The Young Leave, the Old Live Long: Italy Reported Through Its Extremes

Two foreign dispatches this week sit oddly beside each other, and the oddity is instructive. The Guardian reports from Bolotana, in the mountains of central Sardinia, a village in line to be recognised as the world's sixth blue zone for its remarkable number of female centenarians. Elsewhere in the same coverage, the streets of Milan fill with young people who say they cannot afford to live in the country they were born in. One story is about living a very long time. The other is about not being able to start.

The world has long been fond of the Sardinian story, and we do not begrudge it. Longevity is a genuine achievement, and the Guardian's account of sisterhood and community in the village is a warm one. But we would note what the blue-zone genre tends to leave out: the same mountain villages are among those steadily emptied of their young, kept alive in the winter by the old and in the summer by visitors. The centenarian and the emigrant are neighbours.

This is the demographic frame the foreign press returns to about Italy, and it is largely right. A low birth rate, an ageing population, and the steady departure of the educated young are not separate problems but a single one, and it shows up in the housing protests as surely as in the pension arithmetic. When the young say they are suffocating, part of what they mean is that the country has been arranged, for decades, around the comfort of those already settled.

The temptation in Rome is to answer each of these stories separately, with a policy for the villages and a policy for the cities and a policy for the birth rate. The better answer is to see them as one. A country that can keep a woman alive to a hundred in a mountain village ought to be able to offer her granddaughter a reason to stay. That is the question the world's coverage is really asking, and it will not be settled by troops in the piazza.