**5. Conclusions**

An economy depending on an unprofitable or declining agriculture, trade and services contraction, sharp depopulation and population ageing, poor enhancement of existing resources and/or potentials, social and economic stasis, and conservative and traditional forms of territorial organization and ways of life: these are the features common to most of the settlement network of Italian inner areas, rich in small towns, the so-called "borghi", away from tourist circuits featuring "imageability" [63]. Despite such marginal conditions, in recent years some of them showed the intentions to become sustainable and responsible communities, able to open themselves, to include and to look with hope beyond the decline, changing their route, instead of closing in on themselves. They are local systems with the precise goal to create new development prospects based on the enhancement of their own "raw materials", represented not only by environmental and cultural heritage, but by a set of intangible assets (quality of life, social cohesion, human capital, and flavors and knowledge of the territory) considered as concrete opportunities of rebirth. Thus, the communities can become key players of a real "hot authentication" path according to the definition given by E. Cohen and S. A. Cohen [53] of their *milieu*, initiating a "recreational re-ruralisation" [73] (p. 206) that catches the interest of travellers in search "a break to replenish energies and regenerate" [33] (p. 20), creating "unprecedented forms of economy and socialization and building new-ancient meeting places" (*Ibidem*).

If today, in the settlement network of Italian inner small towns, not lacking in discontinuities and patches, a resistant "common thread" is noticeable, which allows to overcome optimistically several weaknesses, this is due not only to the firm "restance" [74,75] of the many individual or collective "custodian of the territory" present, but also to the new way of thinking and implementing the social and spatial justice [76] initiated by the SNAI, with a mixed top-down/bottom-up approach, who acts as an institutional framework for the placed-based processes of local development. Likewise at a national level, voluntary networks as "Borghi Autentici d'Italia" [34,48] and "Borghi più belli d'Italia" [35] represented, and still do, an empowering environment for small-sized local systems with poor planning capacities, due to a marked political and institutional, as well as geographical, peripheral condition. Among the administrative regions, the far-sightedness of Apulia in putting in

place a regulatory instrument as the Regional Law No. 23 of 20 May 2014 (see § 4.3) not only represents a general sensitivity of institutions, but also a strong intervention capacity, due to a deep knowledge of territorial weaknesses and potentials.

In December 2020, the SNAI testing phase will end, with the obligation of terminating all the Framework Programme Agreements (FPA) stipulated by the 72 "project areas" in order to proceed to the next structural phase of full implementation of the planned interventions. Notwithstanding the bureaucratic issues due to the difficulty of quickly coordinate a large number of entities-central ministry administrations, Regions and Municipalities [77]—multiple positive and innovative elements of this testing lead the European Parliament, in April 2019, to include the "SNAI model" positive features in the ERDF 2021–2027 planning [78] (p. 9).

The Monti Dauni pilot area does not lack in tourist enhancement initiatives to target. Sometimes they are incidental, as in the case of Castelluccio Valmaggiore (§ 4.1), sometimes they are systemic but still lacking "imageability" [63], as in the Alberona community (§ 4.2), up to mature capitalization forms as in the case of Biccari (§ 4.3): in particular, this latter local system seems able of metabolizing all the external incentives, both positive (regional, national, and EU financing facilities) and negatives (Covid-19 pandemic), operationally conveying them into what Raffestin [79] calls the "actor's programme", that is a real territorial project which appears to be endogenous and self-centred, constantly self-perpetuating. The main development driver of the network appears to be the "innovating" administrator (with similar characteristics to the entrepreneur described by Schumpeter) [80], in the person of the Mayor Gianfilippo Mignogna, also Vice President of BAI, able to continuously promote the interaction between Biccari's small community and the supra-local contexts.

In the light of the above, it seems clear that the present and future task of inner areas governance in Italy shall be the strengthening of two key skills: "creating the local society" [58] (p. 80) and "nurturing the *amor loci*" [81], essential elements to promote a "bottom-up globalization" to which every local player has to participate "to make a *direct* contribution to the production, care and reproduction of its own life and relationship environment, creating new interconnections among individual activities and social purposes of production and consumption, widening the values of use, the non-negotiable shared assets, the off-the-market activities able to initiate multiple forms of mutually supportive exchange" [67] (p. 309). At the same time, the qualities seen by Caravaggi and Imbroglini [82] as peculiar to "resilient" local systems shall be strengthened: flexibility, inclusiveness, integration and, above all, resourcefulness, which is "the ability to achieve economic viability goals and development prospects through new creative and innovative avenues" [*Ibidem*] (p. 148).

**Author Contributions:** For research articles with several authors, a short paragraph specifying their individual contributions must be provided. The following statements should be used "Conceptualization, A.I., A.R.; methodology, A.I., A.R., F.R., F.E., S.N.; investigation, A.I., A.R., F.R., F.E., S.N.; writing—original draft preparation, A.I., A.R., F.R., F.E., S.N.; writing—review and editing, A.I., A.R., F.E.; visualization, S.N.; supervision, A.I., A.R." Please turn to the CRediT taxonomy for the term explanation. Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work reported. Although both theoretical framework and Conclusions are shared by the Authors, Sections 1 and 2 are to be attributed to A.I., Section 3 to A.R., Sections 4 and 4.1 to F.R., Section 4.2 to S.N., Section 4.3 to F.E. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
