The clear distinction between town and country that I'm used to in the UK doesn't exist in this part of Italy, the Veneto region. When driving between centres, the sprawl is continuous and the density only increases a little in the urban areas. Even in towns the pattern is that of large plots, with houses in the middle as opposed to the tighter pattern of houses and gardens in the UK. Somehow it doesn't fit with the traditional image of Italian towns that are the well-worn basis for urban design case-studies. Of course the historic cores still corresponds to this image, but very quickly they disintegrate into low-density suburbia and then endless out of town retail.
A Little history from my Italian teaching colleagues helps to explain it. Mestre / Marghera / Venice is of course an industrial zone, so the population were socialist-cum-Communist. The region is Conservative, however and the regional planning policies were designed to encourage sprawl as a means of dispersal. The fear was of a spatial communism, reinforcing a political Communism.
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