End of 2024. More than 2000 days from today, including holidays. The reclamation of the former industrial area of Bagnoli will be completed by 2024. The Minister for the South, Barbara Lezzi, has put her seal on this date. For what it's worth (nothing personal), given the storms in government. She is convinced that within that year everything will be fine. The reclamation operations of the large industrial center will be completed and Naples will become like California.
From the top of the Posillipo hill waiting to see hotels, swimming pools, shopping malls, we will see large lush green lawns and brand new roads. Still five and a half years of waiting, patience, with only the interlude in March 2020 for the land reclamation. The sea remains polluted and dangerous, unless we wait for future works. The Cinquestelles had said that once in government the reclamation plan would go ahead quickly. Yesterday there was confirmation that the words are not following the facts, unfortunately. The true facts that everyone is waiting to finally see a huge area of the city reborn.
It is no coincidence that the minister made his commitments before the representatives of the local committees. The "hidden" table of the Bagnoli operation is full of 320 million euros which these days are coveted by many entrepreneurs. Patient, they too, please. You have been waiting too long for Bagnoli to return to being a place of life, accessible and usable by its community and by the city of Naples, said Lezzi. 25 years lost can't be made up in a year, of course, but the remediation works will be completed by 2024.
On Friday there will be the Services Conference for the urban planning excerpt from the environmental remediation and urban regeneration programme: the so-called Praru. A useful passage, equally awaited by those who follow the story. May it end with certain things and without hindrances. Bagnoli's operations are linked to the release from seizure of polluted land, the plans to redesign the old steel mill and the prospects for resettlement and use of future structures. "The works will take years, but I'm optimistic because it is the time necessary to achieve the final objective", commented Lezzi again.
Also present with her at the meeting in Rome were the Extraordinary Commissioner for Bagnoli Francesco Floro Flores, the Chief Executive Officer of Invitalia, Domenico Arcuri and the Undersecretary for the Environment, Salvatore Micillo. Actors of today on a set that has seen so many. In a long and complicated film, obviously boundless in transversal politics: from De Magistris, to Renzi, to Di Maio, to De Luca, to the welcome or contested Commissioners, to the control room in Rome, far from the set. Lezzi claims that the current government has restarted the reclamation. But wasn't 2024 the year in which the new Bagnoli would have seen the light? We were ready.
The reclamation works had to start even a year ago, while we are still here… A mortifying ping pong for any aspiration of environmental remediation. To have a different and modern Naples on the ruins of an ancient and glorious industrial settlement. That aspiration placed in a political movement which, starting from the pro Bagnoli meetups, led to believe that once the delegation for the leadership of the country had been obtained, everything would be resolved in no time. Few cards, quick decisions, efficiency, vigilance. It didn't happen that way. And yesterday Minister Lezzi, without saying it, admitted it.
