Conference Program

Over recent decades, many rural and inner areas of Southern Europe (San-Martín and Vaya, 2024), and particularly of Southern Italy (Pugliese, 2002), have been affected by progressive depopulation and what has been described as anthropological desertification. Despite its profound impact, this phenomenon has remained largely marginal in public debate, often overshadowed by media and political attention focused primarily on incoming migration flows and securitized border management. Yet, a closer look at regional dynamics reveals a significant hemorrhage: a continuous and systemic outflow of young people toward the more developed areas of the Global North. This process deprives local territories of their youngest, most educated, and potentially innovative population.

Southern Italy represents an emblematic example of this crisis. According to the 2024 SVIMEZ Report, approximately 200,000 university graduates left the South over the past decade in search of better opportunities in Central and Northern Italy. Despite territorial rebalancing initiatives, such as the National Strategy for Inner Areas, public policies appear largely incapable of counteracting a trend that has become increasingly structural and deeply rooted.

Alongside this critical scenario, however, recent ethnographic research conducted in Sicily within the project A European Desert? has highlighted a countervailing phenomenon: a growing number of young people consciously choose to remain in their places of origin. This choice does not amount to passive resistance but rather takes the form of active political and cultural engagement. Such practices resonate with the concept of Restanza, developed by anthropologist Vito Teti (2011, 2024). Restanza does not imply renouncing the future; instead, it represents a way of building it by anchoring it in the present and in sites of memory. It constitutes a generative and resilient response to experiences of marginality.

The “right to remain$” thus entails the creation of concrete conditions that make it genuinely possible to choose to live and build one’s future in one’s place of origin. This perspective does not moralize the decision to leave or remain but rather claims a form of real freedom: the ability to leave or return without being driven by economic necessity or a lack of alternatives. From this viewpoint, the right to mobility must be accompanied by a right to rootedness.

Experiences of restanza in Sicily reveal young people engaged in cultural, agricultural, artistic, and cooperative projects that combine tradition and innovation. Through these practices, an “alternative modernity” emerges, challenging symbolic hierarchies between North and South. The Mediterranean, often conceived as a margin or borderland, is thus reconfigured as a vibrant political and cultural space in which categories such as belonging, development, and marginality are profoundly renegotiated. Far from being an inert area, Southern Italy appears as a laboratory for new forms of modernity grounded in care, creativity, and permanence.