Traveling along major highways through Italy you will often see ruins of castles and old villages. In fact, there are thousands of these towns across the country, many in the interior regions, which are completely depopulated or have very few residents.

These “ghost villages” have met this fate due to natural disasters, emigration and also because of population shifts for economic reasons. According to Istat, the Italian National Institute of Statistic, these numbers may be as high as 6,000 abandoned towns if you consider concentrated areas of housing which were actually separate towns.