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What happened to the Average Italian When Rome Fell?

1. Died of Malaria and other assorted diseases. No, I'm not kidding. The Aqueduct system broke down due to all that invading. A. Fresh clean water became difficult to acquire in some areas, spreading waterborne illness due to feces in the drinking water. B. The marshes among which Rome was built ceased to be properly drained by the the efficient Imperial water management system. The malaria bearing flies endemic to North and central Italy had a field day. People had little resistance after centuries of good drainage and clean water.

In Cities: 2. Died of hunger and hunger induced lowered resistance to disease. Most of Italy couldn't feed itself without supplemental grain shipments from Africa, even if the irrigation system hadn't been trashed. Global climate changed helped make this worse with cooler weather and less rain. Combine disaster 1 and 2, and watch the population figures for urban areas plummet.

3. Muddled on somehow. A. In some areas, civil administration completely collapsed. Luckily for the survivors (maybe less luckily in the long term), the Church had built a parallel government with administrative structures based on the Imperial ones. Local Bishops etc. took over city defence, tax collection, aid to the poor, and whatever governmental functions were no longer covered by civil authorities. B. In other areas, invading tribes took over the areas they captured and set up a government mixing tribal and Roman law. (This is particularly true in Tuscany). C. Refugees from a leveled city founded Venice. Similar stuff happened on a small scale all over the place.

In general, a whole lot of people died from the secondary effects of invasion. Cities shrank dramatically as people died or fled to the country. Many of the folks who died were crucial specialists who knew how to build and fix the complex machinery of higher civilization. The people left found ways to keep on going on. They farmed or grew gardens, they built houses out of rubble. They formed new governments and administrative units. Communities started knitting back together using whatever skills, talent, and resources that were at hand.

Rome managed to create a hopping tourist industry less than a century after the official collapse of the Western Empire. People came to look at the ruins of the great city, the cites where martyr's died under the "Bad" emperors, the Christian cemetery/catacombs, early churches, and of course the Pope. They bought souvenirs, stayed in hotels, put money in the collection plates, and went on tours. I'm not making this up. People are people.