ROME. The government has launched in the Council of Ministers a plan for the mountain areas of the country, which aims to favor their development and counteract their depopulation. An organic law for the Italian mountains expected for almost thirty years, which provides for the allocation of 100 million euros for 2022 and 200 million starting next year, within the new National Strategy for the Italian Mountains. “The objective – explains the Minister for Regional Affairs Mariastella Gelmini – is to guarantee the usability of all essential services in the mountains, from health to school”.
Thus, whoever chooses to be a doctor in a mountain municipality will have preferential access to the position of medical director and will be granted a tax credit by purchasing or renting a property in the mountains for work reasons. Concessions and rewards that will also apply to teachers, from the service score to the tax credit for the home. In the same way, agricultural and forestry entrepreneurs recognize themselves as a contribution for their own activities and for investments in green practices, which are also fundamental within a broader framework, that of green communities, which “perform two different functions – says Gelimini. -, on the one hand to strengthen the relationships between mountain and rural areas in view of the greater protection and enhancement of common goods of general usability, on the other hand to trigger a virtuous subsidiary relationship of exchange with urban realities “.
To make mountain communities less isolated, the commitment to connect the most remote areas of the mountain to the mobile network and internet (with ultra-broadband) was then considered central, further strengthening the measures envisaged by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and involving also some territories initially excluded from the NRP. An element that should contribute to the presence in the mountains of the younger generations. The tax credit envisaged for small and micro-enterprises in which the owner or at least one of the merchants is under 36 years of age goes in this direction. And on the other hand, to avoid the depopulation of mountain communities, tax deductions for the first home loan are granted to those who have not yet turned 41, but only in municipalities with less than 2,000 inhabitants. This set of measures – writes Gelmini – is part of “a general strategy that sees the Italian mountains as protagonists also in the Pnrr, with green communities” and which now awaits the scrutiny of Parliament.