The docs say:

Any key in a hash which starts with a '_' or '.' character will be considered private and cannot be evaluated or updated from within a template.

update: but

You can disable this feature by setting the $Template::Stash::PRIVATE package variable to a false value.
$Template::Stash::PRIVATE = undef;   # now you can thing._private

In reply to Re: Template::Toolkit - accessing hashes when keys starts with underscore? by olus
in thread Template::Toolkit - accessing hashes when keys starts with underscore? by jaa

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