The poster announced a public meeting with regional and national politicians for Friday, December 18 with a challenging thematic title: INFRASTRUCTURE AND URBAN REGENERATION IN TOURIST DISTRICTS. The participants, who flocked to the City Council Hall of Palazzo De Fusco in Pompeii, left decidedly disappointed at the end of the morning. The fact is that the rumors foretold a series of alternative proposals that a group of entrepreneurs, both male and female, operating in the area of Via Plinio, in front of the Excavations, would have made to the Municipal and Regional Authorities for the announced Variant, which also appeared on the Internet. None of this came true.
For example, it was not possible to say no to the feared cancellation of the Via Plinio, which represents the historical route of the Via Regia delle Calabrie from the early twentieth century. Numerous period photos portray the Vesuvian paving still present intact in front of the ancient Hotel Suisse, which was instead half destroyed by the Allied bombings and torn apart by the looting that followed the aerial bombs. We ask ourselves: who will be able to accept that such an action of wild alienation of the historicized territory occurs with funds from the European Community and by the hands of the leaders of the GPP-Grande Progetto Pompei, who are in some way a direct emanation of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage? How can the Ministry allow this to happen when its protection bodies are always on the front line when it comes to stopping any mayor who dares to uproot the historic paving? Is Pompeii an exception? Someone will have to say so! Or get down to an immediate Variant - before the start of the works - that avoids waste of public money and turns attention to the requests that come from ordinary people, entrepreneurs, local professionals, true connoisseurs of the problems of Pompeii. In fact it must be said clearly that the technical bodies of the railway group RFI, formerly FFSS, have designed a variant to via Plinio and a railway overpass for the HUB (which is then only a mini HUB) that do not appear at all suitable to deal with the millions of tourists that crowd Pompeii.
So, a suffocating roadway just over eight meters wide should absorb all types of traffic induced by the three million visitors – four or five million with the Sanctuary – and the commuters who today make the city center unlivable for many hours a day? We hardly believe it!
The Circumvallazione Mazzini, built in the early 1950s - that is, seventy years ago - and much wider and more welcoming!! Are you kidding? We at Cronache della Campania will stop here and await clear decisions and coherent commitments also from the Municipal Administration of Pompeii. We hope that it will finally establish itself as an active interlocutor of the RFI Group, the GPP, the Metropolitan City, the Campania Region and the MiBACT, abandoning the role of Cinderella that has been granted to it up to now.
But let's move on to the news. The meeting was opened by the entrepreneur Polisto Amitrano of the Hotel Ristorante MEC, a hospitality facility at the exit of the Naples Pompeii motorway that has been active since before the motorway itself was built, in June of the distant year 1929. The speech was brief and focused on building a new tourist HUB, of which the attendees were unaware of the forecasts. A slide on the wall portrayed a sketch by WC Allers, the most famous German cartoonist who lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The sketch is one of the many that the prolific cartoonist developed during his stay for a couple of weeks at the then very famous Hotel Suisse. We have adopted it for this article dedicated to the meeting.
The President of the Tourist District Enzo Marrazzo instead dwelt on the Centrality of Pompeii in the tourism of the District, underlining the need for urban regeneration and territorial redevelopment, but also the thick bureaucracy that acts as a brake on the development of the tourist offer.
The Mayor of Pompeii Pietro Amitrano, after greeting those present, then briefly opened up to the hope of being able to participate in a dividend on the ticketing of the excavations of Pompeii. Two important speeches followed.
The first was that of the Regional Deputy Mario Casillo – regional referent for the GPP – who announced the provision of pedestrianization reserved for the urban areas of Pompei City as well as the Archaeological area. According to Casillo, with the EAV Project and the RFI HUB the city of Pompei will enter the future of the regional transport network, including air transport. A quick reference of his concerned the sea resource of the Vesuvian coast and the rethinking of the coastal railway network.
Parliamentarian Piero De Luca extended the scope of his intervention to the need to counter the “hemorrhagic” emigration of young people from Campania with employment initiatives. He then announced that he had presented as the first signatory a bill that provides that 10% of the proceeds from ticket sales for archaeological areas remain in the territory for interventions aimed at improving the tourist offer.
The last speech was by the Undersecretary of Transport Salvatore Margiotta who illustrated territorial problems in a wide area starting from Basilicata up to Naples, making an intermediate stop in Salerno, whose airport appears to be an extraordinary opportunity for development for the South Tyrrhenian.
With these words the meeting ended, with the slide melancholically frozen during all the speeches. And the people, swarming in the street, wondered what the real theme of the meeting was in the end.
Federico LI Federico
EDITORIAL TEAM
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