COLUMN ONE : Italians’ Baby Boom Goes Bust : Long known for its large families, the nation now has the world’s lowest birthrate. The bambini gap has spurred immigration, prompted government incentives and fueled fears of a graying society.

La Mamma is the same dominant figure in Italy today that she was in Caesar’s time, but she is raising fewer bambini than ever, and her changing role is forcing a social revolution in a country that is running out of children.

A land where baby clothes hanging on urban wash lines has been as much a tradition as pasta is now graying rapidly. Italy’s birthrate today is the lowest in its history and the lowest in the world--1.3 babies per woman. And that number is falling.

The decline has been a long time building; now, long-range scenarios of its impact are beginning to alarm some specialists. And for the first time, the Italian government is casting about for social and economic policy initiatives to revitalize the family.

Italy’s bambini gap is at once a product of change and a catalyst for further change. On the one hand, it triggers here-and-now challenges that reach into every corner of national life.

On the other, it implicitly offers an against-the-odds chance for a new life to ambitious immigrants like Fan Shu Li. When she left her native town near Shanghai four years ago, Fan says, she knew coffee as an exotic luxury that only foreigners drank. Now, she serves cappuccino for a living in the shadow of the 2,000-year-old Pantheon here--one of thousands of new arrivals doing jobs for which there are too few native Italians.

If current rates persist, in another century instead of 57 million Italians there will be about 15 million, half older than 60, said Antonio Golini, director of the government-financed Institute for Population Studies.

“High or low fertility only become dangerous if they last too long. Italy is reaching that point,” he said. “If the trend continues for another five to 10 years, it will be really alarming, because it becomes so difficult to reverse.”

Numbers, Golini notes, are inexorable. If Italy’s birthrate were to rise overnight to two children per woman, it would still take 30 years for the population to grow.

Italy is aging quickest, but all of Western Europe is shunning children in the waning years of a tumultuous era.

Europe had about one-third the world’s population when the 20th Century began. Today, it has one-tenth, the consequence of both its falling population and exponential growth in the Third World. Fertility rates for Europe of 2.8 in 1965 fell to 2.1 in 1975, and to about 1.5 by 1990. By 2020, there will be 4 million fewer West Europeans.

Among the 12 member states of the European Union, only in Ireland are enough babies being born to keep the population growing. Italy, where Pope John Paul II regularly rails against birth control, is the most notorious dropout: Already there are only 83 children younger than 14 for every 100 adults older than 65. There are 11.5 million Italians younger than 18; that is 4 million fewer than 20 years ago.

Despite unflagging Vatican opposition to artificial birth control and abortion, Catholic Spain and Portugal join Orthodox Greece and formerly Communist eastern Germany near the bottom of the European fertility charts.

In Italy, big, close-knit families have historically formed the backbone of society: Jobs, recommendations, partnerships, doctors, plumbers, priests, lawyers--all sprang from a seemingly endless chain of cousins and in-laws. Even 20 years ago, children were still fashionable, as one New York woman discovered when she married a Roman.

“We have six, and not a lot of money but faith in their futures,” said Gretchen Triulzi, 54.

“I think people these days are more materialistic. They want designer clothes and to keep the lifestyle they had as singles. Me? I’d do it my way all over again.”

More typical of today’s mother, Monica Falcone is a professional woman who has just turned 40 and has a 5-year-old son.

“I think we have been affected by the fact there is no more child culture in Italy. There is no space for children, socially or even physically in a city with few parks, playgrounds and nursery schools,” she said. “Someone once said that I haven’t allowed my life to be built around my child. She meant that as a compliment, but I’m not sure I like it.”

What triggered Italy’s dramatic turn away from children?

All the same things that have lowered birthrates in other parts of the industrialized world, says Carla Collicelli, deputy director of Censis, a private research center: industrialization, education, communications, the pill.

“What is different in Italy is the speed of change. It was an agrarian country, and women came late to the labor market,” Collicelli said. “Now, women working is a question of economics but also of identity.”

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In the United States, 2.1 births per woman keep the population stable. In Italy, women tell pollsters that 2.2 children is their ideal. In fact, they are having one baby less. “We call the difference between the ideal and reality the ‘deficit child,’ ” Golini said.

Ever-high economic and social expectations are often the reason for the deficit child. Stress, infertility and the fact that male attitudes have not changed much are also part of the equation, he said. As ever, kids are women’s work in Italy. Often for a mother with a job outside the home, her second child is one cradle too many.

Maternity benefits are liberal, and women routinely return to their jobs. But if, for instance, after a second child a woman wants a job less than full time, the workplace has trouble accommodating her.

Collicelli laments what she calls “an absence of flexibility” in employment laws. About 5% of jobs are filled by part-time workers, the lowest percentage in Europe, Golini said. In places like Britain and the Netherlands, part-timers are as much as 30% of the work force.

“Women want to work, but the problem in Italy is that once you leave there’s no way back,” said Collicelli.

