GRAYING TRIESTE SETS STAGE FOR EUROPE July 31, 2000 TRIESTE, Italy -- At first glance, you wouldn't notice the wrinkles, but this dowager on the Adriatic is getting on. There are more pensioners in Trieste--one-quarter of the population is over 65-- than there are working people. The most common occupation in this city of 216,000 is "retiree." Last week, the local papers announced that the National Institute on Aging, based in Bethesda, Md., plans to open a research center in Trieste to study various problems associated with the elderly. The choice makes sense; Trieste's population is Europe's oldest. Thanks to increased longevity and lower birth rates, all of Western Europe is graying at an alarming rate. Almost every member of the European Union will face a crisis in In Trieste, this demographic time bomb has already exploded. "If you want to know what's going to happen in Europe over the next 20 years, come to Trieste," said Mayor Riccardo Illy, whose city has managed to keep up appearances despite its advancing years. Trieste first rose to modern prominence in the 18th Century as part of the Holy Roman Empire. The Emperor Charles VI and his successor, Maria Theresa, transformed Trieste from a fishing village into the third-busiest port on the Mediterranean. Its architecture is Viennese and, up until the beginning of the 20th Century, its language was German. World War II saw Trieste occupied by Nazi troops and liberated by Tito's partisans who claimed the city, with its large Slovene minority, for Yugoslavia. The Allies, however, insisted that Trieste be returned to Italy. The reunification did not officially occur until 1954. By then, Trieste's place in the world had shifted dramatically. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," as Winston Churchill famously described it, "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." With Europe's eastern half effectively cut off, Trieste no longer made much sense as a port. The big ships stopped calling. As jumbo jets replaced ocean liners, Trieste's famous passenger terminal fell into disrepair. A new kind of economy took root in the 1970s and 1980s. Busloads of Yugoslavs, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians and others came to buy and sell. A giant Balkan bazaar took root beneath the chestnut trees of the Piazza della Liberta. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, this too became obsolete. Some creative projects have helped revive the port a bit, but these days Trieste's docks are mainly occupied by elderly Italian gents with fishing poles. Psychologically and culturally, Trieste has always stood a little apart from the rest of Italy. "Trieste hardly has a nationality," wrote Jan Morris, the British author who first visited Trieste as a young officer at the end of World War II and remains among the many who have fallen under the city's spell. "It is like no other Italian city, and to be a Triestino is to be a special kind of Italian citizen; many Triestini would rather not be Italian anyway. In this city, the lines between fact and fiction, past and present, the explicit and the enigmatic, let alone between one ethnicity and another, always seem to be uncertain," she wrote. Illy, the mayor, said his city is comfortable in its multiethnic skin. He is a typical Triestino: His grandmother was half-Irish, half-Austrian; his grandfather, who founded the coffee empire that bears the family name, was Hungarian. He is, however, worried about the demographics. Italy already has the lowest birthrate in Europe; Trieste and Genoa have the lowest in Italy. For every birth recorded in Trieste, there are three funerals. The arithmetic is simple: Pretty soon there won't be enough workers to support the growing ranks of pensioners. At present, the European average is 4.8 people of working age to support each pensioner. To maintain this ratio over the next 50 years, Europe will either have to absorb 1.4 billion new immigrants or raise its retirement age to 75, according to a recent UN population survey. Trieste's last population growth spurt came in 1954-56 when about 60,000 Italian refugees left the Istrian Peninsula, now part of Slovenia and Croatia, and crossed into Italy. That influx boosted Trieste's population to a high of 286,000. The numbers have been in steady decline "The situation is getting worse and worse. We need young people, and the only solution is immigration," said Laura Chies, an economist at the University of Trieste. What has happened in Trieste reflects trends that are gaining momentum across Italy, especially in the north. Without a fresh influx of immigration, Italy's present population of 57 million will shrink to 41 million by the middle of the century. But Italians, like most other Europeans, have been extremely reluctant to open their doors to foreigners. The Italian media seem fixated on crimes committed by immigrants, and politicians have been quick to exploit those fears. A recent survey by Censis, a large Italian polling organization, concluded that 75 percent of the population equated immigrants with crime, even though crime statistics show that the immigrant community population is significantly less inclined toward criminal activity than the native population. Anti-immigrant feelings run strongest in northern Italy even though the industrial north has benefited substantially from low-cost immigrant labor, and northern businesses have been pushing Rome to increase Italy's rather stingy quota on legal immigrants, currently at 63,000 a year. In the immediate postwar period, the northeast region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which includes Trieste, was one of the most depressed in Italy. Today it is booming, thanks mainly to thousands of small, family-run industries. About 15 percent of the workers in Friuli-Venezia Giulia are immigrants, many of them illegal. Trieste relies heavily on workers who cross the border from Slovenia and Croatia. Locals call them pendolari because they go back and forth every day. Officially, there are about 200 Slovenian citizens with legal jobs in the Trieste area; an additional 500 to 1,000 are employed on temporary contracts, usually in the construction and shipbuilding industry. In reality, a small army of 5,000 to 15,000 workers crosses the border from Slovenia each day, according to Trieste University's Chies. Mostly they are women who clean houses or take care of elderly people. The pendolari cross the border in buses or car pools. A longstanding agreement between Italy and the former Yugoslavia allows residents of the border areas to transit without visas or even passports. "They say they are going shopping or that they are visiting relatives. We can't stop them," shrugged Antonino Abate, chief of the border police for the Trieste region. In the postwar era, the economic revival of northern Italy was fueled by migration from the country's historically impoverished south. Although unemployment in some parts of the south is more than 20 percent--double the national rate--southern Italians no longer seem interested in moving north. This month, for example, an elder-care cooperative in northern Italy reported that it sent out 30,000 letters offering jobs as nurses in assisted-living centers across the north. More than 10,000 such jobs are vacant. The letters were aimed at qualified candidates whose names appear on unemployment rolls in southern Italy. The jobs pay $900-a-month after taxes--the standard industrial wage in Italy. Only 53 replies were received in response to the mailing. Just across the border in Slovenia--and further east--where wages are less than half what they are in Italy, there are plenty of potential takers. And because Slovenian workers return to their "homeland" each evening, and because their employers can skip the taxes and social welfare benefits that must be paid for legal workers, it seems these are "immigrants" Italians can live with. The city's population includes more pensioners than workers. As such, it is a demographic time bomb. |