by Tobias Jones
That was in the spring of 2001. The therapy of the bulldozers was the sting in the tail of the out-going left-wing government, an attempt to raze to the ground the various houses and hotels which had been built illegally around one of the country’s beauty spots. The war on abusivismo – illegal building – was a side-issue during the bitter election campaign; there were so many other accusations against the Pole of Liberties that the suggestion that they were firmly on the side of the concrete profiteers came very low down the list. And yet left-wing politicians, Legambiente, Italia Nostra (Italy’s environmental pressure groups), and northern Italians in general have constantly denounced abusivismo. The practice of erecting enormous hotels and houses without planning permission might sound innocuous until you realise the scale on which it happens. In Sicily 4,780 illegal houses sprang up in 2000 alone, which represented another 717,000 square metres of cement poured out around the island’s besieged beauty spots. Those figures simply represent the illegal building in one part of the country. Legal and illegal houses combined now mean that Italy has a higher per capita consumption of concrete than any other country in the world. In the last five years another 163,000 illegal houses have sprung up, invariably in Italy’s south, and especially in Sicily. By now the country has a very unusual housing problem: there are simply far too many of them for a declining population. Two and a half million houses aren’t even lived in, whilst hundreds of thousands more are built every year. It’s a particularly poignant problem for Italians because it’s not only an affront to ethics but also aesthetics. Abusivismo is more than just another example of the hazy attitude towards law-abiding and the authority of the state. Its importance lies in the fact that it’s the one instance in which illegality is very clearly ugly. Critics of abusivismo consequently denounce not only the illegality, but also the visual impact of the rampant building, suggesting that Italy, traditionally the bel paese, the ‘beautiful country’, is at risk of extinction.
The most important front of the war against abusivismo is the country’s beauty spot par excellence: Agrigento. On the southern coast of Sicily, it’s an ancient town squeezed between the mountains and the sea where the Greeks, in the fifth century BC, built temples out of ochre limestone. Most of them are still standing, and are referred to as Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples. It’s Agrigento that the Greek poet Pindar once described as ‘the finest city among those inhabited by mortals’, a place where, he wrote with uncanny prophesy, people ‘lived their lives as if they were supposed to die the next day and built houses as if they were immortals’. Despite Sicily’s reputation as an island that is secretive and impenetrable to outsiders, it’s hard to disguise what’s going on in Agrigento and the Valley of the Temples. It’s a strange story, though, and one which could have been written by Agrigento’s most famous inhabitant, Luigi Pirandello: nothing is quite what it seems, everyone contradicts each other, and you’re never certain quite what to believe.
The town is only a couple of hours on the train from Palermo. The railway snakes across the island, past Corleone – where The Godfather characters came from – and onwards between rugged hills and golden wheat fields. Every now and again you can see, from the window, the concrete shell of some abandoned construction project. Agrigento is the end of the train line from Palermo, and it feels like it. Rubbish has been uncollected for weeks, the pavements smell of rotting fruit and fish. There are stray dogs and sun-bleached posters promoting parties for last May’s general election. Electricity cables are slung casually from one house to another, barely above head height. When I walk down the main street I’m almost knocked over by two men on two mopeds who are somehow carrying a double mattress between them. But the town is eerie and beautiful. It’s on about the same latitude as Tunis, and is set on a steep hillside. People sit outside their houses on the pavements, just waiting and talking and shouting jokes to their neighbours. If you ask someone for directions to your hotel, they will either ignore you, or else actually walk you there themselves.
When I finally arrive in my prison-like hotel, the jovial, sedentary maitre d’hotel is watching television. As he shows me my cell, I ask him what he makes of abusivismo. He just laughs, and cryptically, improbably, quotes Constantine: ‘With the sign of the cross we will win.’ When night falls, you can walk to the edge of the town and see the temples a mile away: rows of floodlit orange pillars. Beyond them is the sea. It’s also a place of mournful and austere Catholicism. One of the town’s tiny squares is called Piazza Purgatorio. When I go into a bar, an old woman, surprised to hear a foreign accent, offers me a glow-in-the-dark rosary and a picture of the Madonna (stamped with ‘ecclesiastical approval’ from the Archbishop in Palermo). Her advice for my travels is a mixture of the medical and the Catholic, a sort of prescription devotion: ‘Say two Ave Marias before breakfast, and a Gloria to this blessed Madonna before you go to bed.’
