Landslide turns Italy’s focus to illegal construction
CASAMICCIOLA TERME, Italy — A bulldozer paused and everything went silent in the night as a firefighter, spotting a pink sweater in a generator’s light, reached into the mudcaked debris. This time, it was only a sweater.
Torrential rains last weekend sent a powerful landslide plowing through Casamicciola Terme, a port town on the southern Italian island of Ischia, killing 11 residents — including a newborn baby and two small children — and washing away houses and burying streets. This past week, rescue workers and volunteers continued to dig for survivors and to unearth the town from under thick rivers of mud.
“I was born here and can’t remember anything like this,” said Filippo Martira, a 53-year-old hotel worker, covered from boots to hat in mud, as he helped clean up along what residents call Via Lava because it has served as a gateway for the mountain’s regurgitation for centuries.
But as some evacuees came back to search for their belongings, many felt an unwelcome scrutiny from a nation that was asking whether the island’s abundance of illegally constructed houses had increased the vulnerability of a town that sits in a geologically fragile zone across the bay from Naples.
Authorities have not clarified which buildings, if any, may have been illegally built. But a series of amnesties over decades from various Italian governments may have rendered most of them legal in any case. That has set off handwringing among politicians, including the far-right party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and a bitter round of fingerpointing over who was to blame.
“We have no zoning plan since the 1960s,” Vincenzo Capuano, 64, a town resident, said as friends emptied his basement of mud one bucket at a time. “Politicians have never decided where residents can build here. There is no way to build legally.”
Illegal construction has blighted Italy’s coastlines, hilly landscapes and cities, but the practice is especially endemic in the poorer southern regions, including Campania. On Ischia, an island of 63,000 that is famous for its thermal baths, 27,000 requests for amnesty on illegal works are pending, from altered windows to entire homes.
Italy has a long history of condoning these illegal constructions, and the expectation that another amnesty will always arrive has prompted offenders to keep building illegally, marring some of the country’s most pristine beaches with shoddy, and unsightly, homes.
In 1985, Bettino Craxi, the prime minister at the time, introduced a large amnesty for illegal buildings. Silvio Berlusconi, now a member of the governing rightwing coalition, expanded the amnesties when he was prime minister in 1994 and 2003. He allowed residents who broke zoning rules, constructed illegal houses or added entire wings to their homes to pay a fine in return for regularization.
In 2018, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the leader of a hardright and populist government, passed a custom-made measure for Ischia — slipped into a law ostensibly to speed reconstruction of a major bridge that had collapsed in Genoa.
The policy seemed a political win-win, popular with voters but also providing some extra cash for Italy’s coffers. But it has now left Conte and his increasingly leftist and southern-based Five Star Movement scrambling to defend themselves, with legalistic explanations.
“A political analysis should not revolve around the word ‘amnesty’ in that decree,” Barbara Floridia, a Five Star senator, told Parliament this past week. “It does not mean that there was an amnesty. I am against the mafia and, in this sentence, there is the word ‘mafia.’ Does it mean that I am for the mafia?”