The death of cable car maintenance worker Silvano Dellea in 2018 left Monteviasco, an isolated village in northern Italy, dependent on a mule track during the subsequent closure. Reporting in November 2022 described residents relying on the Carabinieri, Italy’s military police, to deliver food, medicine and mail a few times a week. Here is more information about Italian communities without infrastructure and the efforts in place to address their challenges.

Challenges Facing Peripheral Communities

Monteviasco is an extreme example of the difficulties facing some peripheral communities. Italian governments have attempted to counter marginalization through the National Strategy for Inner Areas, known as SNAI. The strategy aims to improve services and economic opportunities in territories at risk of marginalization.

SNAI identifies inner areas principally by their distance from centers offering services such as education, mobility and health care. Most are not in Monteviasco’s position. Figures discussed in research on the 2014-2020 cycle describe inner areas covering around 60% of national territory, almost 52% of municipalities and 22% of the population. Classification as an inner area does not mean that all residents lack basic infrastructure.

The Challenge of Maintaining Services

In March 2026, ANSA reported that 10 mountain municipalities in Piedmont had applied to a regional infrastructure funding call. The requests concerned improvements to mountain settlements, illustrating continued demand for investment in basic infrastructure.

Infrastructure such as sewerage can be challenging to extend. Piedmont’s 2026 environmental report states that further expansion is strongly affected by the physical terrain and fragmented settlement patterns. It says resources are prioritized toward improving existing networks and treatment arrangements rather than extending collection networks to scattered homes.

Missing Networks and Temporary Interruptions

There are communities in Italy without basic public infrastructure, but a gap in service access is not itself evidence that every resident is living in poverty. ISTAT’s 2025 Noi Italia summary reports that in 2022, approximately 58,000 people lived in 13 municipalities with no public drinking-water distribution service. It also identifies 41 municipalities, with around 397,000 residents, entirely without a public sewerage service. These definitions concern public networks, not proof that all those households lack every alternative water or sanitation arrangement.

Buonanotte, a hamlet in Angrogna near Turin, illustrates a network gap. Rai reported in July 2026 that public drinking water did not reach some homes and that there was no sewerage network. Residents relied on private springs or collected water, while drought put pressure on those supplies. Their appeal was for an aqueduct to help the village remain habitable.

A different problem occurred at Planet di Gignod in August 2022. About 10 hamlets temporarily lost drinking-water service after a reservoir dried up. The municipality arranged a tanker supply while the network delivered water unsuitable for drinking. This was a disruption to an existing network, rather than a place that had never had one.

Missing sewerage is not confined to remote mountain settlements. A July 2022 Corriere della Sera article described the lack of a sewer network in Bergamo’s Castagneta area, despite high property values, and also discussed the need for a network in Casal di Principe in Campania.

Initiatives to Counter Marginalization

SNAI seeks to improve essential services, particularly education, health care and mobility, while supporting local economic opportunities. Research on its programming emphasizes context-specific approaches and the involvement of local communities in identifying priorities. This matters because communities face different combinations of distance, depopulation and service constraints.

Looking Ahead

Italian communities without infrastructure face different problems: some need new public networks, while others need reliable maintenance and continuity of existing services. These examples show geographic inequalities within a high-income country. SNAI provides a framework for addressing access to services and local development, while the continuing challenges underline the importance of investment tailored to each community.

– Sebastiano Brussato

Sebastiano is based in United Kingdom and focuses on Politics for The Borgen Project.

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