Rome Letter: Keen Italy observers may recall television images three years ago of bulldozers knocking down illegal buildings in the celebrated Valley of Temples in Agrigento, Sicily.
Widely considered to be one of the finest examples of Greek architecture outside Greece, the 2,500-year-old Valley of Temples is not only a priceless architectural and cultural heritage but is also, de facto, a huge archeological site.
Those considerations, however, did not save the Valley from the property speculators who over the years managed to put up more than 500 buildings, including a three-star restaurant and elegant private villas.
The arrival of the bulldozers at the Valley on that March 2000 morning had followed upon another high-profile demolition job carried out almost a year earlier on the infamous Fuenti Hotel on the Amalfi coastline, south of Naples.
The Fuenti was a 35,000 square foot, seven-story hotel that had been built more than 30 years earlier along one of Italy's most handsome coastlines, a coastline which, in 1997, was named a "World Heritage Site" by UNESCO.
Those two demolitions, carried out under the aegis of a centre-left government, had appeared to mark an historic moment in Italy's ongoing fight against illegal building. Four years ago, Ermete Realacci, president of the environmentalist lobby group, Legambiente, suggested that maybe the tide was turning. He argued that more illegal buildings had been destroyed in the previous six months than in the last 50 years. Four years later, environmentalists are sounding the alarm, with many experts claiming that illegal building will increase by 30 per cent this year alone.
The reason for this dire prediction is simple. On more than one occasion in the last six months, centre-right government figures have indicated that this year's Finance Bill (Budget) may yet contain an amnesty for minor building infractions committed over the last ten years.
"As of now, obviously, we don't have precise figures on what is happening. But from information gathered everywhere, we predict that, by the end of 2003, illegal building will have increased by 30 per cent.
Ten years of fighting to protect the environment will have been wiped out," Enrico Fontana, editor of Nouva Ecologia and a collaborator of Legambiente, recently told weekly magazine L'Espresso.
Legambiente and other environmentalist groups are convinced that it requires only the mention of a possible amnesty for illegal building to mushroom. According to figures from Cresme, a building-sector research institute, the last amnesty granted by the 1994 Silvio Berlusconi-led centre-right government prompted the number of illegal buildings in Italy to jump from 58,000 in 1993 to 83,000 in 1994. (In the wake of the Fuenti and Valley of the Temples demolitions, the number went down to 28,000 in 2001.)
Even though various government spokesmen have stressed that the amnesty will apply only to minor infringements (for example: illegal adjustments to existing buildings), environmentalists still see any amnesty as the thin end of the wedge.
They fear that property speculators and private citizens, determined to build how and where they want, will have interpreted talk of an amnesty as a carte blanche to rush ahead, get a skeleton building structure up and then pay a condono (or fine) to have it legalised under the amnesty.
They also argue that talk of an amnesty only leads some already less-than-vigilant local authorities, especially in southern Italy, to turn an even blinder eye.
Legambiente claims that for every illegal building that is currently sequestered, another nine sprout up somewhere else in its place. Thus it is that illegal buildings have been going up in places as diverse as the Molentargius National Park near Cagliari, Sardinia (185 buildings), near Frosinone in Lazio (a whole 110-acre village proved to be abusivo or illegal), on the island of Maddalena (50) and even up the side of volcanic Vesuvius, near Naples.
The condono or fine is, of course, the whole point of the amnesty from the government viewpoint, since it would, in the short term, generate a significant, one-off cash injection into the state coffers.
(Fines can be anything from €1,000 to €100,00, depending on the nature of the infringement. It is estimated that the amnesty could generate up to €2.5 billion for the Treasury).
In the long term, however, any form of encouragement for illegal or abusivo building can do serious damage to the eco-system and soil substructure. Abusivo building is widely believed to have played a fundamental role in recent environmental disasters such as the Sarno landslide of 1998, and various flooding disasters in Piedmont, Liguria and along the Po river in recent winters.
Then, too, there is the very principle of the amnesty itself. Anti-Mafia State Prosecutor Pier Luigi Vigna is one of those who have signed a Legambiente appeal against the proposed amnesty, arguing: "It is imprudent to introduce an amnesty because it is one way to undermine people's sense of legality. The person who has stuck by the law is made to feel a fool, whilst the person who is unsure is encouraged to do something illegal."