man sat around in his fashionable clothes every day. August 2026, Nova Siri, Basilicata.

It made me think about how strange it must be to live somewhere where there are so few people that one’s presence is an event. I was here a few years ago, and when we went to the old town, which I’m in now, there was no one. Nobody. It genuinely felt a little post apocalyptic. But no.

Apparently there was a funeral. Everyone, literally everyone, was there. The small pizzeria in the town centre was closed, and there was no one in sight. Which is somehow even more interesting. Because the town wasn’t empty. It was just empty at that particular moment because everyone was together somewhere else, mourning one of the people who made the town what it is.

There’s a 103-year-old man here who is apparently perfectly healthy for his age. I suppose it’s the topography. They need to walk up and down steep hills to get anywhere. There are others around the same age who I may not have met.

There are a few younger people here and there, but I imagine many of them eventually want to go to Rome, Milan, London, somewhere bigger. There’s no hospital around. Probably no school. Fewer and fewer reasons for a young person to stay. And so I keep wondering:

What happens next?

In 5 years? 10? 20?

What happens to a town when the people who have lived there their whole lives are no longer there?

The houses will still be there. The churches will still be there. The little piazza will still be there. The café might still have the same chairs outside, although probably not? But who sits in them?

Will the local pizzeria become a Pizza Hut? Or maybe an Italian chain?

Will there actually be a supermarket? Because right now there isn’t one - just a small shop with very (very) few items.

Perhaps one of the bigger houses will be a Vapiano?

“Chi va piano, va sano, e va lontano.”

Written in beautiful Italian-style gentrified font above the door.

Maybe the town gets discovered. Maybe someone turns an old house into a boutique hotel? Someone else opens a natural wine bar. An artist residency moves in, or an art gallery selling over priced Italian art. Or better yet: modern art.

A hundred Airbnb listings appear. People from Milan buy €1 houses and renovate them. Foreigners arrive because they want the “real Italy.”

And slowly, somehow, people start coming back.

But then I wonder:

Is that the same town?

Because maybe the problem isn’t that the buildings disappear. Maybe the problem is that the people disappear. And then, eventually, the people who come to bring the town back to life might completely change what made the town worth saving in the first place. Maybe that’s what happens everywhere. A place becomes empty. Then “beautiful”. Then desirable. Then expensive.

Then full.

And somehow, the thing that was there before is gone.

I don’t know what will happen to Nova Siri. Maybe it will die. Maybe it will be preserved. Maybe it will become a tourist destination. Maybe it will become a place where people come for a week to experience “authentic Italy” while nobody who was actually born there lives there anymore. Maybe it will be completely abandoned. Or maybe something else will happen that I can’t imagine.

But I keep thinking about that funeral. Because for a few hours, the town looked dead. While actually, everyone was just together.

Maybe that’s the strange thing about these places. They’re not dying because there’s nobody there. They’re dying because there are fewer and fewer people left to make being there matter and keep it alive.

When the owners of these homes pass, who will these houses be passed on to? Their children? The government?

And I wonder whether, in trying to bring them back to life, we’ll accidentally make sure they never come back as themselves. “Tourism as resurrection,” I like to call it. But in an attempt to make it alive again, are they simply turning it into a beautiful corpse?

Buildings may outlive culture and community, but they were created to serve them. Over time, will people just use the spaces that were created years before without the energy that was put into their creation?