Two years ago Michela Padovani, a 32-year-old microbiologist from Verona, traveled to Venice for Italy’s once-a-year taxidermy licensing exam. Venice is the only city that allows the Italian Taxidermy Association (ATI) to administer its test. Twenty years ago, Padovani might have been part of a cohort of 10 or 15 aspiring taxidermists. But she is the only taxidermist to have earned a license that year—or since.
Padovani, a sunny and soft-spoken blonde, likes birds, puzzles, and collecting. Taxidermy drew the three interests together. “It seemed so precise and creative, so satisfying, as a craft,” she told me this spring. The weekend-long Italian National Taxidermy Championship was winding down and Padovani, who had just won Best in Show in Birds—for a first-place cuckoo, a parakeet, and a long-tailed glossy starling, embalmed dragonfly in its beak—kvelled over her awards.
Outside her orbit, however, the mood was more glum. “We have an enormous problem,” said Iginio Bressan, president emeritus of the ATI.
“Twenty years ago we had 400 entries,” said Piero Della Libera, a 66-year-old graphic designer who won third prize in small birds for a blue-gray thrush. “Now we have 81.”
That’s the proximate problem: For all Padovani’s enthusiasm, Italian taxidermy is dying out. The deeper problem, though, is this: Throughout Europe, cratering birth rates and an accelerating brain drain are converging into a demographic crisis that threatens to hollow out economies, pensions, and labor forces, to fray social contracts, to unsettle national identities. This is Europe’s unraveling, and rural communities on the margins of the continent say they are on the front lines of the crisis. They are already experiencing the erosion of their traditions, the collapse of their ways of life. They wonder what will go next. They wonder if anyone is paying attention.
