Politiche e azioni per il ripopolamento dei piccoli centri. L'esperienza di alcuni borghi italiani

For decades now, the depopulation of inland areas and small towns has been a topic at the center of the debate at European level which also closely concerns the Italian context. From 1971 to 2015, most of the small Italian municipalities lost more than half of their residents, a negative trend that recorded a further decline of 5% even in the following three years. Small villages constitute approximately 70% of all Italian municipalities and they occupy 54% of the surface area of the entire national territory. In this scenario, in recent decades there have been various measures and actions aimed at repopulating the internal areas and recovering the small centers within them. Plans and actions ranging from the sale at symbolic prices of uninhabited houses in historic centers (1 euro houses), to the National Strategy for Internal Areas, from Law 158/2017 "Measures for the support and enhancement of small municipalities, to incentives provided by the Italian Regions and Municipalities aimed at repopulating small centres, up to the most recent Village Plan of the PNRR. In this framework, the work examines the experience of some small villages and the related actions undertaken aimed at repopulating their historic centres.