SAN GIOVANNI D’ASSO, Italy >> Two small towns in southeastern Tuscany, one famous for red wine, the other for truffles and organic grain, are considering a municipal marriage of convenience that could blur their cherished identities, separately formed over the centuries.

With a population of just 853, San Giovanni d’Asso can no longer deliver basic services to its citizens on a daily basis. Left with only three town officials to do the work, something as simple as getting an identity card drawn up and stamped requires making an appointment days in advance.

So the town’s mayor, Fabio Braconi, picked up the phone back in 2014 and sought help from a neighbor, Montalcino, 10 miles to the south across rolling wheat fields.

Home to the famous Brunello red wine, Montalcino is more prosperous and considerably larger. But as its population of 5,070 declines, it is also likely to encounter trouble delivering municipal services.

So San Giovanni d’Asso and Montalcino are considering an option for both municipalities to legally disappear by merging into one brand-new town.

It is a choice that towns across the country are facing. For years, Italy, made up of 8,000 tiny, medium and large towns, has been pushing its smallest communities to join forces to provide better services.

To curb expenses, towns with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants have been required for years to share services with neighboring communities or to merge into one larger town, and they are limited in hiring new employees until they combine. To further encourage towns to merge or share services, the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi passed legislation in 2014 offering economic incentives and simplified hiring procedures for towns that do so.

While such mergers hold the prospect of improved services, many communities also see them as a loss of local identity, a sentiment that is crucial to many Italians — especially in rural Tuscany, where the landscape sometimes still resembles that of the Middle Ages.

“I am attached to my coat of arms, don’t get me wrong,” Braconi said, referring to the town’s emblem, while sitting in his office, which is nestled in a 12th-century castle overlooking the wheat-yellow hills.

“But I knew we needed a more radical project,” he said, one that would let the town offer administrative services every day of the week.

San Giovanni d’Asso tried before to share a police force and public transportation with partner villages. When those arrangements lost their appeal for their partners and ended in 2014, the town found itself isolated, Braconi said, with a declining population and fewer municipal employees.

For decades, the rural community had increasingly lost residents, schools, and health and transportation services as people moved to major cities.

The town is not without considerable assets. It still has a countryside with enviable agricultural resources — truffles, grapes, olive oil and a large production of organic grains — and tourism has flourished, with 38,900 visitors in 2015.

“We need to build the future here, or even our children will leave us,” said Braconi, who has a daughter in her 20s. “We can’t keep staring at our past.”

To discuss the possible merger, Braconi had several meetings with the mayor of Montalcino, Silvio Franceschelli. The two also met with the regional government of Tuscany and with residents.

The two communities will cast their ballots in October in a referendum on whether they want to merge. Montalcino managed to keep two requirements on the table: The new town would use its coat of arms and keep its name, linked to the famed wine.

If the proposal passes, as the two mayors hope, Montalcino and San Giovanni d’Asso will share schools, police officers and post offices, as well as health services and about 70 miles of municipal roads. The towns will also share 44 employees.

Local officials also hope a merger would persuade the summer tourists who travel to Montalcino to taste Brunello wine to also come in the winter months, when the prestigious truffles of San Giovanni d’Asso are in season and locals organize street fairs and tastings.

“Of course we want to sell our wines, but our vision is to talk to people about this territory as a whole,” said Tommaso Cortonesi, vice president of the consortium of Brunello producers in Montalcino. “That’s why we like the idea of a larger district with organic products.”

Franceschelli, Montalcino’s mayor, described the potential merger as an act of self-determination.

“Some citizens ask me whether we’ll lose independence,” Franceschelli said. “But to me, independence is in the action. Are we able to make decisions and investments or not? Shall we wait for the government someday to forcefully merge us with some other town or choose who we want to pair up with?”

Not everyone is sold on the idea.

“The risk is that San Giovanni d’Asso will remain only a suburb of Montalcino,” said Michele Boscagli, a former mayor of the town and now president of the National Association of Truffle Cities. “That is, it loses some power in making decisions, investments, future projects; it’s not little for a small community like ours.”

San Giovanni d’Asso’s balance sheets are not in the red and it is a lively community, Boscagli said, but it needs more entrepreneurship.

Despite significant economic incentives from the regional government for towns to join forces, Tuscans have proved to be divided on the issue. Of 20 similar referendums, only 10 have led to merged communities.

Since 2012, the Tuscany region has offered 250,000 euros ($277,000) a year for five years to each town that merges. This is in addition to the central government’s incentives: more funding, more flexibility in hiring and reduced budgetary constraints.

“The great Tuscan reformer, Leopold II, did unite many towns; it’s essential to finally do more,” said Enrico Rossi, president of the Tuscany region, referring to the grand duke of Tuscany in the mid-19th century. “It’s a process that we are encouraging from the bottom, from municipalities, but also needs to come more powerfully from above, from Parliament. People in our countryside deserve better services.”

While 2,489 towns now share services in Italy, only 202 have decided to formally merge into a new municipality. Some regions, like the island of Sardinia, have created large administrative areas, gathering various villages together. Others, like Piedmont in the north, which has many small villages scattered around its hills and mountains, have maintained traditional boundaries.

The issue is significant in a country where more than 10 million Italians live in small towns, and more than half of the territory is controlled by local administrators, according to a recent study by the National Association of Italian Municipalities.

“The problem is not the number of municipalities,” said Daniele Formiconi, who runs the association’s small cities department. “The challenge is how to organize the governance of a modern, functional local administration, to share resources in order to save taxpayers’ money and go beyond the small-town mentality.”

The residents of Montalcino and San Giovanni d’Asso will have to decide soon whether it is better to keep going it alone or to join forces.

“I hear some older people who do not like the idea of merging with Montalcino, of losing some powers, but I see this change as a good thing,” said Paola Cerretani, 60, a San Giovanni d’Asso resident who used to drive about 30 miles a day to go to work because she did not want to leave her hometown.

“Montalcino will give us more visibility,” she said. “I fear more the alternative that we will eventually disappear.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company