I have downloaded the data on resident population by age and sex from Demo ISTAT . Here is an example made using 2015 data from a North-Western Italian village of 2587 souls, Caltignaga, famous for its Roman aqueduct:
age sex value 0 males 8 1 males 10 2 males 11 3 males 5 4 males 11 5 males 20 ....
ggplot(data=dt) + geom_bar(aes(age,value,group=sex,fill=sex), stat = "identity",subset(dt1,dt1$sex=="females")) + geom_bar(aes(age,-value,group=sex,fill=sex), stat = "identity",subset(dt1,dt1$sex=="males")) + scale_y_continuous(breaks=seq(-100,40,10),labels=abs(seq(-100,40,10))) + coord_flip()
extra annotation for the text and arrow:
geom_curve( aes(x = 96, y = 2, xend = 96, yend = 10), data = dt1,curvature = -0.2, arrow = arrow(length = unit(0.03, "npc")))+ annotate("text", x = 96, y = 16, label = "This is my grandma!",fontface="italic")