Preserving and Developing Small Italian Borghi. An Economic Strategy to Enhance Sustainable Cultural Tourism?

During recent years, a lot of attention has been given to economic and demographic trends in different rural areas. Considering this, the main aim of the present work is answering the following research question: Can a robust resilience of small towns and villages (also called Borghi, in Italian), bolstered by powerful planning and financial force through the NRRP, reverse the abandonment process? Our case study refers to Italy. In physics, resilience refers to the ability of a system to recover shape and balance after some form of turbulence. Applied to regional and urban development, this term is generally construed as the ability of a system to respond to changes that occur at different territorial scales. Beyond the interpretative differences, the potential of the concept of resilience for the analysis of the economic growth dynamics of the territories remains significant. The initial findings of this work reveal how the interventions in marginalised areas have failed to correspond to the intended ’territoriality’, thus compromising their effectiveness.