In fifteen years, more than 2,000 establishments have closed their doors. The demographic decline has eroded the catchment area, the lockdowns with Covid have changed the minds and tastes of young people and caused management costs to explode. A lethal mix for a sector that in its heyday was worth over 1 billion euros. And those who resist have the security challenge
From punkabbestia to the chicest girls, everyone has been there for at least an hour. Between photos lost in the library, ghosts of an old company, that place that was more than my home, what has it become?”. The answer to this question – which Max Pezzali asks himself in the single Abandoned Discotheques – is varied but still melancholy: a supermarket rather than a car park, a sofa outlet, a fast food restaurant, a landfill, an apartment building or – in the worst case and not at all rare – a moldy concrete block inhabited by thugs.
The clubs are closed, folks, and they won’t reopen next weekend. In fifteen years in our country, 2,100 nightclubs have pulled the plug. The picture of the end of the party is soon in sight: until the 1990s, Italy was unleashed in around 7,000 dance temples, a pool which has shrunk by 52 percent and shows no signs of regaining strength (just 630 new openings in the period 2010-2023). By dint of tachipirina and watchful waiting, Saturday night fever also vanished along with its healthy carriers, the teenagers. One of the most obvious causes – although not the only one – of the death of dancehall is the demographic decline. The number of young people in the Bel Paese has collapsed: in the last 20 years (Istat report 2024) the population between 18 and 34 years old has decreased by 3 million units and another 3 million will be lost in the next twenty years. The endless crowds swaying in time to the tune of Corona’s The rhythm of the night (the year was 1994) are social archaeology. The glittering haunts of disco music, at the time the final destination of the collective rite of youthful entertainment, are ruins.
Caravaggio’s Studio Zeta, a sort of dance Mecca for half of Northern Italy, is a supermarket. Cashier instead of cubists. The Marabou in Reggio Emilia (average turnout of 30 thousand people between Friday and Saturday in the golden age) was almost entirely demolished. Bulldozers instead of strobe lights. The Last Empire (province of Turin) expanded over four floors and could contain 8 thousand people: now it is full of brushwood and on the peeling facade the bat symbol of a well-known brand of alcohol spreads its wings – making the scenario even more gloomy. Clochard instead of barmen. The list of nightlife mausoleums is endless: from the Pipa in Prato Sesia (Novara) to the Genux in Lonato del Garda, passing through the Red Zone (Perugia), the Baraonda in Versilia, up to the Merendero in Bari. Throughout the country, rubble remains where there was entertainment – often high – and youthful excitement.
The nightlife sector was a highly respectable economy, with a total value of 1.1 billion euros.
Over the decades, various factors have weakened it: the impoverishment of families, which has left less available for children’s entertainment, and the high cost of energy (in larger rooms the audio system can reach 30 thousand watts) have dealt hard blows. Then came the final blow: the pandemic. Once the lockdowns were concluded, of that billion in total value, just 400 million euros remained intact. The season of masks and isolation has caused over 50 thousand direct and indirect jobs to evaporate. And above all it left the premises without a paying audience.