By now, the shortfall is taking a national toll. In such cities as Venice, where the population is rapidly dwindling, public schools actively compete for students--to save teachers’ jobs.

Across Italy, small towns that once bristled with energy are becoming melancholic preserves for the old; the women in their kitchens, the men with their canes and wool caps around the piazza reliving old times.

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“There are no jobs here, people go to the cities, population is dropping, the family is in crisis--so we decided to do something about it,” said Ivo Boscardin, a 44-year-old schoolteacher and part-time mayor of Enego, a mountain village of 2,300 people in northern Italy. To encourage growth, the City Council will pay about $400 per year in nursery school fees for parents who have three or more children.

“It is only a gesture, but judging from the national response, it has touched a nerve,” Boscardin said by phone.

More than civic vitality is hostage to the deficit children. The national health and pension systems are in financial distress. They will need drastic overhaul as Italians retire, grow older and fall ill with proportionately fewer of their countrymen and women to shoulder the cost. Already, the government pays more pensions than there are people working in Italy, and as in the United States, many workers are deferring retirement until they can afford it.

Think of this: fewer people in a rich country and an array of necessary, sweaty jobs that Italians will no longer do despite serious unemployment among the young.

The combination makes Italy an inviting target for enterprising outsiders. Last month, police on Italy’s Adriatic coast broke up a ring smuggling Asians and East Europeans into the country via Albania.

Large Italian cities such as Milan and Rome are still more homogeneous than big cities in France or Britain. But they are rapidly acquiring an international cast that can be only partly explained by an official 30,000 immigrants a year.

For the record, about 1 million foreigners live in Italy, but some estimates say there are as many as 400,000 more.

Rafaele Ciarelli, a law professor who counsels immigrant groups, estimates that 200,000 foreigners are in Rome--120,000 of them illegally. Rodrigo Hidalgo, president of an association of expatriate Peruvians, says there are 60,000 in Italy--40,000 of them illegal.

The newcomers’ presence is pervasive. Italians still work as seamstresses, but not many as house cleaners: The homes of well-to-do Romans are cleaned almost exclusively by Filipinas and other Asians.

“Fifty years ago, my relatives in Tuscany remember asking black American GIs for permission to touch them--they had never seen a black person,” said John Navone, a Jesuit theologian from Seattle who has lived in Italy for 31 years.

There is hardly a sidewalk in central Rome without Senegalese salesmen hawking faux designer sunglasses and pocketbooks. And knots of Roman Somalis, Ethiopians and Nigerians form and dissolve around the clock at the vast Termini train station.

At the high end of the economic scale, boutiques of Italian designers in cities like Rome and Florence boast Japanese sales clerks. There is a boomlet of Korean and Indian restaurants in Rome.

When a fellow bread buyer couldn’t speak basic Italian early one recent morning, she was offered help in French, under the assumption she was West African. She replied in Portuguese--she was a Brazilian newly arrived to cook for a wealthy family.

During the Cold War, it was Poles who washed windshields at Roman traffic lights. By now they have moved into blue-collar industries and Fiats of their own, and the best corners are patrolled by North Africans and Bangladeshis.

Navone remembers a single hard-to-find Chinese restaurant when he came to Rome 30 years ago. Now, they are everywhere, the only ethnic food (discounting American hamburgers and french fries) to make a dent in King Pasta.

Sociologist Collicelli was surprised to learn the nationality of the oven master at a legendary Roman pizza parlor: “A Filipino? That is interesting. So many pizza makers are Egyptians nowadays.”

Two of the three movements in Italy’s young right-wing coalition government are anti-immigrant. The “they’ll overrun us” school spews alarming figures.

At current rates, in 30 years Italy’s population will drift from 57 million to about 52 million. At their present levels of growth, in that same period Morocco will go from 26 million to 47 million, Nigeria from 115 million to 285 million and Iran from 61 million to 144 million. Immigrants from all three countries routinely come to Italy--legally or not.

“At the moment, we see no economic, social or cultural factors to make the numbers change for Italy,” said Golini. “The state should act to remove obstacles that stop people from having the children they would like. We need practical changes and structural changes.”

An innovation of the new government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (a billionaire father of five) is a Ministry of the Family presided over by 49-year-old child psychiatrist Antonio Guidi.

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Guidi, a father of three who took office last month, foresees across-the-board reforms to strengthen the family: expanding child care, making it easier for employers to hire part-time workers, offering tax relief for couples with children and financial aid to young families buying a house.

“Many couples who decide to start a family don’t know how. There is no house, and no work. What we must do is find ways to help them,” Guidi said. And, he said, the government must win back Italian cities from the automobile and make them more livable for families.

Reformers who hope to reverse population decline say official audacity can help: Sweden’s birthrate soared after women who had two children within 30 months were offered two long, well-paid leaves.

In larger Italy, though, it is clear that the bambini gap will be a long time closing. That is hardly dismaying to thousands of new Romans like Fan Shu Li.

“My name is Ana now. I’m here to stay,” she said. Ana’s Italian is still shaky, but she makes cappuccino like a Roman.