The next day, Legambiente’s Sicilian lawyer, Giuseppe Arnone, arrives in a large jeep. He opens the passenger door for me, before driving through the steep, narrow streets, saying nothing. We stop outside the courtroom, its two guards armed with submachine-guns and sunglasses, before driving towards the outskirts of the city. Eventually Arnone pulls up on a blind bend on the road, and points at a building which looks like a large doll’s house sawn in half: all the interior walls and floors are showing. To the left, on the outer and under side of the blind bend, is the rest of the building. ‘The law limiting the building craze came after this landslide in 1966,’ says Arnone, speaking for the first time. ‘It was caused, of course, by over-building on a fragile hillside. By now, that landslide and the reasons for the protective legislation have been forgotten, and the whole process has started again.’
Within minutes we are at the temples. We walk onto the narrow ridge of the hill between the city and the sea. There’s a forest of columns – the Temple of Hercules, the Temple of Concordia, the Temple of Juno and the rest. Linking them there’s a wide path, lined on each side by cacti. Many of their large, flat leaves engraved with declarations of love or of political opinions: ‘Pachu loves Sabri’ or else ‘Communists are the shit on your shoes’. Like Agrigento, it’s all both beautiful and depressing. The sun is so hot it blurs the near-distance: you can just make out, within a few hundred metres of the proud, crumbling temples, a motorway on massive concrete supports. Huge palazzi hem in the area, and there are nearby cranes heaving new (illegal) breezeblocks into place. Agrigento itself, about a mile away on the hilltop inland, is a wall of white concrete.
‘The therapy of the bulldozers,’ says Giuseppe Arnone, ‘is a physical as well as political battle. It’s the cranes against the bulldozers. And it’s a race to save one of the most important archaeological areas in Europe.’ He explains how the economics of abusivismo work: despite being a stone’s throw from the temples, agricultural land in the area is worth very little. Growing wheat or grapes has a very low and very long-term yield. A hotel built there, however, would be incredibly lucrative since tourists and academics arrive from all corners of the globe. So people build on their land, and the profits are so great that they can be shared out with the ‘local authorities’, who thus give them the retrospective go-ahead for the building.
During the 2001 election, Italy’s most popular novelist, the Sicilian Andrea Camilleri, tried to persuade the inhabitants of Agrigento to get out of its ‘tunnel of illegality and abusivismo’. The trouble is that the people in Agrigento aren’t used to thinking in terms of the Italian state. Many are so poor that they care little for archaeologists, novelists, lawyers and high-brow politicians from northern Italy who wag their self-righteous fingers. But the strange thing about the Agrigento story is that it’s not the poor who are building houses (the traditional defence of illegal building), it’s the wealthy, political classes; precisely those people who are supposed to be most bound by the law are above it. ‘Here,’ says Arnone, ‘anyone with money can do what they want. There’s a seriously criminal administration and a class of p
oliticians who are simply thieves…’ It’s not the poor and pious who are building their sumptuous palazzi a stone’s throw from the Greek temples, but a different class of customer: the rich and powerful, like the former mayor of the town.
I go to see the new villa of the former mayor of Agrigento, Calogero Sodano, recently elected to parliament as a deputy for Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition. It’s an imitation of the temples, built (illegally, according to the prosecution) in the same, ochre limestone. The gates are now chained up, with a notice announcing that it has been ‘sequestered for investigations’. It was Arnone who ‘denounced’ the new member of parliament. ‘Sodano presented himself as the face of change, the bright new Italy of Berlusconi, but it’s just typical gattopardismo [Lampedusa’s ‘leopardism’], in which everything appears to change, but remains exactly as it always was. Sodano has been involved in this racketeering business for years: massive invasions of concrete, profits shared round the political classes and so on.’ Giuseppe Arnone is a man so reticent that he’s almost impossible to interview. He doesn’t say much, only hints occasionally at what is really going on. What is clear, given those long silences, is that Agrigento is a very dangerous place for a law-abiding lawyer.
