CHIOGGIA – Le Tegnùe heritage site of UNESCO? The Municipality tries and launches the project “Le Tegnùe di Chioggia towards the Unesco Tentative List” whose preliminary participatory path will be officially presented to citizens during a public meeting to be held on Friday at 4 pm, in the San Nicolò auditorium. The mayor Mauro Armelao will be present at the presentation, with the councilor forEnvironment Serena De Perini and the vice mayor and councilor for culture Elena Zennaro. The Municipality, which is currently the manager of the Tegnùe Special Conservation Area, has started the application process in the Tentative List of sites that they may subsequently become a UNESCO World Material, Naturalistic or Cultural Heritage Site (Unesco Convention 1972). The preliminary participatory process, currently underway, involves the involvement of numerous interested parties, from institutions to schools, from economic categories to the third sector, including the citizens of Chioggia themselves. “This is why their presence at the meeting – the Municipality says in a note – can constitute an essential exchange of ideas”.
The meeting is free to enter. Last March, the Municipality had appointed professionals who had to follow the entire procedure for recognition and who had also met with the president of the “Tegnùe” association of Chioggia Piero Mescalchin. If all goes well they will be the first marine site recognized as a world heritage site by UNESCO. A project that Mescalchin had been carrying out since 2010, the year in which he organised, in the UNESCO headquarters of Palazzo Zorzi, a conference in which the Tegnùe were presented, launching the idea of worldwide protection of the site. All in front of illustrious speakers such as Giuliano Bellieniprofessor of the Geosciences Institute of the Cnr, Gianluca Franceschini, biologist from Ispra and the associate professor of sedimentary petrography at the Geosciences department of Padua Cristina Stefani. A site, the one located off the coast of Chioggia, which has already obtained various recognitions in the past, such as that of a biological protection area in August 2002, a site of community interest in 2011 and a special conservation area in 2019. Its management, starting from April 2023, has been entrusted to the Municipality together with Ispra, Cnr, Arpav and the University of Padua.
