Desolate Alps

A mari supero ad inferum. The Alps were so called from the ancient writers who defined the limits of the Alpine mountains from the higher sea, the Adriatic, to the lower one, the Tyrrhenian. The long and wide Alpine valleys have been important penetration grooves that allowed the intercommunication between several populations. Populations who dominated the apparently impenetrable surrounding nature, stabilizing along the waterways until the most remote peaks. Before long, the Alps went from a demographic saturation during the Middle Ages to a rapid depopulation from the XVIII century.

In the last decades the Alpine mountain area has lived increasing emigration directed principally towards more developed urban areas and oversea countries. The abandonment of these lands has caused a loss in cultural values that have characterized the area for centuries, the growth of the phantom cities’ number and a general deterioration of the rural environment. Mountains are slowly “dying” due to government negligence, the negative image that it has spread out and the advancement of nature which makes impervious most of the areas and no more human accessible. What to do to reestablish a relationship with the mountains, making them “livable” again?

Until the XV century, the Alps were the European territory more densely populated, considered a central point for entire Europe. Thousand of several communities have lived the Alpine mountains, characterizing each territory with different specific languages, cultures, rules, traditions. Their existence was based around the capacity to establish a mutual relationship with the surrounded nature, becoming arbitrary figures of entire ecosystems.

The onset of the capitalistic economy and the rise of the mechanical work brought an economic and social derangement on these territories, considered areas with unfavourable development conditions. The depopulation phenomenon has been focused mostly in the oriental Alps, including Italians, Slovenian and Austrian alpine regions. In these lands, the rapid decrease of newborns, the direct consequence of the emigration, the inaccessibility of several areas and their regression and more generally, the diverse economic issues, have been key factors in the phenomenon’s advancement.

Sources: Zucca, M.,(2006), Le Alpi. La gente. Antropologia delle piccole comunità. Movimenti demografici. Condizione femminile. Prospettive di sviluppo. / Löffler, R., Beismann, M., Walder, J., Warmuth, W., Steinicke, E., Čede, P. & Jelen, I., (n.g.), Il nuovo problema demografico delle Alpi.

Despite every attempt to enhance "popular culture", words such as "mountain man", "country", "farmer" maintain their negative charge, their meaning of backwardness and, inability to adapt to the world that changes. Nevertheless, new mountaineers , or amenity migrants, are settling more and more on the alpine areas. People who knowingly undertake a new life in the mountains, who abandon cities located in external areas, and who therefore can contribute to the revitalization and the maintenance of peripheral mountain settlements, generating a population exchange between those who leave the lands and those who settle. The newcomers bring renovation and counteract the aged population and the drop of births, strengthening the cultural and social structures of the mountain community. Below you can find some cultural and social projects that have somehow given visibility to the forgotten Alps and / or contrasted the lack of credibility by creating new opportunities.