Pavese and Pasolini have stayed with me since I was eighteen. The first taught me that belonging and movement are not opposites: a place remains alive when it allows people to leave, gives them reasons to return and knows how to welcome those who arrive.
This article was originally published in Italian on Esco quando voglio.
“Un paese ci vuole, non fosse che per il gusto di andarsene via.” Roughly translated: “Everyone needs a place to belong, if only for the pleasure of leaving it.”
It is one of Cesare Pavese’s most frequently quoted lines, and also one of his most domesticated. It is used to celebrate roots, provincial life and the return home, often placed over a photograph of hills at sunset. But the decisive part is not only the paese. It is the leaving.
Pavese is not describing a static form of belonging. In the same sentence, he brings together the need for a place and the freedom to leave it. He then adds that having a paese means not being alone. Something of ours remains among its people, plants and land, capable of waiting for us even when we are no longer there.
He does not say that we must stay. He says that there must be a place with which distance does not erase the relationship.
At eighteen, for my maturità — Italy’s final high-school examination — I was already a miniature Catholic-liberal politician, a category that at that age exists mostly in the mind of the person concerned. I chose Pavese and Pasolini. It seemed very courageous to me at the time. In all probability, it was mainly a complicated way of making my final exams even more difficult.
I do not know how much I really understood them. Certainly less than I let on, as happens with nearly all graduating students and quite a few adults who no longer have even that excuse.
At the time, Pavese and Pasolini were treated almost as the intellectual property of the left. There were, of course, biographical, political and cultural reasons for placing them on that side. There was no reason to make them inaccessible to everyone else.
The paradox was that parts of the left quoted them frequently but read their own poets and prophets far too little, while on the other side their political labels often provided a convenient excuse not to read them at all. Two deeply uncomfortable writers were therefore left in the hands of those who had turned them into monuments — one of the most effective ways of no longer listening to what somebody actually wrote.
I had not chosen them simply to be contrary, and I have not carried them with me as two ideological holy cards. They became part of my recurring cultural vocabulary.
I continue to find them whenever I try to understand the real Italy beneath the Italy that is narrated: Pavese in the uneasy relationship between roots and departure; Pasolini in his suspicion of every modernisation automatically presented as progress, even when it erases places, languages and ways of life.
They were profoundly different, but neither allows us to hide behind comfortable words. A village is not innocent simply because it is small. The new is not good simply because it is new. And tradition does not deserve to survive merely because it is tradition.
These ideas appear simple. They are nevertheless sufficient to complicate almost every Italian debate.
It is significant that Pavese’s words about the paese belong to Anguilla, the protagonist of The Moon and the Bonfires. He is a foundling. He does not know where he was born. In those hills he owns no house, no plot of land and not even the bones of ancestors that might prove his origins. Yet this is precisely where he returns after many years in America.
His belonging does not come from blood, property or official registration. It was formed through living, remembering, leaving and returning.
It is difficult to imagine a more contemporary idea. We can belong profoundly to a place in which we were not born. We can have been born somewhere and no longer feel that it is ours. Our paese is not necessarily the place written on our birth certificate. Sometimes it is the place that continues to call us when we are elsewhere.
In the novel, the paese can be understood from a distance, after leaving it and comparing it with the rest of the world. Once Anguilla has truly seen the world, he discovers that it too is made up of many small towns and villages.
But returning does not magically reconstruct what existed before. The landscape remains recognisable, while people and history have transformed it. Anguilla loves those hills, but he also loves knowing that the world is round and keeping one foot on the gangplank.
There is no tourism-brochure village in Pavese: no happy place suspended in time, ready to welcome the visitor. There is something more truthful and more uncomfortable. We can belong to a place without owning it and without being able to inhabit it as we once did.
In Italian, moreover, paese is an extraordinarily ambiguous word. It can mean the village or town in which we grew up, but it can also mean the entire country. Perhaps this is why I continue to write about Italy, small towns, departures, returns and people arriving from elsewhere. The scale changes, but the question remains the same.
What makes a place ours? Birth, the time spent there, the freedom to leave, our memories, the way it receives us when we return? And when does it stop belonging to us?
This is also a very personal question. After thirty years abroad, with London as my more-or-less official base and a daily geography determined mainly by wherever I happen to be needed, I now answer the question “Where do you live?” with sentences full of subordinate clauses.
This is not necessarily evidence of great intellectual depth. More probably, it means that I am no longer capable of giving a short answer.
And yet movement has taught me that living elsewhere does not necessarily make us belong less. Sometimes we simply belong differently. Distance can weaken a bond, but it can also make it more conscious. Some things can be seen only after leaving; others can be understood only by returning.
