For those who have seen (and denounced) the almost undisturbed course of mountain abandonment over the past 70 years, it is clear that the current situation is now a different story, with new actors and a new sense of life.

It is clear because we remember the mountaineers who are no longer there, those who are up at five o’clock and fix their first coffee with two fingers of grappa, those whose pace is always the same uphill or downhill, after an hour or after ten of walking, who call their spouse ‘you’, who have never entered a hospital.

Those who wanted to do what they did (perhaps they would have preferred a little less effort…), they had no other project than to maintain the qualities of their work and living space (and excuse me for saying so…). Obviously this was an implicit project, in which the entire community participated but was almost not aware of, but which permeated for many generations and consistently all daily acts and recurring events, starting from the stubborn way of cultivating and nurturing up to festive gatherings and relations with outsiders.

It was the last generation of a society that was quite complete in itself, jealous of its autonomy, devoid of envy for the status of citizens who came to visit, with a highland life aware of an irreducible but non-confrontational otherness with the city below.

Now the mountain is inhabited, sparsely and occasionally, by the children and grandchildren of that last generation of independent natives and by a few outsiders who by choice (the Europeans) or by necessity (the others) do not stay in the city. These are almost always people who have lived in urban environments, who have savoured the status of the citizen, of those who have easy access to services, are immersed in a sea of opportunities, know many places and many people superficially, communicate before they think, have a rare and sporadic relationship with nature.

Yet those citizens have chosen the mountain habitat that they know requires the opposite behaviour to that of the city: access to services is arduous, the range of possible activities is very modest, both for work and leisure (mostly they retrace the activities carried out secularly, now with less effort), the frequentation of people is limited (even more so than in past generations, when villages were well populated), communications are reduced and sporadic (even mobile phones often have no range), the relationship with nature is systematic and continuous, inescapable (also given the general modesty of indoor spaces).

In short, those who, out of nostalgia or a sense of enterprise, go to live in the mountains today, consciously make the choice of a model of life that is culturally alternative to the urban one to which we are accustomed.

These are choices that translate into new behaviours, difficult to distinguish between those induced by passing fads and those that are taking root in a new socio-cultural structure.

In general, there are some constant aspects: on the one hand, there is the attempt to maintain a minimum kit of urbanity to which one is accustomed, on the other hand, there is the demand that those alternative diversities remain intact, for which one decided to go up to live at altitude, with a sense of liberation, after generations that instead went down to the valley, with a heavy heart.

The new mountaineer appreciates nature and the landscape in a ‘cultured’ way, much more explicitly and with attention than the historical inhabitant; he has a sober lifestyle model, often by choice or to make his choice of life more sustainable; he has a work and leisure model with substantial shares of outdoor physical activities. So far, this is an easily ascertainable identikit, which holds together almost the entire heterogeneous hodgepodge of new mountaineers.

However, there is also a disruptive situation: those who choose the mountains to defend themselves from the society of social networking and obsessive, compulsory communication certainly have a life project, but often locked in an autistic closure that leads to solitary choices, to social individualism. In short, the desired mountain is thought of in the imagination of the new inhabitants more as a hermitage than a cenoby.

With this point of view, it is perhaps the dimension of the village that has been lost most with the end of historical communities. It was a modest community, of a few dozen or a few hundred people, which was always close to the youngest, but which made the implicit project of rural settlement powerful, because it was capable of the titanic work of terracing, channelling, clearing and clearing to have pasture, mowing and arable land. It was that which still endured in the traditional coutumier (which replaced the official, town law) and which gave the gathering of heads of families a strategic role for joint undertakings in the face of collective adversity.

Today, mountain dwellers seem to prefer Leopardi’s ‘solitary life’, or more likely to satisfy their need for social relations by participating in aterritorial networks, between even very distant people, met directly in an occasional and individual manner, not shared with neighbours.

It is clear that, with this approach, the mountain settlement in which one lives is experienced more like an apartment block than a village: it generates problems of management of the existing rather than prompting the planning of collective enterprises to guarantee a better future for that place and the people who will inhabit it.

In fact, this is what we find historically: these are the operational results of interventions, albeit always valuable, to rehabilitate entire nuclei in abandonment, or programmes to reintroduce rural practices that had been lost, or to organise scattered settlements in valleys cut off from winter tourism into scattered hotels.

