REGENERATING ITALIAN HISTORICAL VILLAGES: policies and good practice

In Italy there are 6,989 municipalities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants (86% of all municipalities); with a population of 19,000,000, they represent 32.7% of the population of our country. Our studies have shown that restoration and recovery of historical buildings and public spaces located in these villages is not enough to create new paths for a renaissance of this kind of settlement. Indeed, these activities could recover physical structures without allowing the growth of new urban functions. So, paradoxically, a village could be completely restored but could become a ghost town. Therefore, urban regeneration is the most important action to be promoted: namely it is necessary to take diverse actions, mostly at a territorial level because, the small size of most of the villages (many of them were abandoned by their inhabitants over the years because of the lack of jobs or catastrophic events ) does not facilitate a development process if the actions are not performed in the context of a large territorial system. For this reason, two key points should be to emphasized: Indeed, it is very important to regard the villages as systems of settlement instead of regarding them independently from one another. In addition it is equally important that the urban regeneration should be considered in the context of local development, where the different specific components of material and intangible goods and activities ( agriculture, factories, recovery, real estate, culture, environment, training, etc.) should be considered as parts of an unique economic system. During the last ten years many regeneration policies have taken this direction in order to achieve the development goals of public administrations. It has not always been possible to completely realize planned actions because of many interested stakeholders, different public sector goals, and the complexity of the Italian planning system. This paper describes the framework now outlined and makes some hypotheses to build effective regeneration plans aimed at developing historical villages and also through the establishment of new urban functions. Specifically the paper considers Castel Vecchio Calvisio and its territorial context to promote a new systemic local development .