I have often read in newspapers that Agrigento is the zoccolo duro, the ‘hard hoof ’ of the Mafia. That’s why, the more you understand it, the more abusivismo seems not chaotic lawlessness but precision profiteering. ‘Nothing,’ says Arnone, ‘ever gets done here without the correct clearance.’ There’s clearly nothing in Agrigento that money and connections can’t achieve: all the illegal houses have running water, telephone lines and electricity, even though they don’t, on paper, actually exist.
Meanwhile, the week that I’m there, the bulldozers are poised to go to work on new houses. In Licata, a few miles east along the coast, the order has just been given to raze another eighty houses. But in Agrigento and Licata nothing is happening. The troops are back in their barracks on standby. There seems to be a truce. Andrea Camilleri had already understood which way the wind was blowing: ‘Demolition work has been stopped. There are no bulldozers anymore, they’ve retreated in orderly fashion. That’s a very beautiful indication of the way things are going in Italy…’ The reason is that, since the spring offensive against abusivismo, Silvio Berlusconi has become Il Presidente. More than that, he was the first man in the history of Italian democracy to win 61 out of the 61 directly elected parliamentary seats in Sicily. The implications are obvious. The therapy of the bulldozers had given offence, and Berlusconi isn’t going to repeat the error. He knows which side his political bread is buttered, and it’s widely predicted that he will now do everything he can to encourage the cranes instead of the bulldozers. Figuriamoci! laughs one person I speak to, which (given the tone) translates as ‘but of course!’
Few people really expect the bulldozers to win the war anymore. The new houses will be ‘sanitised’ and therefore given the condono, the ‘official pardon’. That condono only encourages more illegal housing. It’s the magic wand of Italian illegality, repeatedly waved often over criminals in return for a fine. Avowals are made about being tougher in the future, which never discourages others from attempting the same scam. ‘Every hypothesis about an official pardon,’ says Legambiente’s president, Ermete Realacci, ‘will only serve to increase new abuses and further degrade the few corners of our coast which have remained uncontaminated.’ The practice of pardons, it’s obvious, just encourages more of the same: if you’re not supposed to build on a particular site, you build anyway and then pay a paltry fine and sanitise the illegality. Every few years, the Italian government, strapped for cash, agrees to recognise thousands of new constructions in return for a little investment: 207,000 houses, originally illegal, were sanitised in that way between 1994 and 1997. It doesn’t matter if you’ve broken the law: it will be changed to accommodate you and your accommodation.
The most frequent question any foreigner is asked in Italy is ‘isn’t it beautiful?’ ‘Yes, absolutely’ is the obvious, expected answer. The standard reply I now give (having been asked the question three or four times a week for the last four years) is that of course Italy is the bel paese, but that it has aged like someone who has lived life in the fast lane, someone who has abused themselves and has the lines and scars and stories to prove it. Because Italy, as is obvious to anyone who looks out of the window of a train, is big on building. Since the war the country has seen half a century of ceaseless construction – be it at break-neck speed or more usually in snail-pace developments. (All ‘works-in-progress’ have billboards announcing the law and the architect which have allowed building to begin, accompanied by a projected completion date which is usually long-since passed.)
La Speculazione Edilizia, basically ‘real-estate gambling’, was the novella which Italo Calvino considered his best work. It describes the ‘new social class of the post-war years’, the ‘improvising entrepreneurs without scruples’ and the way in which they caused the ‘squalid invasion of cement’. The book was written during 1956–57, but could equally be applied to the entire post-war period in which money flowed as fast as the concrete. It’s a trend that was captured in the opening shots of Francesco Rosi’s Le Mani Sulla Città (‘Hands Over the City’): all you can see from the window of a helicopter are tons and tons of white concrete. In one long and uninterrupted take, the camera shows Naples and all its rampant redevelopments. The buildings look the same: tall white cubes with tiny windows, stretching for miles and miles over the hills and towards the port. When the camera looks directly down, you can see the grid of the city, the narrow streets between the new buildings and, as it zooms in, the lean-to shacks between the motorways.
