The scratches of the crisis are in all those closed shutters, in the signs of many shops that no longer light up. One by one, small business owners are giving up. Typically, they do it after the last bill or yet another loan denied by the banks. Calabria does not escape the decline of Italian craftsmanship but passes through it at a different speed thanks to an extraordinary capacity for resilience.
The numbers from the Mestre CGIA photograph a profound national contraction in all regions, but with very different intensities. Calabria, however, is the one that has lost the least. In 2015 it had 37,009 artisan entrepreneurs; in 2024 they were 31,559, in 2025 they dropped to 30,409. In ten years the negative balance is therefore 6,600 units, equal to 17.8% with a contraction that is evidently more contained than that recorded in Italy. Even in the last year the decline remained lower than the national average: between 2024 and 2025, artisan entrepreneurs decreased by 1,150 units, 3.6%, against the national -5.1.
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