Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, chaired by Giovanni Gorno Tempini and led by Dario Scannapieco, is alongside the municipalities to redevelop the city spaces. From Ancona to Quinto Vicentino passing through Spezzano della Sila we work to give new life to the historic centers.
Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP) has been alongside the municipalities since its inception, for over 170 years. As? By financing the creation of schools, hospitals, roads, in order to promote sustainable growth that has solid roots and responds to the needs of the territory. They are all initiatives united by the same intent: attention to citizens and social. A focus that in recent years has expanded to a new area, that of the redevelopment of Italian squares. Thanks to a funding of 8.2 million euros, for example, a covered market in Piazza d’Armi, in Ancona, which will allow you to relaunch the entire surrounding area will be built. With a million and a half the restyling of Piazza Bracci was instead supported in San Lazzaro di Savena in the province of Bologna. In Abruzzo, in the center of Avezzano (L’Aquila) 2.1 million contributed to the opening of the construction sites in Piazza Giacomo Matteotti.
And again in the village of Quinto Vicentino thanks to funds for over 1.1 million euros A road widening in Piazza IV Novembre is transforming on the basis of the requests and needs of citizens, while about 480 thousand euros were intended for Camiglitello Silano, a hamlet of Spezzano della Sila in Calabria with just under a thousand inhabitants, where we aim to redevelop Piazza Misasi. We stay in Calabria where in Tortora, on the Tyrrhenian coast, you work to give new life to Piazza Stella Maris, an urban villa with an attached amphitheater, thanks to another loan of over 460 thousand euros. There is great attention to every social aspect in each of these ongoing or already carried out projects. Those who follow the developments in detail will discover that in the center there are citizens, the improvement of the territory also from a strictly urban-building, green, as well as the life of relationship life for the elderly, parents and children, or young people. These are just some examples of a work carried out with care and with the careful use of the funds also from the savings of Italians that Cassa Depositi e Prestiti – National Promotion Institute – has as its objective for years in the context of its activity to support the territory. And part of this territory are the Italian squares, collectors of a sociability impossible to create in the laboratory.
But we have the squares, we will say, there is no small village or cities that is without it. Yes, the squares are there, as well as the historic centers of our municipalities, from large to tiny. However, they need more and more to be redeveloped, to find their soul; The genius loci which has seen its birth and, in many cases, also the marginalization, due to numerous factors. The CDP intervention meets the needs of the Municipalities: only in the last year has granted public bodies over 1.5 billion euros. “Support for entities” remarked the president of Cdp Giovanni Gorno Tempini speaking at the last assembly of the ANCI, last November “is in the DNA of the Cassa and has earned in intensity”. The confirmation of these words is the strategic plan 2025-2027 in which the support for the public administration and the Municipalities will be expected to be further enhanced. “Even by reducing the size of those with which there is a direct interlocution, with particular care therefore in following the smaller municipalities,” said the CEO, Dario Scannapieco. The commitment of CDP is testified for this great attention to the territory and for citizens for the redevelopment of the squares, an action that covers great social importance. Because the squares have never been, and they will never be, a mere urban space or an architectural whim. Instead, they are the meeting point par excellence: they attract the energies of the individual citizens who frequent them by feeling part of a community with shared values, while they act as a driving force for the area around them.
A square that returns to being a meeting point for citizenship It becomes a development engine for the entire neighborhood. CDP’s commitment for the municipalities and projects affecting the squares is therefore concrete and touches the experience of individuals. In fact, it concerns the daily day of citizens, who use the squares, live them as an extension of their private spaces in harmony with those of others. Between 2023 and 2024, it financed small and large municipalities so that modern, trees, functional squares were returned to citizenship. Places of sociality, sharing, leisure, trade, culture. Contemporary agora. No sociologist can know how much a square, returned to its true function, is a gain for the life of the community. A gain that cannot be reduced to an economic return, but which will bear fruit, sometimes not immediately, if you look at a wider time horizon.
See you in the square? Yes, we can continue to give us an appointment in this way, as was done since the Renaissance, in our Belpaese who taught the whole world the style of urban life, solidarity and common interests including. The support of CDP also has social and cultural value: in a redeveloped square and in a revitalized village ideas emerge and ties are welded that contribute to improving the quality of life.
