Ostana

Ostana sits at 1,280m on the south-facing slope of the upper Po valley, in the Occitan linguistic island that runs across the upper valleys of Cuneo and Torino provinces, a dialect still spoken by maybe 50,000 people. In 1921 the village had 1,200 residents working rye, pasture and chestnut at altitude; by 1985 that had fallen to 25, with over 60 houses in ruin and the village close to abandoned, near-officially so.

The reversal began in 1985 when the newly elected mayor, an architect named Giacomo Lombardo, set a 30-year masterplan in motion: rebuild the ruined houses in their original 17th-19th-century stone-and-larch style, draw in residents through Occitan culture, and reposition the village as both an alpine architecture showcase and a cultural centre for that language. It worked on its own terms. By 2024 the population had climbed back to 85, still small but stable, the demographic curve reversed rather than merely slowed, and the 60-plus restored houses carry insulation modern enough to meet Class A energy ratings behind their traditional stone and larch. The cultural centre, combining library, restaurant and events space, has anchored the new community life since 2012. The village holds the Borghi piu belli d'Italia inscription despite its tiny population, and architectural press across Europe has taken to citing the case as a model for alpine village rebirth generally.

The upper village of restored houses and the lower functions of trail junction and literary festival now depend on each other: walkers on the long-distance trail that crosses the village, and on the former royal hunting trail alongside it, pass through a place that would have had nothing to offer them forty years ago, and the writers who come each year for the minority-language literary prize, now in its fifteenth year and drawing entrants from Occitan to Sardinian to Maori to Welsh, stay in houses that were rubble within living memory.

The food is Occitan-alpine: gnocchi con bagna cauda, cunsa di bietole, raviolas di rapa, raclette and fontina mountain cheese, with Barolo and Barbaresco from the Langhe 60 km east. Like other alpine villages, Ostana goes quiet in winter, its high season running June to September. What the demographic curve and the rebuilding record show together is a village that did not simply survive its emptying out but rebuilt itself around the very things, language and landscape, that might otherwise have been lost with it.