CHIETI. The Sant’Anna cemetery is full. There is no more space for new burials and the Municipality requisitions already assigned graves.
Mayor Diego Ferrara yesterday he signed an ordinance in which he orders “the requisition of 20 niches among all those granted to citizens still alive”. Existing concessions are suspended for a period of two years, possibly renewable only once. They will resume “effectiveness”, it is written in the ordinance, “from the moment in which the niches are returned to the availability of the concessionaire”. A ranking of the concessions to be suspended will be drawn up, which will be classified according to the ascending order of the age of the concessionaires, the future users, starting from the youngest. Thus arrive the “transitional burials”: that is to say that in the emergency period, with no more free places, if necessary the deceased will be buried temporarily in the requisitioned burial niches and then, as soon as a place becomes free, the bodies will be moved to their tomb definitive.
The ordinance in fact provides that «when at the end of the period of use of the requisitioned niches other niches are available in the cemetery of Sant’Anna or in the new cemetery or others, the bodies temporarily housed must find permanent accommodation here». For these temporary burials, the rates for the temporary six-monthly use of municipal burial plots in force at the time of the burials will be applied. In short: there is no peace even for the deceased.
On the other hand, with the Sant’Anna cemetery collapsing – the ordinance speaks of “saturated spaces and critical health and hygiene issues” – and the new Santa Filomena cemetery abandoned, the Municipality no longer knows how to take action. The works on the new cemetery, which also ended up at the center of an investigation by the prosecutor’s office, «suffered slowdowns», explains the mayor, «due to the change in the economic-financial balance due to problems linked first to the Covid emergency and then to the increase in the cost of raw materials and the extraordinary increase in the costs of energy, gas and oil due to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, as well as a reconsideration of the number of niches and chapels to be built, which led the company entrusted with the construction to present a new economic and financial plan. The new plan is being evaluated before approval by the city council.”
The Municipality had issued a notice ten days ago for the recovery of cemetery niches through the institution of the exemption: that is, it was given, as the councilor for cemetery services had explained Alberta Giannini, «the possibility of regularizing the use of free spaces to provide additional places for underground burials». But even this measure was not enough.
©ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
