Ghost Villages and Dying Towns: How to Tell the Difference

The Problem

Rural Italy is depopulating. It has been for decades, and the trend is accelerating. Italy's resident population dropped to 58.9 million at the start of 2025, down 37,000 from the previous year, and ISTAT projects a fall to 54.7 million by 2050. The fertility rate hit a record low of 1.18 children per woman in 2024. The decline is not evenly distributed. Northern cities are broadly stable. Southern and inland Italy is emptying out. Young people leave for cities where there are jobs. The elderly remain. When they go, the village goes with them.

Abruzzo sits squarely in this pattern. The mountainous hinterland, mostly in the provinces of L'Aquila and Chieti, has been losing population for decades. More recently, the trend has spread to smaller coastal towns. Villages that had 2,000 residents in 1950 might have 200 today. Some are stabilising at a smaller size and finding new equilibrium. Others are on a one-way path to abandonment, and the property prices reflect it.

The problem for property buyers is that a quiet village and a dying village look almost identical on a sunny afternoon in June. Both have stone houses, narrow streets, and an appealing stillness. The difference only becomes apparent when you try to live there year-round and discover that the services are disappearing, your neighbours are increasingly elderly and then absent, the infrastructure is deteriorating, and the "community" you imagined buying into does not exist in any meaningful sense.

Warning Signs

There is no single indicator that tells you a village is dying. It is the accumulation of signals that matters. Here is what to look for, grouped by what you can observe on the ground, what the services tell you, and what the people tell you.

Physical Signs

Walk through the village slowly and count what you see. Multiple abandoned or collapsing buildings are the most obvious signal, but look more carefully at the detail. Shopfronts that have clearly been closed for years, with faded signage and dust behind the glass, tell you that commerce left a long time ago. Overgrown public spaces and neglected piazzas suggest the comune either lacks the budget or the political will to maintain them, both indicators of decline. For Sale signs that have been up so long the paper is sun-bleached tell you that even at rock-bottom prices, nobody is buying. If the church is boarded up, that is a particularly stark signal. In Italy, a church closing means the diocese has concluded there are not enough parishioners to justify a priest, and in a country where even the smallest village traditionally sustains a parish, that represents a profound loss of community infrastructure.

Look for children's playgrounds. If there is one and it is maintained, young families are present. If it is rusted, overgrown, or missing entirely, the village has not had children in it for a long time. Look at the cars parked outside houses. Are there many, suggesting occupancy, or very few? Are they old, suggesting elderly owners without the means to replace them?

Service Signs

Services close in a predictable sequence as population drops. The last commercial establishment to survive in any Italian village is usually the bar, because it serves a social function beyond selling coffee. If the bar has closed, the village is in serious trouble. Before the bar goes, you will have already lost the alimentari (grocer), the pharmacy, the post office (or it has been reduced to a few hours a week), and any medical presence. Check whether there is a bus service. In many inland Abruzzo villages, the regional bus operator (TUA, formerly ARPA) runs one or two services per day timed for school and work commuters, with nothing in the evenings or on Sundays. In the most depopulated areas, even that minimal service has been withdrawn entirely.

The school is one of the strongest indicators. Italian primary schools stay open as long as there are enough children to form a class. When the school closes or merges with a neighbouring comune's school, it means the village has fallen below the threshold of young families needed to sustain one. No school means no young families. No young families means no future growth. The closure also removes one of the last reasons a family with children might choose to stay.

People Signs

Visit on a weekday, not a weekend. Visit in January, not August. Italian villages that appear deserted in winter but fill up in summer are functioning as holiday destinations, not living communities. The people you need to count are the ones who are there in February on a Tuesday morning.

If the only people you see during the day are elderly, and very few of those, you are looking at a village in terminal decline. Listen to how the residents talk about their own village. If you hear variations of "the young people have all left" spoken with resignation rather than concern, the community has already accepted its trajectory. If there is anger or active planning (efforts to attract new residents, community projects, engagement with regional funding), the village may still have fight in it. Some Abruzzo comuni have tried creative interventions. Santo Stefano di Sessanio, a medieval village in L'Aquila province that had dropped to around 115 residents, offers grants of up to EUR40,000 to people under 40 who move there and start a business. Villa Santa Lucia degli Abruzzi, one of the least populated comuni in the region, offered EUR25,000 to anyone who could reopen its closed bar-shop. These efforts are worth noting because they signal awareness and initiative, but the evidence from across Italy suggests that a few dozen incoming residents rarely offset the structural forces driving depopulation.

How to Research

Before buying in any small village, you can and should do quantitative research that will tell you, objectively, whether the village is viable, declining, or dying. This data is freely available and does not require Italian language skills to access.

ISTAT Demographic Data

ISTAT (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica) is Italy's national statistics institute, and it publishes detailed population data for every comune in the country. The key resource is demo.istat.it, which has an English-language interface. Navigate to "Resident population" and you can look up any municipality by name to find its current population broken down by sex, age, and marital status. The data is updated annually based on municipal population registers.

What you are looking for is the population trend over time. ISTAT's historical series go back decades, and the pattern tells you far more than the current number alone. A village of 500 that has been stable at 500 for 20 years is in a fundamentally different situation from a village of 500 that was 1,200 twenty years ago and 800 ten years ago. The first is viable. The second is on a trajectory that will take it below critical mass within a decade or two.

You can also find the age distribution, which tells you about the village's future even more clearly than its past. A village where 40% of residents are over 65 and fewer than 10% are under 15 is going to lose population through natural decline (more deaths than births) regardless of whether anyone moves away. The maths is inescapable.

