Small Mountain Rural Settlements (SMRS) across the Italian Alps are experiencing a slow and compounding process of demographic decline, physical abandonment, and escalating environmental hazard exposure. Rooted in long-term structural forces including depopulation, service withdrawal, and infrastructural fragility, this crisis is particularly acute in the mountain regions of Northwestern Italy, where settlements classified as Minor Historical Centers (MHCs) carry significant cultural, architectural, and landscape heritage value yet remain marginal within mainstream conservation and planning frameworks. Despite renewed policy interest at both national and European levels, expressed through instruments such as the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI), the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), and the EU Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas, reinhabitation initiatives remain largely disconnected from systematic spatial evidence, producing outcomes that are episodic, project-based, and rarely embedded in long-term, data-driven governance strategies.