Hillside and mountain villages, green fields and endless plains with scattered settlements and post-industrial medium-sized towns constitute Europe as much as the big cities we all know. These places have long been considered peripheral to the large urban centres and have often been associated with a certain passivity, stagnation and resistance to change. Yet a closer look at their interstices, inlets and plains reveals that they also move, live and transform. And they are also continuously enriched with new voices and stories, becoming spaces of “multiple nationalities”.
In the last decades, some rural, mountainous, and peri-urban European regions started to welcoming both newcomers from other countries and returnees who went to live abroad in search of better work and living opportunities (Perlik et al., 2019). Welcoming new inhabitants of different nationalities, as well as returnees, these territories are enriched by hybrid identities and intercultural dynamics. In other words, the territories themselves become territories of “multiple nationalities”, characterised by complex stories of immigration and emigration whose signs shape public and private spaces. At the same time, these places represent the dream for a better future for some, and the nostalgia for the past for others, slowly transforming into places of multiple conviviality and intercultural dialogue. However, given their local scale, their dispersion in space and a limited political sensitivity, such peripheral plural places remain under-investigated…