Journey to the real village of “A world apart”: this is how you resist depopulation

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It’s all as seen in the film “A world apart” , with Antonio Albanese. The central road divides the town lengthways, the ancient houses, Mount Marsicano and Mount Amaro draw the frame in the background and all around the woods of the Abruzzo National Park. In Riccardo Milani’s film, Rupe is a village that fights to save its school from closure to save itself. But Rupe doesn’t exist, it’s just a fictional name. In reality, Rupe is called Opi.

It has less than 400 souls, Opi. And no, the elementary school hasn’t been here for a few years now. The children go to Pescasseroli, a handful of kilometers further south. But like Rupe in fiction, and like all small mountain villages in reality, Opi also fights against the depopulation that affects the internal areas of the country, where many services are lacking and the local economy struggles to ensure a salary for everyone. Milani’s film has shined a light on realities like these and also offers its recipe for a possible way out. But how do we really resist depopulation today in Opi?

Tourism is the first link in the safety net. An intuition that comes from far away. «We can say that our municipality gave birth to the Abruzzo National Park in 1921, selling the first hundred hectares that started its construction” says the mayor, Antonio Di Santo. The ones who agreed, then, were the Honorable Erminio Sipari, a native of Abruzzo, and Don Alessandro Ursitti, parish priest of Opi and brother of the mayor, as in Guareschi’s best stories. Over the years, the activities linked to the Park – from the Forestry to the public administration offices – have been added to the more traditional sheep farming. Until tourism became the most important business, even capable of retaining some young people in the town: «In 2020 we were down to 370 residents – says the mayor – today we went back above 380». Antonio Di Santo himself is living proof that staying, for young people, is possible. The “remainder”, they call it in Milani’s film. You are 43 years old, have two young children and work as an accountant and auditor: «I was in Pescara, then in Milan, in the end I decided to return».

The first citizen in reality

The mayor of Opi, Antonio Di Santo

Even the Ursitti brothers, Ercole and Maria Adele, have returned in a certain sense. For eight generations their family did transhumance, the six winter months in the Tavoliere Foggia area, the others in the mountains of Opi. Then, once they finished school, they decided to become sedentary: «We kids no longer wanted the nomadic life, transhumance makes you feel like you belong to both places and neither», says Maria Adele, who is 42 years old.

So, together with her husband and brother, she reopened the old family home in the Pretali of Opi and filled the sheepfolds with 600 sheep: «We produce milk and cheese which we sell directly in our company shop – he says – not online, because it works better when tourists come directly to the place and together with the cheeses you also sell the history of the area”. Too bad the tourist season doesn’t last all year. How do you do it in winter? «We have organized ourselves – he explains – if the animals all give birth at Easter, lactation runs from April to the end of August and fits well with the presence of tourists in the town. We sell the bulk of the cheeses in the summer, we continue to sell the rest at the weekend until December, then we actually stop.”