Italy's Medieval Forests Are Making a Comeback—And Young People Are Following

For the first time in over 500 years, Italy’s forests have reclaimed more ground than its farmland. It’s a shift that sounds almost mythical—like the peninsula is rewinding its own history—but it’s very much real, and it happened quietly until this week when the National Union of Mountain Municipalities and Entities revealed the official milestone was actually reached back in 2020.

Here’s what makes this story less like environmental tragedy and more like a genuine turning point: all 60,000 square miles of Italian woodland isn’t some industrial restoration project. It’s what happens when abandoned farmland decides to become forest again. For decades, rural Italy has been hemorrhaging young people, who packed up and headed to cities in search of opportunity. That left marginal agricultural land—the kind that was always economically marginal—to its own devices. And nature, given a chance, does what nature does. In a municipality called Marcetelli in Rieti Province, where 94% of the land is now forested, those trees are essentially doing $9.5 million worth of work for free: storing carbon, filtering water and air, preventing erosion. That’s not metaphorical—it’s the actual cost to replicate those services with industrial solutions.

The plot twist? The migration is reversing. Since 2021, 932 Italian municipalities have seen positive net migration of 10 per 1,000 inhabitants, and a significant share of them are heavily forested areas. Young people aren’t just abandoning rural Italy anymore—some are actually moving back, or moving in, to places where the landscape is becoming wilder and more alive.

The distribution tells you something about Italy’s geography and its future. The Alps, pre-Alpine hills, and Apennines account for three-quarters of the country’s forested area while housing just 13.5% of the population. That concentration means endangered species like bears and wolves have genuine room to breathe again. It means opportunities for eco-tourism, sustainable forestry, and hunting traditions tied to wild boar and red deer—the kinds of game meats that fuel Italy’s restaurant culture.

The article frames the loss of farmland as economic decline, but that’s only true if you believe the invisible hand got it wrong. If demand for farmland remained high, farmers would’ve stayed. They didn’t, because the actual economy—shaped by real people making real choices—moved elsewhere. What we’re seeing isn’t a country broken by rural depopulation. It’s a country rebalancing. The demand to live close to nature apparently outweighed the demand to farm land that was never very profitable anyway.

For anyone dreaming of experiencing these reimagined landscapes, the data points the way: of Italy’s five most-wooded municipalities, two are in the province of Perugia and two are in Udine. Start there, and watch a medieval dream slowly grow green again.