Italy's Low-Lying Regions in High-level Scam
London Guardian
John Hooper in Rome
Monday April 30, 2007
Yet both have succeeded - along with dozens of other less-than-elevated places - in getting themselves classed as "mountain communities", in an adroit piece of bureaucratic manoeuvring to raise cash.
Not least among the attractions of establishing one is that it creates a layer of bureaucracy. Palagiano is one of nine boroughs in the Mountain Community of Murgia Tarantina where, as the book's authors note, the average height above sea level is slightly less than that of a hill outside Milan that was once a rubbish dump.
None of the boroughs is officially classified as mountainous. But that has not stopped the Murgia Tarantina from equipping itself with a president, a six-strong executive and a 27-member assembly.
Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella, authors of La Casta, found that Campania, the area around Naples, with barely half as much mountainous territory as Lombardy, had twice as many officials working for mountain communities. There are six such authorities in pancake-flat Apulia, yet only four in the region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, which extends into the Alps.
The president of Italy's local authorities' association, Enrico Borghi, was quoted in yesterday's Corriere della Sera newspaper as saying "at least a third" of Italy's mountain communities should be wound up.
john.hooper@guardian.co.uk
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