Inner areas are the most peripheral Italian municipalities and they are characterized by clear loss of both public and private services. They represent one of the relevant elements in national and regional planning policy and the Italian government has made available a fund (€ 100 million) for small municipalities up to 5000 inhabitants (Law n. 158/2017). These areas have gradually seen an evident process of marginalisation, which is difficult to evaluate because it is the result of several factors. This work describes an applied methodology for this marginality assessment on the Italian inner areas, which was developed through the quantification of eight criteria selected from Law n. 158/2017. The analysis carried out two different simulations for elaborating and mapping territorial disadvantages, with the use of GIS software and MATLAB. The analysis highlights an evident clustering in specific geographic areas. Moreover, this result confirms that there is a significant chaining of some typical issues of the small municipalities. This research represents a first analytical approach to evaluating the intervention priorities of regulatory instruments and national strategies and it is proposed as an innovative approach that introduces a profound change of attitude moving from an equality-based model to an equity-based model.

The following work proposes the utilisation of a technical device named “Planning Tool Mosaic” (PTM), defined as a total homogeneous and standardised framework for the principles contained in municipal regulatory plans: the assignment of zoning, legends, and technical rules. The 300,000 km²-broad national territory is divided into nearly 8000 municipalities. Each of them refers to a distinct regulatory plan and then to a distinct regulation on local buildings, infrastructure, and social services. This level of planning tool is the one that has most impact on the territory. This highly fragmented scenario should be driven by upper-level regulation. Although protocols and guidelines are in force, they are almost irrelevant compared to the impact of regulation at the local level. This process is a European example of city planning mismanagement that needs to be brought to the broader attention of the European technical/scientific context. The PTM, though intervening when municipal plans are already in effect, introduces an element of social and political transparency to planning before transformative events occur. It also provides a continuous framework on the probable future of territories, thereby overcoming the current opacity with regard to public cognition of future arrangements.

The purpose of this work is to synthesize, for an international audience, certain fundamental elements that characterize the Italian peninsular territory, through the use of a biogeographical model known as the “peninsula effect” (PE). Just as biodiversity in peninsulas tends to change, diverging from the continental margin, so do some socio-economic and behavioral characteristics, for which it is possible to detect a progressive and indisputable variation depending on the distance from the continental mass. Through the use of 14 indicators, a survey was conducted on the peninsular sensitivity (which in Italy is also latitudinal) of as many phenomena. It obtained confirmation results for some of them, well known as problematic for the country, but contradictory results for others, such as those related to urban development. In the final part, the work raises a series of questions, also showing how peninsular Italy, and in particular Central–Southern Italy, is not penalized so dramatically by its geography and morphology as many political and scientific opinions suggest. The result is a very ambiguous image of Italy, in which the country appears undoubtedly uniform in some aspects, while the PE is very evident in others; it is probably still necessary to investigate, without relying on simplistic and misleading equations, the profound reasons for some phenomena that could be at the basis of less ephemeral rebalancing policies than those practiced in the past.