Throughout the 2000s the philosophy had been quite clear: by relying on large numbers, nightclubs were able to hire famous DJs and cultivate a business model not dissimilar to the rock concert. There were superstars on the bill, commensurate entry prices and substantial takings. Then dance music experienced a mainstream explosion and the fees of the great disc jockeys skyrocketed, allowing only the most famous and renowned venues to remain in the game. Finally, Covid arrived. After the pandemic stasis, when life “reopened”, we found ourselves with much fewer people eager to live it. An entire generation has been catapulted into full adolescence after being locked in a bedroom with the Internet as the only way of contact with the rest of the world. Once outdoors, many young people continued to maintain virtual bonds thanks to smartphones and social networks. Youth is hyper-connected but at the same time crushed by loneliness. «I define it as a psycho-evolutionary gap», explains Professor David Lazzari, president of the Psychological Wellbeing and Health Observatory, as well as former president of the National Order of Psychologists. “There is a misalignment between cognition and emotion.” Today’s teenagers are very aware, they have an ocean of information but they are extremely immature in terms of their emotions. “It’s like having two legs of different lengths,” says Dr. Lazzari, “and thinking you can walk or run in good balance.” Children handle a large amount of knowledge – more than previous generations – however according to the doctor “this is only the surface, there is no emotional depth underneath and this makes very young people easy prey to stress and frustration” once catapulted into reality, from which they therefore tend to escape. They are used to a sociality “strongly mediated by social networks” and go into crisis “when instead sociality is embodied”, adds the psychologist, “as happens for example in the disco”. The dance floor is a place where you can take initiative, live real experiences that can be challenging and expose yourself to the fear of “failing”, be it the simple mass scheme to join, rather than the approach with the opposite sex or even witnessing negative episodes such as fights. However, the expert highlights that «even bad experiences are experiences. The important thing is to recognize them, but they also leave us something in terms of personal growth.” The pandemic has been devastating from this point of view: «The lockdown has inculcated the concept in many adolescents that socializing is in itself a risk, but the resulting avoidance is absolutely not a valid strategy, on the contrary. It is necessary to experiment with multiple environments, since these feed back on the individual and contribute to shaping him.” Blocked by all these fears, many kids prefer to rely on virtual connections which make them feel safer. One of the many tangible effects is that the queues outside the discos on Saturday nights have disappeared, with all their load of excitement and hopes.
A trend also confirmed by the explosion of a new phenomenon, at least in the metropolises (Milan in the lead): that of soft clubbing. In simple words, a morning disco, where you dance in the sunlight while consuming cappuccinos and croissants instead of gin and tonic. Not infrequently, these events are attended by children and parents at the same time: more or less at brunch time, during the weekend, unusual spaces for this type of activity are crowded, such as large venues for events (recently in the Lombardy capital there was a date which saw the presence of Linus and Jovanotti). However, the change of scenery is not always painless. The death of large venues – incapable of aggregating large numbers of visitors – has created a market for smaller but also much less structured establishments in terms of safety. Basements, cramped bars, mezzanine lofts are packed with dozens of kids. Management costs are low and the profit margin is greedy: those who still want to dance in the evening are few, someone is trying to catch them all. However, licenses are often lacking (real discos have those for public entertainment, while bars or restaurants only have those for serving food and drinks), adequately trained staff and basic safety protections.
A real dance club is required to comply with scrupulous regulations, starting from the fire prevention system down to the smallest details, such as the material – which must be of good fireproof capacity – with which the cocktail napkins are made. On the other hand, improvised spaces (and entrepreneurs) even lack emergency exits. Examples can be found almost throughout the country: a bar used as a nightclub just outside Frosinone was discovered by the police; during the inspection of a restaurant in Bardonecchia (Turin) the authorities found 50 people dancing at 1 am; in a room near Piazza della Vittoria in Pavia, transformed into a ballroom, a university party was underway with music beyond the established limits and enormous risks, since there was no emergency exit and the only access route was a spiral staircase which in no way would have allowed the room to be evacuated in time in the event of an emergency.
And again: an illegal disco inside a bar in the Portuense area of Rome, where more than 200 young people were dancing without any authorization for public entertainment, was closed by the police and the manager was reported. A similar episode was recorded in Torre del Greco (Naples), where the police discovered a real illegal disco set up inside a warehouse on the outskirts. During the control activity in Crotone, the police operators arranged for the interruption of an event and the turning off of the music, ensuring an orderly exit of the patrons, who numbered over 130, in a structure without emergency exits. In Perugia 200 kids were crowded into a hundred square meters and more: the financial police found the only emergency exit blocked by a bolt and blocked by waste. In Padua, in via Sarpi, 300 people were dancing in a space with a maximum capacity of 200: the police commissioner proposed its permanent closure.
They seem like small episodes, in themselves not very worrying. Yet they have a disturbing trait in common: they are all checks carried out in the first weeks of 2026. That is, after the Crans-Montana massacre took place in a place completely similar to these on New Year’s Eve.
