(12/9/99)
VASTOGIRARDI, Italy: The smoky Bar Centrale in the southern Italian village of Vastogirardi may soon be left without its most devoted customers.
Concerned about a demographic decline that risks wiping his village off the map, Mayor Vincenzo Venditti has warned Vastogirardi's die-hard bachelors to get married and start having bambini or face a hefty tax.
'The situation is truly dramatic and it is reaching the point of no return. Unless we have more babies, I will soon be forced to close our school. And a village without a school is as good as dead,' Mr Venditti said.
Last year, funerals in Vastogirardi outnumbered births 30 to one and only two newborn babies were expected by the end of this year. Weddings are so rare that they draw crowds of up to 400 people, or half the village's present population.
'I have thought of everything, even of subsidising nappies and making holes in condoms,' Venditti said.
'The idea of a tax on bachelors seems reasonable to me as singles live with their parents and have fewer expenses.'
Venditti's proposal of a five-million-lire levy ($A3,827) on Vastogirardi's 70 single men is unlikely to be enacted due to constitutional considerations.
However, it has already succeeded in provoking a vibrant debate on family life among his citizens as well as attracting hordes of journalists to Vastogirardi, known for its delicate Mozzarella cheese and little else.
Since the village made international headlines, dozens of lonely spinsters have written to the mayor inquiring about the availability of the village bachelors, who have no plan to marry and have every intention of continuing meeting in Bar Centrale to play cards and talk about football.
Settled continually for 2,000 years in the Pennine hills of the Molise region, Vastogirardi has seen its population plummet from 3,000 residents in the 1960s to 823 today.
The village no longer has a local plumber or a carpenter. It used to have a makeshift cinema, which has also shut down. So has the local fruit shop, with villagers being forced to drive 30 km to buy groceries. Only the liquor store remains.
This is a typical example of scores of dying villages in a nation that features a birth rate of just 1.2 children per woman, the lowest in the world.
In the aftermath of a rapid transition from a predominantly agrarian society to an urban one, Italians no longer see children as an investment but as a cost, and an impediment to card-playing.
According to research think tank Censis, over 20 per cent of Italian couples are childless, up from 18.8 per cent at the end of the 1980s. They also marry much later and, on average, women give birth to their first child at the age of 28, compared to 25 two decades ago.
Financial difficulties are often cited as explanations for the unwillingness to bear children. Unlike France and Britain, the Italian State offers very little in the way of tax incentives and subsidies to families.
Economic factors do not explain, however, why couples in the more affluent north have fewer children than in the high unemployment regions of the south.
Sociologists instead point to Italy's culture of 'mammoni', which describes the unwillingness of grownup children to leave their mothers.
'It's not because you don't meet the right one, its purely a question of laziness,' said Antonio Bisciotti, 29 and still single, as he downed a Campari at Bar Centrale.
'In Vastogirardi we like to remain single. If someone gets married, we have one less card player, a real drama. We are afraid of tying the knot and losing our autonomy because having a family is much harder than living with mama and papa.'
His friend Fernando Di Ciocco, 29, says he would like to marry. But for the moment, he prefers to share his parents' house with his two bachelor brothers, aged 33 and 35.
'I am going to get married soon and have two children,' stepped in Giuseppe Di Benedetto, a 40-year-old forest ranger who has been engaged to the same woman for 15 years.
'If only,' replied the mayor, his hands joined in prayer and his glance raised towards the heavens.