The villages the state tried to move

In 1952 the cave dwellings of Matera were called Italy's national shame. Law 619 of 17 May 1952 ordered them cleared: around seventeen thousand people, two thirds of the city, were moved into new districts over some twenty years, and the caves were walled up. In 1993 the same Sassi were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and in 2019 Matera was European Capital of Culture. The state that emptied them turned them into its most photographed image.

Source: Legge 619/1952; UNESCO

In 1935 the mayor of Calcata registered the village among those to be relocated under a 1908 law on settlements threatened by landslide. Anyone moving within ten years would receive a hundred square metres in the new site, free. Nobody went. Two laws in 1939 protected the place as a historic and landscape asset, the new village was finished in 1959, and from the 1960s artists from Rome moved into the houses the state had condemned. They are still there.

Source: visitcalcata.it; Regione Lazio

Under the landslide laws of 1902 and 1908 the inhabitants of Roscigno were ordered to a new settlement a kilometre or two down the road. The move took decades and the mass exodus came in the 1960s. The square, the church, the fountain and the houses stayed exactly where they were. For over twenty years one man, Giuseppe Spagnuolo, refused to leave and became the face of the place in dozens of reports. He died on 20 January 2024, and the square is now genuinely empty.

Source: visitcilento.com; Quotidiano Nazionale, 2024

In March 2012 the mayor of Falciano del Massico, in the province of Caserta, signed an order forbidding his citizens to die. The cemetery was full and a legal dispute had blocked construction of the new one. The town has had no cemetery of its own since 1964. The order is still in force, and will lapse only when the new cemetery opens.

Source: Il Post, 7 August 2025

On 19 June 2026 the mayor of Norbello in Sardinia, population about 1,100, signed an order titled Vietato ammalarsi, requiring citizens to recover on their own in the shortest possible time and recommending positive thinking, physical and moral resistance and, failing that, luck. The text declares its own provocative intent. The village has no resident doctor.

Source: TGcom24, 19 June 2026

Morterone, in the province of Lecco, has 30 residents. Its historic maximum was 399, in 1921. It still has a mayor, a council and a budget.

Source: Istat via geopop.it; LeccoToday

Italy has been depopulating for a century and legislating about it for just as long. The results are less tidy than either the laws or the brochures suggest.