The film, made in 1963, was similar to Rosi’s other films: a plea to battle against the abuses and illegality of society. It was a nightmare vision of the new Italy: the collapse of a palazzo isn’t used to slow down development but to speed it up. The ‘Party’ (the Christian Democrats) get rich by assigning building contracts to mafiosi, who in return guarantee the politicians their votes. The city council’s one honest politician, a Communist, is powerless to stop the speculation, and is reduced to traipsing from office to office looking for proof of illegality which doesn’t exist. As far as the law goes, tutto è in regola, everything is ‘by the book’. The lawless has been legalised. The commission of inquiry can reach no conclusion. Politics is reduced to the buying and selling of votes, made possible by the vast amounts of money slushing around the construction business. Besieged by angry women, the mayor unfolds huge notes and passes them around. Looking over his shoulder he smiles and says ‘Consigliere, see how democracy works?’
If building residential properties is lucrative, appalti are even more so. Appalti – governmental contracts – are the gravy of the Italian economy. Before the Clean Hands prosecutions against bribery, it was normal for politicians to get a hefty kickback from the recipient of any contract. As the system became habitual, huge factories and refineries were built simply to make the politician and the constructor a profit, regardless of whether there was any need for them. Once a particular project had served its purpose (injecting a bit of cash in the right directions), it could be shelved and forgotten. Many now lie abandoned half-way to completion, as people have realised that there was never the necessity. There are, all across the south, roads that lead literally nowhere. Those abandoned, useless constructions are called the ‘cathedrals in the desert’, and look like something from Ozymandias: ‘trunkless legs of stone’ in the sand.
Since Clean Hands, people are more aware of the problem of government oiling the wheels of big business, and politicians therefore benefiting. But it still goes on and is, many have suggested, making a comeback. Eyebrows were raised after the election of 2001 when a building entrepreneur from Parma, Pietro Lunardi, was made ‘Minister for Infrastructure and Road-Building’. Lunardi’s role in his engineering and construction company, Rocksoil, would provide yet another potential conflict of
interests for the government since he would be responsible for spending a 100 trillion lire war-chest on everything from the high-speed rail link between Milan and Rome to the long-projected bridge which might finally unite Sicily with the mainland. What if Lunardi’s Rocksoil had interests in the bidding? Quizzed on the matter by a journalist, the politician’s defence was the invincible ‘family’ argument – ‘Why should one hundred families have to be turned out of house and home just to please I don’t know who?’
Then, a few months later, the minister made a comment that sent out a very clear message about his intentions: ‘One needs to get along with the Mafia and the Camorra [the Napolitan Mafia]. Everyone should resolve problems of criminality as they see fit … the Mafia has always existed, always will …’ If anyone was still in any doubt, his words were a chilling indication of who the government was prepared to accommodate. It was, wrote one newspaper, as if the martyred anti-mafia judges had never existed, as if all the mourning at their deaths had suddenly been forgotten. One cartoon in the (left-wing) L’Unità newspaper spelt it out: ‘The government says we should get along with the Mafia,’ says one character. ‘Judging by the election results in Sicily,’ replies the other, ‘someone’s getting along with them very nicely.’
The fact that the scandal blew over after a few days’ indignation is typical, because fear about construction corruption is so widespread that it isn’t news. The consequences, though, for the country at large are hugely damaging: tax-payers feel, rightly or wrongly, that a cut of all their taxes is paid back into the politicians’ pockets (I’ve never met anyone in Italy who isn’t convinced of this); thus tax-dodging comes to appear a form of honest resistance; the costs of public works are artificially high, because it’s in the interests of both parties to up the prices; finally, nobody outside the loop is likely to get a look-in. The best company making the most financially competitive bid rarely comes out on top.