From Grosseto-Siena to Piazza Venezia, to Talamone: infinite construction sites and abandonment threaten the Italian heritage.
It was last millennium, it was in summer as now, and I went along the road that connects Grosseto to Siena. There were the works, the road was a whole construction site, deviations, machinery, cranes, workers, slowdowns.
I spent the other day from the same road, it often happens to me. There were the works, the road was a whole construction site, deviations, machinery, cranes, workers, slowdowns. Like last year, ten years ago, twenty years ago …
We Italians are easy for cursing but equally easy to forget and add us, up to considering normal what happens for so long.
The paradox of Grosseto-Siena
The paradox of that eternal construction site is that it is not abandoned. It is not like some motorway works where the deviations remain and the works are never seen.
Here it is the opposite: since I pass us, that is, on the other millennium, I see people who work. It always seems that they are about to end. To the point of thinking that, in addition to the company in charge, there is a “peelope company” which at night gets away what is built during the day, to extend the times.
And I’m afraid that this “Penelope company” has many contracts in Italy.
The problem of controls
The case concerns the Maremma, an area not infamous and far from criminal conditioning. But show that something doesn’t workstarting from the checks.
There are no “civic defenders” who monitor public works, delivery times and the use of resources.
The comparison with the past
There is always talk of the South as a negative example, but the “Bourbon South” of three centuries ago made the San Carlo Theater of Naplesat the time the largest in Italy, complete with direct connection to the Royal Palace.
Comparing the speed then with today’s works is humiliating. The ancient Romans or the Egyptians would probably have built The pyramids in less time of Grosseto-Siena.
The case of Piazza Venezia in Rome
With gathering I look at the construction site of Piazza Veneziaopen for a subway stop. A work that will block the historic center for years, doubling travel times and costs.
Excavations at eighty meters below the level of the Tiber to bypass the archaeological remains: a job that perhaps we will not see completed in life.
A census of infinite construction sites
The unfinished or eternal construction sites should be surveyed, those who advance during the day and they unknown at night. A phenomenon that has been bringing Italy for decades.
And all this is accompanied by progressive degradation of coasts, mountains and landscapes that we do not know how to preserve.
Talamone: a jewel that goes off
In Maremma there is Talamone, jewel on the sea that is transforming into a faded postcard: closed Rocca, degradation aquarium, eroded coasts, reduced beaches.
Garibaldi today would pull straight. The Municipality of Orbetello, on which it depends, responded to the landslide of the coasts with progressive closures of the free beaches, leaving only overcrowded paid areas.
The last free beach was closed before the summer, without work. Then, after the protests, they opened ten meters of coast: a mockery.
A heritage in sale
These are small examples of a bigger problem: We inherited a paradise and we are transforming it into hellwith the excuse of a purgatory necessary to “put it back in sixth”.