These are almost always projects supported by a substantial public contribution and/or by a strong capacity for mobilisation and entrepreneurial sense on the part of a promoter, which are successful in the phase of creating the infrastructure or the physical location of the new equipment, and which then lose energy and sustainability when it comes to the management phase and the entrepreneurship distributed among the users of the intervention: the new inhabitants whose profile has been traced so far do not know how to treasure them.

This long preamble to focus on a hitherto neglected aspect, but one that is fundamental for those who study strategies for the territorial enhancement of the mountains.

It can be summarised brutally as follows: the mountain settlement may have new human resources that inhabit it, recognising its value, but their planning and organisational tools to deal with the problems of such a demanding territory are probably inadequate today, often lacking the capacity for collective and long-term intervention.

Now, if this is the socio-cultural and psychological typology of the new inhabitants, this is what we have to deal with: we cannot count on widespread and structural changes in the short term.

Therefore, any programme aiming at a sustainable valorisation of the mountain settlement cannot disregard the characteristics of this new typology of inhabitants, on pain of losing the investment, the energies of all subjects, the commitment of the best planners and public money.

What are the ways to tackle the problem?

I think we have to discard the compulsion to behave ‘as’ in a traditional village, which, as we have seen, was organic to a system of life and choices closed locally but driven to collective and long-term actions, while here we are dealing with subjects open to the world but who tend not to adhere convincingly to large-scale collective actions.

On the other hand, the strategy of disseminating urban service standards, central to the Inner Areas Programme, is proving necessary but not sufficient. In fact, the interventions envisaged for the Internal Areas satisfy (perhaps) the demand for accessibility to minimum service endowments, but (probably) do little to affect the specific particularity of mountain living.

Life in the mountains is desired by the new inhabitants, but in many cases they are not able to sustain it over time, not so much because of the lack of services for them, but because of the lack of planning and competence with regard to the work they can do, with regard to the production or services they can provide for lowlanders.

Indeed, the new lowlanders tend to neglect a resource implicit in their own history: their knowledge of the city system, of the tastes and manners of its citizens. On the other hand, it is evident that only with a new relationship with the plains, which is the natural market outlet of the mountains, can a decent perspective of life in those contexts be achieved.

Therefore, if we do not want the mountains to become, like the sea, an archetype of the dwelling places of non-active citizens (because they are rich, or on holiday, or retired), it is necessary to facilitate new-generation productive initiatives for the new inhabitants, promoting those that sustainably enhance the mountain’s own resources by making them available to the citizens of the plains, but taking care that this can also be achieved by the individual operator, not necessarily integrated in a community of intentions with the other inhabitants.

This is a very difficult prospect, which calls for overcoming trust in works of general interest, hitherto considered basic infrastructures that automatically generate widespread planning and development.

Therefore, let us no longer ‘only’ trust in recovering entire abandoned nuclei, or in completing systems of forest roads giving access to every pasture, or in building school or leisure services theoretically useful for dispersed settlements: almost all those experiences, precious in their conception, glorious at the moment of realisation, demonstrate after a few years their very low effectiveness in triggering self-generating processes of development and the rooting of new settlement forces.

However, it is also difficult to successfully promote the development of entrepreneurial activities of individual operators with top-down tools, as we are used to doing with targeted programmes: as mentioned earlier, we are dealing with a new type of subject, full of expectations, ethically motivated, but almost always poorly equipped and in some ways naive, who in any case hardly adapts to standard paths already mapped out.

The only strategy potentially applicable to this type of ‘new settlers’ is the one that is being attempted for start-ups of innovative processes: ensuring an initial promotion against a draft project of the proposer and his lasting commitment, but above all guaranteeing systematic, competent and operational accompaniment, in the field (it has to be said), for several years.

It is a public strategy that costs a lot in terms of ‘political time’ (presence on the ground of competent agencies, alliance with the mayors of small municipalities, communication of initiatives, etc.) and quality human resources (especially for accompaniment), but it probably costs much less than any public works strategy that has so far captured the bulk of resources for the mountains.

When each valley has two or three examples of new inhabitants who manage to take root, the activation of social mirror-neurons that multiply good practices in infinite local variants and regenerate the territory with decisive diffusion is almost certain.

It will then be the case of a lesson in development from the periphery to the centre, whereby an area, precisely because of its very characteristics, is chosen to be inhabited with ethical and sober behaviour and induces transformations that are sustainable and appropriate to the times: a model of choices for the new generations, a healthy way of inhabiting the future.