As the traveling brass band ended San Giovanni Lipioni’s annual holiday concert with a rendition of Wham’s “Last Christmas,” the gray-haired villagers seated in the old church of the central Italian hill town gazed dotingly at the few young children clapping to the music.

“Today there is a little movement,” Cesarina Falasco, 73, said from the back pew. “It’s lovely. It’s different.”

San Giovanni Lipioni used to be known — if at all — for the discovery in its countryside of a third-century B.C. Samnite bronze head, a rare Waldesian Evangelical community and an ancient annual pageant with pagan roots that venerates a circular cane garlanded in wild cyclamen flowers. (“It represents the female genital organ,” said a tourism official, Mattia Rossi.)

But decades of emigration have shrunk the population to 137 full-time residents, and in 2023, San Giovanni Lipioni became the town with the oldest average population in Italy, a country with one of the oldest average populations in the world. While that national designation has prompted existential angst — heightened by warnings from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (the country was “destined to disappear” unless it got busy) and Pope Francis (“the future of the nation is at stake”) — the town has embraced its creaky distinction as a lifeline.