Considering the processes of territorialization as an interweaving of material and symbolic aspects, the article discusses how the National Strategy for Inner Peripheries has initiated a new season of discourse and intervention on these territories. Based on the Foucauldian concept of discourse, the article analyses the Strategy guidelines, discussing how these territories are signified between a certain vision of peripherality – or remoteness – and of tourist attractiveness. Finally, the discourses of some mayors of the inner peripheries – partly collected in the fieldwork, in the Sicani area in Sicily – are considered to understand how they relate to the imaginary codified by the Strategy.