
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Italy, home to the Pope and the Holy See, perhaps the most Catholic of all countries, is undergoing a peculiarly un-Catholic crisis; it now has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. There are so few children being born that if the current trend persists, traditional Italians are at risk of dying out in just a handful of generations. How can the nation famed for Romanticism, for enormous affectionate families, for Mamma Mia and for an enviable certainty that all you need is good food, good wine and your family around you, be the same nation that no longer gives birth? Laurie travels to Milan to unpick the tangled interactions between the individual, the family, the church and the state and discovers why Italians are delaying parenthood and in many cases rejecting having a family altogether.
By BBC Radio 44.5
294294 ratings
Italy, home to the Pope and the Holy See, perhaps the most Catholic of all countries, is undergoing a peculiarly un-Catholic crisis; it now has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. There are so few children being born that if the current trend persists, traditional Italians are at risk of dying out in just a handful of generations. How can the nation famed for Romanticism, for enormous affectionate families, for Mamma Mia and for an enviable certainty that all you need is good food, good wine and your family around you, be the same nation that no longer gives birth? Laurie travels to Milan to unpick the tangled interactions between the individual, the family, the church and the state and discovers why Italians are delaying parenthood and in many cases rejecting having a family altogether.

7,810 Listeners

376 Listeners

893 Listeners

1,069 Listeners

5,517 Listeners

1,804 Listeners

1,880 Listeners

866 Listeners

733 Listeners

302 Listeners

1,871 Listeners

1,065 Listeners

2,123 Listeners

1,981 Listeners

488 Listeners

410 Listeners

56 Listeners

842 Listeners

162 Listeners

64 Listeners

67 Listeners

3,208 Listeners

780 Listeners

1,042 Listeners