by Marco Olivieri
MESSINA – The inauguration will take place on May 23rd. Not even a month and today was the day of the municipal police seals. The seizure of the “Aldo Moro” park is an unexpected event that leaves you speechless. An enormous damage, also on a psychological level, after so many years of waiting for this green lung. The reason? It is necessary to check the possible presence of polluting materials in the subsoil. And there are so many questions.
Messina is already a city whose beauty has been sacrificed, raped by those who threw poisons into the water and soil in the Falcata area, for example. And, recently, the undersecretary Matilde Siracusano announced that the expected 20 million for the reclamation “will be official in the next Cipess resolution”. Probably not even enough to complete the operation but important to start a turning point.
Denied beauty and the risk of perpetual resignation in Messina
Now the nightmare for the park is that it will remain closed for a long time. Has anyone thrown rubbish there? Is there really any polluting material? Hadn’t any checks been carried out previously, before the work started? And what did the turning point entail? Was there an “electoral rush” to inaugurate, as councilor Coletta (Pd) and Fratelli d’Italia claim, but the mayor denies it, or is it an unforeseeable hitch? A stroke of bad luck linked to the Messina of the past, when anything was buried even in the ATM headquarters.
Many questions that primarily concern the Basile administration. But the psychological effect, for a Messina perpetually poised between comedy and tragedy, mockery and disenchantment, is the worst. The risk, for Messina, is that of resigning oneself to the impossibility of being normal.
Only with the new opening of the park will we be able to reassure ourselves that there is no going back
It was one thing to wait until there were finally bathrooms and all the essential improvements for the park, starting with protecting the lawn. Another is to think once again in terms of denied beauty and green heritage which it is impossible, hopefully for a short time, to take advantage of. If before we said “in Messina there is nothing” (“in Messina there is nothing”), now we wouldn’t want it to be said: “In Messina there is everything, underground, and there is nothing to be happy.”
“The seizure was arranged to allow ARPA to carry out analyzes in order to exclude the presence of contaminating elements. The checks do not concern the areas available to the Municipality”, reassured the mayor. But, to reassure the people of Messina, or those who hope for change and an environmentally friendly city, that park needs to be open again soon. In total safety and serenity. Only in this way, and in the meantime perhaps let’s take refuge in the renovated Villa Dante, can we hope that there is no turning back.
