Pompeii: Rearguard urban planning and no reflections in the Buffer Zone

In recent times, in the few existing political circles and in the rare political circles still alive in the Small Ancient World of Pompeian Politics, new/old urban planning issues are circulating and being stirred up. And it seems clear that the hypotheses and theses cross the majority and the opposition. All together passionately, with very few exceptions. However, this is rearguard urban planning. Late by twenty years, more or less. In the best of cases at least dated and already outdated in other countries in the same Vesuvian area. But this is better than the nothing that oozes from Palazzo de Fusco on the more general and unresolved issues that concern the New City. It is the object of the Buffer Zone and the UNESCO Management Plan, rather than the main subject of it.
But, apart from the Excavations, no one seems to care about its future, while new territorial scenarios are being drawn up for the effects triggered by the Great Pompeii Project. Meanwhile, the Municipality of Pompeii is still debating the dividability of buildings in the Red Zone, with the same urban load. Let's try to be clearer and more understandable for the reader and therefore let's talk, or rather write, as we eat. And so we explain ourselves better, writing that in the Red Zone the division of a real estate housing unit into two, without increasing usable surfaces, becomes an admissible subdivision as it does not determine an increase in the settlement capacity of the original real estate unit.

But the fact has been debated and quarantined. Until when? Still being debated, but not quarantined, is a private initiative, with significant public repercussions, which concerns the construction of about forty underground or partially exposed garages, as they would be built on the slope - about ten meters high - that overlooks Via Mazzini in the area corresponding, upstream, to the last stretch of Via S. Giuseppe. It is an urban intervention from the "bottom of the barrel" already scraped, therefore modest in itself, but it provides for a "perpetual" concession of municipal areas to the private entrepreneur. The fact in itself makes both members of the majority and the opposition turn up their noses. It seems that they smell something fishy. The same that, according to rumors, seems to emanate from the basement of the HOTEL del ROSARIO, the subject of investigations in an area that is otherwise archaeologically very fertile, at the time of the first post-war settlement. It is also true, however, that the urban planning “question”, old and unresolved, has caused damage to Pompeii, which finds itself with a Master Plan that has exhausted all its potential. And also a Building Regulation older than the Master Plan and more than it, if possible, dated and worn out. The modernization and re-updating of both could be done with simple procedures of regulatory updating on the use of cellars, semi-basements, floors above the first, for commercial or productive purposes. As well as a new and more logical regulation of shop windows, unmooring them from the illogical cage of the thirty centimeters of overhang.

In short, Urban Planning in Pompeii is an unresolved issue so far due to the indifference of past, but also recent municipal administrations. The administration that was governed by D'Alessio was mainly concerned with promoting the establishment of the paper mill. It turned out to be literally deadly for the Pompeian economy linked to trade and building ownership. Madness.
The Uliano administration, which followed the D'Alessio administration, only substantially had time to loudly oppose the location of the railway HUB. Another folly. The Pompeian community – and especially the young people – are paying the consequences. And the positive phenomenon triggered by the increased presence of tourists from all over the world in the streets of Pompeii, thanks to the B&Bs, BnBs, Resorts, Rooms and Studios is not enough. They arose spontaneously – despite the inaction of the Municipal Administrations and the regional Tourist Offices – following or, more often, anticipating the increased tourist demand, virtuously triggered by the Great Pompeii Project and its echo in the world. With or without discoveries… in series or not, loose, in packages or in installments.
Frederick LI Frederick