Ferriere, in Emilia-Romagna, has lost five residents out of six since 1951. Depopulation tracks altitude, not latitude.
The Italian municipality that has lost the most residents since 1951 is not in Calabria. It sits high in the Apennines above Piacenza, in Emilia-Romagna, one of the richest regions of the country. It is called Ferriere. At the first census of the Republic it counted 6,469 people. Today 1,081 are left, and five out of every six have gone.
The news of the week is a different one: Istat has restarted its rolling census, and town halls from Frosinone southward are hiring field surveyors. The headlines picked a number, Calabria losing more than thirty-three thousand people in a single year. That figure is real. But the long count, the one that starts after the war, draws a different map of depopulation, and it does not follow the line from Rome to Naples.
Population at each census, 1951-2026. Source: DatiItalia, Istat data
Below Ferriere, in the ranking of the steepest falls since the war, the names come from the whole peninsula. There is Farini, the next village along. There is Crognaleto, clinging to the Gran Sasso above Teramo. There is Novara di Sicilia, up in the Peloritani mountains. And there is Mammola, in the Aspromonte, which held 10,840 people in 1951 and counts 2,335 today. North, centre and south, one under the other in the same table.
The thread that binds them is not the parallel. It is the altitude. The places that have emptied are the mountain and inland-hill towns, far from the industrial valleys and the beaches. Up there the old-age index reaches the highest values in Italy and the birth rate the lowest: few children, many funerals, and the young leaving at twenty. Castelmauro in Molise, San Donato di Ninea in the Cosenza hills, Petrella Salto near Rieti trace the same curve hundreds of kilometres apart.
Population change from the 1951 census to today, towns above 1,000 residents. Source: DatiItalia, Istat data
The same census that emptied the mountains has swollen the suburbs. Fonte Nuova, on the edge of Rome, was a hamlet of 583 souls in 1951. Today it holds 32,787, a rise of 5,523%, the biggest jump in the country. Next door, Ardea and Pomezia have multiplied their populations twentyfold. And the north tells the same story: Rozzano, on Milan's southern rim, has gone from 2,701 to 41,724 residents.
This is not only about big cities. Policoro, on the Ionian coast of Basilicata, grew by 1,956%, from 862 to 17,727 people, as families came down from the hills toward the plain and the sea. The long tail of today's most populous towns is made of these young places, while population density crumbles inland. The census is not counting a country that is vanishing. It is counting one that has moved.
Total population at each census, 1951-2026. Source: DatiItalia, Istat data
Istat's projections to 2050 do not correct the trend. They deepen it, and ever further north. The steepest fall forecast is Rocca de' Giorgi, in the province of Pavia, in Lombardy: from 45 to 18 people in twenty-five years, almost two thirds gone. Behind it stretches a line of Alpine and Apennine hamlets, almost all northern.
Nationally, the peak is already behind us. Italy reached its high point in 2019, then went into reverse, and has since lost almost seven hundred thousand residents in seven years, as if a city the size of Palermo had been wiped off the map. The rolling census exists to count them as they leave, one by one.
Ferriere, meanwhile, stopped waiting long ago for anyone to come back. The question the next census will put to 7,896 municipalities is the same one: who stays, and where.