La proprietà fondiaria nell’aree interne. Un’indagine sulla Montagna Fiorentina e la Val Bisenzio

Among the main obstacles hindering the return to the land by farmers in inner areas land fragmentation, which complicates the productive recovery of abandoned and widely scattered land is a salient one. Notwithstanding many initiatives to deal with the issue like the creation and funding of business incubators in agriculture, and the support and standardization of grassroots initiatives like land associations, the absence of adequate knowledge about the land ownership patterns in Italian inner areas persists. The last systematic nationwide survey on land ownership structure dates back to 1947, in a socio-economic and technological context of agriculture completely different from the current one. This writing aims to begin addressing this knowledge gap, benefiting from the initial results of a research funded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan within the framework of the National Agritech Center with an additional contribution from the Consortium for Land Reclamation 3 Medio Valdarno. After an initial review of the state of knowledge on land tenure regimes in inner areas and an analysis of the motivations behind the 1947 survey and those that now necessitate further study, particularly regarding land access in inner areas (§ 1), we tackle the issue of land ownership rights, both in their historical evolution and in their relationship with the technical, economic, and social characteristics of the territory. Drawing on the institutional economics tradition, various institutional solutions to the problem of land fragmentation are compared in relation to their impact on owners' initiative freedom and associated transaction costs (§ 2). The legal disciplines' perspective complements and interacts with economic analysis, focusing particularly on the so-called preventive remedies to fragmentation that make the inheritance transmission mechanism more flexible, the main cause of the current fragmented land structure in inner areas (§ 3). To support policy actions and institutional innovations aimed at mobilizing natural resources in inner areas, land ownership rights must be studied in their spatial dimension, and phenomena like fragmentation and pulverization must be analyzed through appropriate measurement methods. Fragmented and pulverized properties can thus be related to other spatial phenomena such as land abandonment or general land use. Studies and analyses have been applied as a case study to an inner area of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, where, after seventy-five years, it was possible to compare the current land ownership structure and distribution with that of 1947 and 1931. Alongside a progression in land fragmentation phenomena, there is also a slight decrease in ownership concentration and a long-term persistence of strong territorial differences in the structure and distribution of land ownership (§ 4 and Appendices). This work is an example of how to pursue that necessary knowledge to carry out the activity of protecting and conserving the territory mon issues such as ownership regimes and property rights.