We’ve often joked that living in Europe in our 20s ruined us for life.
America does creature comforts like nowhere else – 24/7 Target, Amazon delivery, Instacart and Grubhub – but in our opinion Europe does beauty, human-scale architecture, and charming simplicity better than we do here.
But is that necessarily true? Could the US create a culture of walkable streets, sun-drenched squares, Advent markets, and town festivals like they do in Europe? Or is that a relic of the pre-automobile, pre-suburban era that can never be replicated here?
We’d like to think it is still possible, so a major theme of this newsletter will be showcasing US organizations and towns that are bucking the trend of suburban sameness as well as preserving or reviving a culture of festivals and other community-building activities. An organization doing magnificent work in this regard is Strong Towns. We hope to feature their work in the future.
At the same time, we are on the lookout for Europe-based organizations and individuals who are reviving dying towns and sometimes even the artisan crafts and traditions that grew around them. Why? Well, it’s hard to put into words, but we both found profound peace at different times in our lives when we experienced the slower rhythms of European life, walked to the bakery for fresh bread, experienced the joy of a festival of a village saint day, and learned about craftsmanship handed down through the generations.
On both continents, the demands of the economy have drained small population centers for over a century, but for the first time in decades there are signs that this trend may be reversed, due to the increasing feasibility of remote work online.
Such an amenity will not be available to everyone and will rely on broadband infrastructure (or SpaceX satellites), but we’re such big fans of underdog and comeback stories that we’d like to cheerlead such initiatives wherever we find them.
Today’s newsletter will provide a bird’s eye view of some of our research thus far. In future editions we hope to delve deeper into these stories, and hopefully find more through reader suggestions and tips.
Who Will Save These Dying Italian Towns?
A 2017 article with that title by the writer Deborah Needleman in the New York Times Magazine made a profound impact on us. It was one of the main inspirations for this newsletter and even started us on a path toward new jobs and a move to a lower cost of living area in hopes of eventually participating in the movement to save places like the ones featured in the article.
Needleman writes:
For all the ancient Italian hill towns and villages that delight the traveler — the San Gimignanos, Montepulcianos and Fiesoles — there are scores of others (many equally or more beautiful) where few venture and in which very few reside today.
But when these towns die, it’s not just the population that suffers: so too do the unique traditions and skills associated with each place, as well as the landscape that supported them. […] What is particular to Italy, however, is the exquisite architectural character of its hill towns, as well as the quality of the handiwork and traditions that were born, cultivated and perfected here. These towns and their craftsmanship are what we think of when we think of Italy — as fundamental to the country’s identity as its important cities and grand artistic legacies. It isn’t far-fetched to say that what’s at risk of being lost with their obsolescence is nothing less than Italy’s rural soul.
So who is saving these towns? She profiles three towns: Civita di Bagnoregio, Sutera, and Santo Stefano di Sessanio. Civita di Bagnoregio is kept alive via tourists as well as wealthy Italians and US expats who have purchased and restored homes in the town center. Sutera has been revived by an influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, and Santo Stefano di Sessanio is the labor of love of an Italian millionaire, Daniele Kihlgren, who has turned part of the town into an albergo diffuso – a hotel spread out over various restored buildings.
Needleman ends a section asking “If there are movements devoted to slow food and slow flowers and slow living, why not add slow travel into the mix?” And it does seem that a quick solution for dying towns is to leverage tourism to at least make these towns known to outsiders, and then hope that – as happened in Civita di Bagnoregio – some visitors will purchase homes and become residents.
In another case, it was the labor of love of an Italian millionaire that kept Santo Stefano di Sessanio alive. Needleman writes beautifully that:
[Daniele] Kihlgren also recognized Santo Stefano as part of a delicate ecosystem, in which the town, the people, its cultural production and the countryside are inextricable from one another; as one falters or languishes, so too do the others. He realized that if he wanted traditional Abruzzo loom-woven wool blankets for his 60 beds, that meant he needed artisans to weave them, which required yarn to be spun, which implied sheep, who need shepherds, and farmland, and farmers. So it proceeds from the building materials used, to the construction techniques employed, to the ingredients and recipes served in the hotel’s restaurant down to the ceramic dishes they’re served on. This cycle, which connects land to people, is what keeps Santo Stefano from becoming a chic version of Colonial Williamsburg.
This story fascinated us, and we hope to find out more about what the people involved with these towns have been doing since the publication of that article.
Slow Tourism
From the Who Will Save These Dying Italian Towns story, it seems clear that tourism is the key solution to providing economic justification for these towns and artisanal traditions. Since many of these places are completely off the radar of big tour providers and are difficult to access from the major tourist hotspots in Italy, we’re interested in finding and promoting the tour guides who specialize in the less well-known parts of Italy and Europe.
