ANDIt was made up of squares, courtyards, voices that chased each other from one balcony to another. The village was the circle. The border within which everyone spoke the same language, had the same roots and a shared history. Even the gestures and clothing were similar and recognizable, as well as the way of making breadweaving and embroidering, dancing, courting and raising children. And in that setting, motherhood was a collective experience. «Now, the traditional aggregating bodies, such as the parish or the courtyard, no longer represent the symbolic centers of belonging. In their place, emotional bonds, informal networks, practices of feeling emerge.” Professor Maria Antonietta Mongiu, intellectual and archaeologist, explains to us. «It is no longer an ideological constraint nor a univocal root that acts as a glue; they are plural identities, sometimes distant from each other, that choose each other freely and recognize each other in the gesture of a mutual and fruitful dialectic” continues Mongiu.
There writer Bianca Pitzorno he remembers what it was like to grow up in a “large” family: “There were four of us at home and the older brothers looked after the younger ones.” Her neighbors, she says, had eight children, yet in the afternoon her mother would pick up her husband from the studio and together, arm in arm, they would go to the cinema. «Today, in the frenzy of life, there is no longer room for such things. And so, even the couple’s relationship is sacrificed, swallowed up by daily urgencies».
The role of grandparents
But are eight children imaginable in our time?
«In Italy, and even more so in those lands of the South that appear on the margins of collective memory, large-scale parenthood is no longer conceivable. Not because the desire for a family has disappeared, but because parents are left alone, without structural and concrete support. Grandparents find themselves making up for the absence of a social body that has retreated” concludes Mongiu. Now, that archetypal village seems to have passed and its dissolution has deep roots, linked to the socio-economic transformation of the country.
Since the Second World War, Italy has experienced a slow but constant process of depopulation of small towns. Industrialization, agricultural mechanization and the concentration of services in large cities have triggered an exodus that has emptied villages and hamlets. According to Istat data, from 1951 to today, over two thousand Italian municipalities have lost more than 60 percent of their population. Small towns, once autonomous and vital cells, have seen schools, health services and public transport closed. Today the phenomenon repeats itself. Every year thousands of young people move from the provinces to metropolitan cities in search of opportunities. According to the “Annual Report 2024” of the Symbola Foundationmore than 40 percent of under 35s live permanently far from their municipality of origin.
Higher fertility in cities
In the 1960s, sociologist Marshall McLuhan anticipated one of the greatest transformations of contemporary society: the advent of the global village. With this expression, coined in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), McLuhan prophesied a world in which electronic technologies, especially television, they would have shortened geographical distancesputting people in instant communication, as if they all lived in the same village. But this large “village 2.0” does not seem to be enough at all. The data speaks clearly: in 2024, 370 thousand children were born in Italy. We are at an all-time low. The fertility rate has fallen to 1.18 children per woman, far from the replacement rate of 2.1 (Istat 2024). Demographer Alessandra Minello of the University of Padua offers us an interpretation of the phenomenon: «Fertility is higher in urban areas than in internal areas. It is a circular process: people who want to have more children move to where there are already children, services and attention to children. The “vertical” family model – where grandparents and even great-grandparents were active figures in care – has entered into crisis.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini had already intuited this in 1975writing in The Void of Power: «What is happening is not a development. It is an anthropological mutation. Peasant Italy has been destroyed, and with it the sense of the sacred and of community.” However, physical closeness does not always guarantee emotional closeness, and we often feel excluded even in our own land, he explains the philosopher Donatella Di Cesare in “Resident foreigners”: «Belonging is not automatic, but always negotiated, relational, sometimes painfully denied».
Towns and hamlets have emptied. A slow but unstoppable movement. Yet communities that share roots and aspirations are not destined to die (Getty Images)
Motherhood discovers new identities
Today, in the midst of that announced revolution, one question remains open: but is there still a village? «It certainly exists» states the composer Paolo Fresu. «Because villages are made up, even before houses, of thoughts and passions to share. Of ideas that should always close the villages not with fences but with visions and dreams.” But in this new “virtual agora”, is it possible to build deep relationships? Ludivine Clement, a young mother who left Paris for Rome, says: «When I got pregnant, I had only recently been in Italy, I found myself isolated, far from my network of loved ones, a real “leap into the void”. As I faced practical and cultural challenges, such as giving birth in a new language, I made a discovery: that sense of isolation and feeling “foreign” is, in reality, a universal feeling that every new mother has in common. Because motherhood is a journey that changes usin any land, forcing us to discover a new identity. The new friendships born out of necessity became my chosen family, which transformed an initial solitude into an unexpected and tender home away from home.”
Perhaps we still have to learn to balance between these two worlds: the digital one, fast and always on, and the slow one, made up of waiting, glances, gestures, silences. In balance between the desire to belong to a traditional village model that has now almost completely dissolved, which persists as an echo of an idealized past, and the acceptance that new forms of familiarity can arise and are the ones that we build, as Mongiu says, “by choice”.
We all share the need to belong
The need to belong, to know one another and to love is intrinsic in human beings. An ancient instinct, which resists even in a frenetic, individualistic and hyper-connected society. According to the most accredited psychological literature, in fact, there is what scholars call “need to belong”, a natural and profound need to feel part of stable and meaningful bonds. Formalized in 1995 by psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, this concept states that seeking social connection is a primary psychological need, as much as food or sleep. When this need is frustrated, not only emotional balance is affected, but also mental and physical health. This is why, even today, in the era of digital villages and liquid relationships, what really remains, and resists, is the desire to be seen, heard, welcomed. Because, ultimately, the village is within us. And that fire around which, once upon a time, we gathered to tell stories can still exist: today, over a coffee at the bar near the house, or in the warmth of a sincere message. The village lives wherever two or more people decide to listen to each other. And as long as there is even one heart willing to welcome the other, that village, old and new at the same time, will never cease to exist.