Aree interne e ferrovie secondarie. Un connubio possibile?

The physical geography of the Italian territory, characterized by the significant presence of mountains, representing 35.2% of the national territory, an even greater presence of hilly territories, 41.6% and only a 23.2% of plains, has always conditioned the development of the railway network. Yet when, in the aftermath of the Unity of Italy, the issue of the country's infrastructure is addressed, the railways are at the centre of the political debate: the aim was to make accessible the entire national territory, not only the big cities, allowing its development and inclusion in the European market. In the first fifteen years after the unification, a major investment in the construction of the railways was made and the foundations for what will be the current Italian railway network, which at the end of the 1930s reached the extent of just over 23,000 kilometers. A network that, although characterized by relatively low operating speeds, due both to the technologies then available but even more to the physical characteristics of the lines, which had to cross precisely those hilly and mountainous territories that cover most of the national territory, guaranteed levels of accessibility today forgotten. Until the mid-1950s, in Italy the railways allowed to reduce travel times and significantly increase the amount of goods transported and the safety of travel, promoting industrial development and radically transforming and in a modern key models of mobility and land arrangements. But precisely in those same years, marked by an ephemeral and very brief economic boom (1958-1962), mobility policies changed: railways and public transport were progressively and systematically weakened in favour of cars and individual transport. It is then that the same "forms" of the Italian territory come to form the historical, cultural and socio-economic basis of that process that has produced the interior areas and that has accompanied the decline of secondary railways.