Serendipitously, while researching some photos for this newsletter we came across a series of “Italian Zoom backgrounds” posted on the website of Creative Edge Travel [www.CreativeEdgeTravel.com]. We reached out to the founder, Sierra Busch, to ask permission to use the photos, which she graciously granted.
It turns out she specializes exactly in what we were looking for: tourism and cultural experiences in the less well-traveled parts of Italy. We look forward to learning more from her and from others about this topic.
Here’s an overview of her work:
And here are some of her beautiful pictures:
Migrant Stories
Just as Italians came to the United States around the turn of the 20th century, now many Africans and Middle Easterners are migrating to Italy. Some of Italy’s dying towns made headlines for welcoming these sojourners. How is that process going? What cultural enrichment is taking place. There are plenty of cherry-picked scare stories about migrants and immigration in Europe. We’d like to hear about and share the good news stories. Here is an academic article examining this issue.
Brunello Cucinelli
According to Needleman’s article, tourism and migration are two answers to “who will save these dying Italian towns,” and the third answer is: eccentric rich people.
Italian luxury cashmere sweater maker Brunello Cucinelli has been revitalizing the medieval town of Solomeo in Umbria for several decades. A 2010 profile by Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker captures the essence of his story: “a local boy made good, who is thought to be making the locale even better.” Cucinelli restored a medieval castle to serve as his company’s headquarters, and he practices and preaches a form of “humane capitalism” that enables his workers to live close to their place of work in Solomeo.
A recent Vanity Fair article by Cucinelli referenced his love for St Benedict and his work restoring the ancient monastery of the saint in Norcia, which had been badly damaged by an earthquake. We’d like to learn more about this restoration effort and we’ll keep you updated here.
Daniele Kihlgren
As previously mentioned, Kihlgren was featured in Needleman’s New York Times Magazine article, but further research surfaced fascinating interviews with him and profiles of his life’s work restoring the “minor patrimony” of Italy, by which he means the smaller, often overlooked parts of Italy that are off the beaten tourist path of Rome-Florence-Venice but which contain architectural, artisan, and gastronomical treasures themselves. Here are a few examples of what he is up to. We hope to learn more.
One Euro Houses
Italy is famous for offering “one euro homes” in semi-abandoned rural parts of the country. Reading the fine print it seems that there are a lot more costs associated with these ventures. We’re interested in finding out who has been following through on these offers? What has their experience been? Is it truly reviving local culture or is it just creating vacation homes for absentee landlords? We aim to find out.
Nomad Villages
COVID-19 has made work from home a necessity for many employees, which has in turn enabled work from home to become work from anywhere.
Several places around Europe are explicitly advertising themselves as “Digital Nomad Villages.” Santa Fiore in Italy and the Portuguese island of Madeira have recently made headlines in this regard. We hope to find out more about these initiatives.
A recent initiative by Gonçalo Hall, the founder of Startup Madeira, and the government of Madeira is promoting Madeira as Europe’s first “Digital Nomad Village” and is taking applications for individuals to work there during the spring of 2021.
Likewise, the town of Santa Fiora in Italy’s Tuscany region recently got broadband internet access and began marketing itself as a “smart working village.” It offered financial incentives to applicants who applied before the end of 2020 to come and work remotely in the village. We’ll try to find out how that and other initiatives are going.
AirBnB Initiatives
Similar to the digital nomad idea, a few years ago, AirBnB partnered with Italy’s Ministry of Tourism to promote small villages in Italy.
AirBnB also sponsored a program called “Casa di Artista” [Artist House] that brought designers to live in small Italian villages, one in Civita di Bagnoregio, ) and others in Lavenone and Sambuca di Sicilia.
How did that go? Are there any plans for successor initiatives? We’ll find out.
What are they conserving?
Another aspect of this topic we want to research is finding out what particularities of these dying towns people are trying to conserve and preserve? We are less interested in tourists or wealthy people moving into a town and bringing the same sensibilities with them as from wherever they came from. We want to find and highlight people doing the sometimes thankless work of preserving local cultural or artistic traditions that may not make a lot of economic sense but that would be lost to history otherwise.
We’re especially interested in people who have found economic solutions to the problem of dying towns and villages. One of life’s great pleasures is walking through the Italian food emporium Eataly, now found in several American cities. How many of their locally sourced products come from these towns? What are those stories, and can they be replicated?
Practical Considerations
Finally, we want to find out the practical things people need to consider if they are going to participate in this movement, whether as tourists, home buyers, retailers, or benefactors. We know almost nothing about this topic but hope to find out more.
We hope you enjoy this series. Please feel free to subscribe, donate to the causes mentioned here, and pass it on to friends.