Visit Multiple Times

Data gives you the structure. Visiting gives you the texture. You need both. Visit in winter, when summer residents and tourists are gone and you see the village as it actually functions for the people who live there year-round. Visit on a weekday, not during a festa or weekend when the village fills temporarily with people who live elsewhere. Visit at different times of day. A village that has activity at 10am and 5pm but is completely deserted at 2pm is probably functioning normally (that is riposo). A village that is empty at every hour is not.

Walk the streets and count occupied versus unoccupied houses. Look for signs of ongoing maintenance: fresh paint, tended gardens, repaired shutters. A village where most houses are maintained is a village where people still care about living there. A village where half the buildings are crumbling is a village people have given up on.

Ask the Comune

The town hall (comune) is a public office, and you can ask for information. Specifically, you can ask for the number of registered residents (which may differ from the ISTAT figure, as some people remain registered in villages where they no longer actually live). Ask about the school: is it open? How many children are enrolled? If it has closed, when? Ask whether the comune has any planned infrastructure projects or, conversely, any known service closures. Ask about the water supply, road maintenance schedule, and waste collection. The answers, and the willingness of staff to engage with your questions, tell you a lot.

If you do not speak Italian, bring someone who does or arrange for a translator. The comune staff in small villages rarely speak English, but the conversation is worth having. A comune that is actively trying to attract new residents will be enthusiastic about your interest. One that has accepted decline will be polite but uninformative.

What Numbers Tell

Population data is only useful if you know how to read it. Here is a framework for interpreting what ISTAT's numbers mean for the viability of a village as a place to live.

Age Distribution

A healthy village has a spread of ages: children, working-age adults, and elderly. A dying village has almost no children and very few people under 50. The critical indicator is the ratio of residents over 65 to residents under 15. In a balanced population, this ratio sits around 1:1 to 2:1. In many inland Abruzzo comuni, it exceeds 5:1 or even 10:1. When you see that kind of ratio, natural decline will continue regardless of migration patterns. There are simply not enough young people to produce the next generation, and the elderly population will shrink through mortality over the next 10 to 20 years.

ISTAT publishes an "old-age index" (indice di vecchiaia) for every comune, calculated as the number of residents aged 65 and over per 100 residents aged 0 to 14. The Italian national average is already high by global standards, around 190. In depopulating Abruzzo comuni, it can exceed 500 or even 1,000. That number tells you, with mathematical certainty, what is coming.

The School Test

If a village still has an operating primary school, young families are present. If the school has closed, find out when. A school that closed last year is different from one that closed 15 years ago. Recent closure means the village has just crossed a threshold. Long-ago closure means the threshold was crossed a generation ago, and anyone who might have had children there has long since left. The enrolment trend before closure matters too: a school that went from 60 children to 8 over ten years tells the same story as the population data, but more vividly.

Questions to Ask

When you are in a village, find someone to talk to. The bar is the obvious place, if one exists. Otherwise, look for people sitting outside their houses, working in their gardens, or walking through the piazza. Italians in small villages are generally willing to talk to strangers, especially if you approach with genuine curiosity rather than an agenda.

The questions that matter most are simple. Ask how many people live here year-round, not just in summer. Ask whether there is a school, a pharmacy, a doctor. Ask whether more people are arriving or leaving. Ask what people do for work, because a village with no local employment is a village that depends entirely on pensions and remote workers, both of which are fragile foundations for community life. Ask what happens here in winter, and listen carefully to the answer. A village where winter is described as quiet is different from one where winter is described as empty.

Pay attention to how people answer as much as what they say. Pride and optimism suggest a community that still believes in itself. Specific plans and projects suggest active engagement with the village's future. Resignation, shrugged shoulders, and "the young people have all left" spoken as a matter of fact rather than a problem to solve suggest a community that has accepted its trajectory and is simply waiting it out.

If there are other foreigners in the village, talk to them too, but weigh their perspective carefully. Someone who bought a holiday home and visits four weeks a year has a very different experience from someone who lives there full-time through winter. The holiday buyer may love the village precisely because it is empty and quiet. That is not the same thing as the village being viable.

When Dying Villages Work

None of this means that buying in a declining village is automatically a mistake. For certain people with specific expectations, it can be exactly the right choice.

If you are seeking genuine solitude and self-sufficiency, a depopulating village offers it in abundance. Few neighbours, no noise, no tourist crowds, dramatic landscapes, and property prices that make ownership possible on a modest budget. If you are buying a holiday home that you will visit for a few weeks each year and do not depend on local infrastructure or community, the declining population may not affect your experience at all. If your budget genuinely cannot stretch beyond the ultra-cheap properties, and you understand exactly why they are cheap and what that means for resale, services, and daily life, then making an informed choice to buy there is perfectly reasonable.

The problems arise when people buy in dying villages without understanding the trajectory. They imagine the empty house next door will be bought and restored by another friendly foreigner. They imagine the closed bar will reopen. They imagine a community forming around the handful of new arrivals. Sometimes that happens. The Sextantio albergo diffuso project in Santo Stefano di Sessanio turned abandoned medieval buildings into a boutique hotel concept and attracted attention worldwide. But Santo Stefano sits in the Gran Sasso national park adjacent to Campo Imperatore, two hours from Rome, and is designated one of Italy's most beautiful villages. Most depopulating comuni in Abruzzo have none of those advantages.

The honest test is this: if you would be happy in this village even if nothing improved, even if the population continued to shrink, even if the nearest shop moved further away, even if you were the only person under 70 on your street, then it works for you. If your happiness depends on things getting better, you are making a bet that the data says you will almost certainly lose.