$url = "http://www.lliisstt.it/2.0/php/dbRead.php";
  $ch = curl________init();
  curl________setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
  curl________setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  $result = curl________exec($ch);
  curl________close($ch);
  return $result;

reduce to single underscore - server didn't accept it otherwise

// If the file does not exist, this function will create one
file_put_contents(
  "debug-log.txt",
  "output text",
  FILE_APPEND);

<?php
$json = file_get_contents("path/to/file.json");
$data = json_decode($json, true); // decode the JSON into an associative array