A substantial part of the debate about small towns continues to present movement as a problem. Those who leave have abandoned their community. Those who stay are resisting. Those who arrive are expected to prove that they intend to remain forever.
This is a moral interpretation before it is a demographic one, and it is usually wrong.
Leaving can be an achievement or a necessity. Staying can be a freely chosen project or the absence of alternatives. A place does not fail because somebody leaves. It begins to fail when the range of possibilities becomes so narrow that leaving is the only viable project left.
The freedom to leave is therefore a measure of a place’s quality, not evidence of its defeat. Young people must be able to go away to study, find work elsewhere, fall in love with another city, travel and change their minds. Nobody is born owing the local population register a rescue mission.
If demonstrating love for the place where we grew up requires us to sacrifice our opportunities, that is not belonging. It is being held back.
A place that tries to hold on to people for fear of losing residents will often lose them anyway, together with any chance that they might one day wish to return.
We should also stop treating return as departure in reverse. Returning does not rewind a person’s life or place them back in the same social position they occupied before leaving.
Someone may return for a summer or a few months, to start a business, oversee a building project, care for their parents, work remotely or simply discover whether that place can once again become a tangible part of their life.
They may retain more than one base. They may leave again. They may not yet have decided — a widespread human condition that statistics and public administrations understandably struggle to fit into a box.
Circulation does not make our relationship with a place less authentic. Under contemporary conditions, it often makes that relationship possible.
This leads to a misunderstanding I encounter in almost every discussion about repopulation. We continue to measure the vitality of places almost exclusively through permanent registered residence, while actual lives have become much more mobile.
There are permanent residents, seasonal workers, people who spend one or three months in a place, families divided between several cities, international retirees, remote workers and potential new residents who first try living in an area and only later decide whether to stay.
These categories are not interchangeable. An overnight stay is not a change of residence. But the opposite is also true: temporary use is not permanent residence, yet it is not nothing.
It can support a shop, create a relationship, generate work or prepare the ground for a future decision. Precision matters because we should not turn every presence into a demographic miracle. At the same time, we should not erase everything that does not immediately appear in a municipal register.
People arriving from elsewhere also challenge our idea of belonging. We still tend to think that a place belongs first and foremost to those born there, as though birth conferred a permanent share of authenticity.
Anguilla should warn us against that assumption.
A place can become yours through presence, care, relationships and responsibility. Many people born abroad spend significant periods in Italian communities. They work there, describe what they see, circulate skills and build relationships.
This does not automatically make them the saviours of Italy’s villages, and they should not be counted as residents when they are not. But they are real presences, with different degrees of involvement and different consequences. They force us to move beyond the binary distinction between tourist and resident, outsider and local.
A place capable of existing in the wider world should function as an infrastructure of freedom. It should make both arriving and leaving possible through decent housing, transport, connectivity, healthcare, schools, places to meet and opportunities to work.
It must also be connected to a wider territorial system, because no small municipality can provide everything required for a life on its own.
The rhetoric of the self-sufficient village is attractive, but it often conceals the isolation that contributed to its decline. Persuading somebody to arrive is not enough. We must enable them to build a life that does not end at the municipality’s administrative boundary.
Nor can a community be created simply by declaring one in a project proposal or organising a festival once a year. It grows through repeated encounters and through the possibility that people of different ages, backgrounds and means may share spaces and real problems.
Those who arrive must be allowed to enter without being forced to perform the role of the grateful guest. Those born there must be allowed to leave without being accused of betrayal. And those who return must be able to bring something new without immediately being told that things have always been done differently.
A living community does not eliminate movement. It learns how to turn movement into relationships.
Italy should not therefore be forced to choose between protecting its roots and embracing mobility. Its strength lies precisely in the number of places to which we can still attach a name, a landscape, a memory and a voice.
But those identities will not be protected by embalming them. They will be protected by allowing them to encounter other lives and by accepting that belonging can be plural, temporary, intermittent and even contradictory.
We can come from a place and live elsewhere. We can arrive from far away and become part of its story. We can return without promising to remain forever.
Pavese’s sentence therefore contains a programme more contemporary than many of today’s strategies for reviving small towns.
A place is alive when leaving does not mean severing every bond, returning does not mean having failed, arriving does not mean invading and staying does not mean giving up the world.
The place we need is not one that nobody ever leaves. It is one that continues to exist in people’s lives even when they are elsewhere — and that, when they wish to return or when somebody new knocks on the door, is still capable of offering real possibilities.
Perhaps this is why, decades after that final school examination, Pavese and Pasolini continue to find their way into what I write. Not as political allegiances, but as instruments with which to read Italy.
We all need a place to belong.
But to be truly ours, it must let us leave.