Living illegally under Vesuvius
Italy is in the midst of a self-imposed crisis involving two basic facts about Mount Vesuvius. First, Vesuvius is an active volcano capable of erupting at any time and powerful enough to destroy entire cities, as it did to ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum in A.D. 79.
Second, the mountain is one of the centres of a national “squatter” crisis, with more than 700,000 people illegally living on its slopes.
An estimated 6 million people live in illegally constructed homes across Italy, the result of decades of state mismanagement. Italy urbanized rapidly in the mid-20th century, and the state proved incapable, or unwilling, to alter its laws to facilitate the necessary construction or city planning. Instead, developers rapidly built shoddy homes that met public demand, even if they didn’t meet public building codes.
The Italian government’s traditional response to this self-imposed problem has been to tacitly encourage — and, for a price, even explicitly collude in — a circumvention of its own rules and regulations. For decades, developers have been expanding Italy’s cities by building wherever they liked, including on land unfit for housing such as Vesuvius.
Terzigno, a small town on the outskirts of Naples, is an unassuming emblem of these anarchical building norms It is one of the 25 full-fledged towns that comprise Vesuvius’ evacuation zone.
Unfettered urbanization now makes Vesuvius one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, according to Lucia Pappalardo, a volcanologist at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology. She warns that a catastrophic eruption is possible and unpredictable. “Since we cannot calculate when a serious eruption would take place, the salvation of the population is only guaranteed by a preventative evacuation of the entire area at risk, which is extremely complicated because the area is densely populated and lacks adequate escape routes,” Pappalardo said.
Only recently has Italian Parliament attempted to pass laws to deal with dangerous illegal housing, but even these have been toothless. Growth around Vesuvius was not restricted by the state until the 1980s, when the government enacted the first in a series of housing condemnations in an official “red zone.”
But the condemnations came with a hazardous loophole that allowed residents to continue building new homes in the zone in exchange for amnesty payments to the state. Despite their controversial nature, amnesty payments continued in the red zone until 2003, when the state finally eliminated them.
Local politicians have attempted to design plans for evacuation in case of a volcanic eruption, but it remains a struggle because of the sheer size of the population, much of which is lower-income and does not have the means to relocate. In 2010, an Italian journalist investigated several evacuation routes and revealed one that referred to a nonexistent road and a mayor who had never seen his region’s plan. Luca Capasso, the mayor of Ottaviano, which is located in the red zone, explains, “Not only are many existing plans ineffective, but many municipalities in the evacuation zone have zero plan whatsoever.”