The current ARTE documentary "Italy: When a Birth Becomes an Event" tells the story of a place where church bells rang out after ten years of silence to mark a birth It concerns the small Molisan village of Montemitro, where a young family sparked an event that has come to symbolise the situation faced by rural Italy as a whole: the return of a child to a village that had not issued a single birth certificate in a decade. What makes Montemitro so remarkable, why the village has its own Croatian dialect, and how it is holding its ground against the demographic collapse affecting Molise, explored in this portrait.
Ten years without a child
On 25 September 2015, a child was born in Montemitro for the last time, a girl. After that, the church bells of Santa Lucia fell silent for new life. As the regional newspaper Il Nuovo Abruzzo e Molise documents, the next birth in Montemitro did not follow until around ten years later, with the arrival of a little boy whose parents gave him the symbolically resonant name Libero Luigino. For a village of only around 270 inhabitants, the birth of a child is not merely a private event but a public message: someone is still living here, there is still a future here.
The community's response was fitting. The bells of the Chiesa madre Santa Lucia rang out in celebration, the older women of the village set about weaving the corredino, the child's layette, on an ancient loom from the village museum, and the entire community took part in a social celebration that extended far beyond the immediate family. The boy bears two eloquent Names: Libero (the Italian word for "free") as a statement of intent for a life in a place that knows nothing of the confines of urban anonymity, and Luigino as a link to family tradition.
The Giorgetta family and the reopened butcher's shop
The story of the parents is a model for the process of returnthat Italy's inland villages need if they are to survive. Emanuela grew up in Montemitro, lived for many years in the Bresciano in the north, and then returned. Rocco, her childhood friend, had stayed in the village. As adults, they found their way back to each other, married in a ceremony in which the entire community took part, and decided to remain in the village. As the news agency ANSA noted in its coverage, the two reopened a butcher's shop that had closed down, thereby reviving a traditional craft in the village.
Libero was not born in the village itself, but at the Ospedale San Timoteo in Termoli, the nearest hospital on the Adriatic coast. In Montemitro itself, the newest resident was welcomed by the local parish priest, Don Pietro, and the village community.
A Croatian-speaking village in Molise
Montemitro is part of a small and little-known linguistic minority in Italy. Together with the neighbouring municipalities of Acquaviva Collecroce and San Felice del Molise, it forms the group of three Molise-Croatian settlements in which Slavomolisano, referred to by its own speakers as na-našo (Montemitro is known within it as Mundimitar), is still actively spoken. The language is a remnant of Croatian migration from the 15th and 16th centuries, when families from present-day Dalmatia fled the Ottoman conquests across the Adriatic and found a new home in the sparsely populated mountain hinterlands of Molise.
The cultural connection to Croatia continues to be fostered at an institutional level to this day. Montemitro is home to an honorary consulate of the Republic of Croatia and celebrates the feast day of Saint Lucia not on the canonical 13 December, but on the first and last Friday of May, in commemoration of the ancestors' historic crossing of the Adriatic. The Chiesa madre Santa Lucia Vergine e Martire houses a small museum of historical artefacts belonging to the community, curated by the parish, which documents the cultural continuity between the two shores of the Adriatic.
Molise: Italy's dying region
The context in which Libero's birth takes place is one of the most dramatic in Italy. As the local portal Primonumero reports, citing the ISTAT report on demographic indicators, the Molise region is recording one of the steepest population declines in Italy, with a loss of 6.5 per mille per year, the second-worst figure in the country after Basilicata. The birth rate stands at just 1.02 children per woman, the second lowest in Italy after Sardinia, and the internal migration balance is also deeply negative, as young people leave the South for northern and central Italy.
The consequences are tangible. As the news portal isnews reports, among the 358 Italian municipalities that recorded not a single birth in 2023, no fewer than 14 are in Molise, nine of them in the province of Campobasso. The region as a whole has fallen from 330,516 inhabitants in 2020 to 289,224 at the end of 2024, a loss of around 12 per cent in four years. Against this backdrop, the birth of a single child in a village of 270 souls is more than a family matter: it becomes a symbolic act of resistance against the gradual dissolution of the territory.
What visitors will find in Montemitro
The village is situated in the province of Campobasso, around 40 kilometres inland from the Adriatic coast near Termoli, on a hill at 508 metres close to the River Trigno. It is reached from the A14 motorway via the Vasto Sud exit, or from Termoli via the provincial roads of the Molise hinterland. A few hours are sufficient for a visit: the historic centre is compact, the Chiesa Santa Lucia with its small village museum is the principal attraction, and the view from the hilltop stretches far across the dry Molise landscape with its furrows and fields.
Those who visit the region will find a network of small villages with an intact everyday culture, where community life remains manageable and relationships between residents play a central role. Among the structural challenges facing the region is the question of how the remaining inhabitants can keep the village attractive for young returnees and potential newcomers, through initiatives in the areas of crafts, gastronomy and regional viticulture. The movement is small, but the return of Emanuela and Rocco shows that the alternative to leaving the village need not necessarily be the anonymity of the city.
