The 'Lost Generation' Reaches a Region That Has Been Losing Them for Decades

The Guardian reported this week that Milan is bracing for further unrest, and framed the disturbances around a debate over Italy's 'lost generation'. Its correspondent described a sharp divide between marginalised and immigrant youth and those with greater prospects, and quoted a young woman who had been filming riot police beating a teenager in Piazza del Duomo. The paper's account places the anger in the country's richest city, among young people who expected more than they were given.

Molise has no Piazza del Duomo and no riot police to speak of. What it has is the other end of the same arithmetic. This is a region of roughly 289,000 people, and its young have been leaving for Milan, Bologna, Rome and abroad for generations, not because they were shut out of a boom but because there was never a boom to be shut out of.

The Guardian's framing — a generation told to expect a future and handed a dead end — is a familiar one in the foreign press. Read from Campobasso, the difference is that here the dead end is not a recent discovery. It is the reason the region's population curve has pointed downward for decades.

The Guardian's piece is careful to distinguish grievances: it notes the divide between those with prospects and those without, and it reports the violence in Milan's streets without claiming a single cause. That restraint is worth keeping. The unrest in Milan is not the same phenomenon as the slow emptying of an Apennine province, and it would be a mistake to claim the Molise young are rioting. They are not; they are leaving, which is quieter and less photogenic.

France 24, in a discussion broadcast this week, put the youth protests in Albania, Italy, France and India in what its guest called 'materialist terms', arguing that the wave reveals more than a succession of local grievances. The Local Italy, meanwhile, described 'generational rage' across Europe, from blockaded schools in Rome to tent camps in Madrid. Both pieces treat the anger as a demand for fairness — for wages that keep up, for housing, for a stake.

That demand has a specific shape in the deep South. The fairness the young of Molise ask for is not a share of the Milanese boom but the basic possibility of staying: a job that pays enough to keep a household, a clinic within reach, a school that does not close. The foreign coverage does not name Molise, and this dispatch does not claim it does. It simply notes that the conditions the papers describe as new in the cities are old here.

The Guardian's editorial this week argued that Europe's social contract has broken, and that an electoral supercycle over the next year may redefine the continent's future. Italy's next general election is due in 2027, and the Guardian's opinion pages have already begun handicapping it. What the region's voters will ask of whoever campaigns here is not the question Milan is asking. It is whether anyone intends to keep the lights on in the valley after the last bus.

There is a bitter symmetry in the coverage. The papers arrive in Molise to write about the villages that will pay you to move in, and they arrive in Milan to write about the young people who cannot afford to stay. Both are stories about the same country's failure to hold its young, told from opposite ends of the same train line. The Molise end has simply been telling it longer, and to fewer readers.