Massiola is a village that is slowly dying

The black letters painted on the walls – announcing the “hostelry” and the “bar” – are fading to nothing. Both have been closed for decades. There’s no building work going on either: in one garden a cement mixer has been rotated upwards, painted yellow and turned into a plant pot. Many of the houses are empty and have hand-written For Sale signs on their front doors.

This is Massiola, a mountain village 772 metres above sea level, west of Lake Maggiore in the northern Italian region of Piedmont. It’s a beautiful place. Alleyways snake between houses with terraced gardens. The air smells of manure and woodsmoke. But apart from the crash of the river in the valley below and the clang of distant cowbells, it’s eerily silent. “There’s no one here any more,” says one old man. No babies have been born since 2015; 23 residents have died. Since the turn of the century the population has dropped from 173 to just 117.

Massiola is slowly dying and it’s easy to see why. It seems better suited to a simpler age: the central road is so narrow, you have to park your car at one end. Phone reception is iffy. In 2020 a landslide crashed through the middle of the village and its last remaining shop. Since then, bread has been left for residents in a cupboard under the arches of the parish church.

It was very different in the first couple of decades after the second world war. With a population of about 350, the village had a sawmill and specialised in making wooden spoons and pins for wine barrels. There was a nearby marble mine, and tin, pewter and aluminium works closer to Omegna, a town farther down the valley.

“It was so different back then,” says Renzo Albertini, 74, the down-to-earth mayor of the village. “In the mid-60s there were two food shops, three bars, the hostelry, 200 sheep.”

Via The Guardian