national economy continues to falter, Sardinia, along with much of southern and central Italy, is grappling with high unemployment, with the overall joblessness rate at 17.7% in the second quarter of 2014, according to Italy’s National Institute of Statistics, Istat. More than 54% of people under 25 are out of work. For the Adesso Parto (Now I’m leaving) programme, Elmas’s council has allocated €12,000 on a first-come, first-served basis to applicants aged between 18 and 50. As long as they are out of work and have lived in the town for three years, they are eligible. They do not have to be university educated and their annual income must be no more than €15,000. The idea of encouraging people to up sticks is sensitive at a time when floods of Italians – many of them bright young graduates – are leaving their country every year. But Piscedda, who belongs to the Democratic Party of the Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, denies he is facilitating a brain drain and believes that the people he is sending away may well return “and give me back 100 times what they were given”. More importantly, he wants the scheme to give a leg-up to those most in need. “It’s a programme for those with no other resource; it’s the last-chance saloon. It’s about allowing them the dignity of not having to ask a friend for money or place burdens on families that cannot do it,”