In Rodengo, above Bolzano, 20.3 births per thousand — a national record. In Sassari, 1,400 people died in 2025 and 483 were born.
Italy's most fertile town is not a city. It sits at 928 metres, above Bressanone in the province of Bolzano, and it is called Rodengo: 1,283 residents. Here the birth rate reaches 20.3 births per thousand people, the highest in the country. The national average is below ten. While newspapers describe Italy's demographic winter as a shared fate, the town-by-town figures say something else. The cold did not fall everywhere with the same force.
The headlines dwell on empty cradles and rules for freezing eggs. But the real freeze is already on the map: towns where children keep being born, and towns whose last primary-school class closed years ago.
Birth rate per thousand residents, towns above 1,000 people. Source: DatiItalia — based on ISTAT data
Keep one number in mind: on average, every Italian town records 45 births a year and 83 deaths. Barely half as many people are born as die. That is where the game is decided, not in the baby bonuses.
And yet geography overturns the uniform story. In Rodengo the old-age index is 90.5 — fewer than one elderly person per young one, a third of the national figure near 291. The town's average age is 40, eight years below the rest of Italy. It is not a lone Alpine quirk: in Castelbello-Ciardes, Verano and Silandro the birth rate stays above thirteen per thousand. Something holds beyond the Alps too — San Costantino Calabro, near Vibo Valentia, nears sixteen per thousand, and Scala above Amalfi passes thirteen. The collapse has precise exceptions, and they are almost always small towns.
On the other side of the same island lies the opposite case, the one in the news. In Sassari, 483 babies were born in 2025 and 1,400 people died: nearly three deaths for every cradle. With 120,510 residents, the Sardinian city loses a small village every year, and projections put it below one hundred thousand within two decades. Its local old-age index, 291, matches the Italian average almost to the decimal. Sassari is the Italy that grows old; Rodengo is the exception.
The hardest cases sit in mountain towns no one names. In Farini, in the Piacenza Apennines, there are 1,053 elderly for every hundred young people, and the average age reaches 59.7 — the highest in the country. There the question is no longer births. It is whether the town survives.
Old-age index: elderly per 100 young people, towns above 1,000 residents. Source: DatiItalia — based on ISTAT data
The national average hides two Italies drifting apart: one that has children, one that closes its schools. Before believing in a winter shared by all, look up the figures for the place where you live.