A Town Without Children

Castel di Tusa, Sicily. It is October 24th, 2025. I look at an empty school. This is the third town in Italy I have visited this Autumn: the other two, one in the hills of Tuscany, the other near the border with Switzerland, were similarly devoid of children. They were not devoid of childish objects. Rusted swing-sets. Dusty soft play corners in Catholic churches. Faded toys in second-hand markets. Towns like these are not unusual in Italy, a country with the lowest birth-rate in Europe (1.2 per woman, 2023). Their world is our world: the world of a society going into retirement. As you cycle through this world, nothing happens. In the countryside, the houses decay, first lone houses, then villages, then small towns. In the city where housing pressure is stronger, dilapidation is more unusual; instead, lone elderly residents – the ‘final generation’ – retreat ever deeper into their overly-large homes, waiting to die. But even in the city, dilapidation is possible. Where property rights are poorly managed, or probate is slow, empty homes can persist in prime real estate. Last time I visited Kamakura in Japan and saw the ruined luxury homes, I asked a friend ‘how could this be?’; the answer: ‘no-one knows who owns them.’ It is not laziness or a lack of acquisitive urges: the flow of property rights has merely ceased. When someone in Japan dies without a will (intestate succession), inheritance goes to branches of the family; when they are part of ‘the last generation’, these branches grow fuzzy and obscure. Finding distant relatives can be costly and time-consuming; combine this with a slow court system and nothing happens. The same issues apply in Italy, with large quantities of real estate falling into null ownership. Empty homes are not the only vacant buildings. Without children, there is no more need for the infrastructure designed to raise them. It starts with nurseries and day-care centres closing; then primary schools; then secondaries. The first and second of