Italian small villages: strengths and weaknesses of on-going strategies for revitalizing a fragile heritage

The depopulation of small villages in Italy is often due not only to socio-economic factors but also to the occurring of hazardous events that, very often, contributed to accelerate the depopulation process, leading sometimes to the total abandonment of inner areas. In Italy, a process addressed to guide and sustain communities living in inners areas in setting up new development perspectives aimed to increase the well-being of citizens and the employment opportunities and to consequntly slow down causes and dynamics of abandonment, has been started in 2012. A key step along this process was the approval of the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) in 2014. This paper, grounding on the analysis of two case studies selected among the pilot areas singled out by the SNAI, explores the role of socio-economic causes as well as of geomorphological and environmental factors in the abandonment of Italian small villages, shedding light on the persisting lack of multidimensional approaches to development policies. Such a lack might lead, once again, to marginalize the issue of risk prevention and mitigation, which represents, on the opposite, a precondition for the sustainable development of fragile territories.