Description, accessibility and safety of sport infrastructures in central Italy: a pilot study.

Local and national Institutions have to support programs to promote physical activity and its practice in safe, adequate and accessible infrastructures. Regulations and guidelines are available but most of the time they are not fulfilled. In order to describe the conditions of sports facilities in central Italy, we performed a pilot study. Public and private sport facilities were analysed. To record the information we used a form created by CONI in previous research (1996, 2003) to take a census of the sport infrastructures in Italy. Our data were also compared to the last census available (2003). Most of the facilities analysed in our research were indoor and 78% resulted accessible to disabled subjects. Similar to the 2003 census, the majority of the infrastructures were built between 1980 and 2000. The most practiced sports in facilities analysed were volleyball, futsal and gymnastic. The majority of the facilities were publicly owned but managed by private. These data are in line with the National trend. A detailed survey on the status of existing sports facilities will assess the need of building new facilities according to the safety and accessibility rules, renovate existing buildings, reuse vacant buildings and improve transportation to sport infrastructures.