In 2022 the population of the province decreased by 2 thousand peopleas if a town the size of Castello d’Annone had disappeared.
In 2023, history repeats itself: they are missing around 1,600 people, that is, a town the size of Tigliole.
Added to all this is another fact: out of 137,430 homes in the province, 43,731 are empty, that is, one in three.
With percentages reaching 66 percent in the towns of the extreme south of Asti, such as Roccaverano, where two out of three houses are uninhabited.
A handful of families remain living in the old village of Castell’Alfero.
The closure of factories, such as Askoll which employed many Castellalfera residents, has depopulated entire towns.
So the inhabitants of the past move and the second home remains in the village, often the result of an inheritance.
In the countryside surrounding the municipalities of Asti things are a little better, with a flow of foreigners arriving in Monferrato. As migrants, from the South of the world, but also as investors from the North.
AND the design of a province that is changing its face: increasingly depopulatedwith more abandoned houses and which is saved by arrivals from abroad.
In 2023, 1,994 people arrived and 779 left, as if a country the size of Montechiaro (about 1,200 inhabitants) entirely populated by foreigners.
Not even the capital escapes this law and reaches 73,797 inhabitants at the end of 2023 thanks above all to the arrival of 667 foreigners and certainly not thanks to births, exceeded by deaths of 397 people.
Abdullah Tahoui has been in Asti for a few years: «I managed to open a small supermarket in via Pavese about a year ago and I’m not complaining». Abdullah had arrived from Morocco with his five children and wife. “My daughter is married, my eldest son is a street vendor and the three youngest are studying.”
Second Enrico Ercole, associate professor of Sociology at the University of Eastern Piedmontthe data must be analysed: «In the 1980s there were 220 thousand inhabitants in the province, then in 2000 they dropped to 208 thousand and rose again in 2012 with over 220 thousand presences, now we are in a declining phase with 207 thousand people residing in the our province.”
A swing in attendance that demographics consider normal. «Today’s empty cradles are the result of a cultural change – explains the sociologist –, if once having a dozen children was the norm because it was not known how many would survive and they were labor for work in the fields, now this is no longer the case».
Times have changed, infant mortality has been eliminated and very few people are farmers compared to the past. Foreign communities are still having children: “For now yes – confirms the sociologist – but soon they will encounter the same problems as us”.
We live longer but we die more: it seems like a paradox. «It is not – says Ercole – the boom in deaths refers to people who were born in years when the birth rate was higher».
What will be the end point of this moment of transformations? «A stable and inter-ethnic population – says LuiGi Berzano, professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Turin – in which foreigners will have brought their culture and learned from ours.”
But what will the demographic evolutions be? «They will settle while maintaining the constant of being changeable: after all we are talking about a “traveling animal” like the human being», concludes Berzano.
