Lack of maintenance, section of Montepulciano wall collapses

Serious damage on Tuesday afternoon to the walls of Montepulciano: in fact, a section of about thirty meters of the castle walls collapsed near a house on Via di Collazzi. The collapse is also particularly serious because there is a busy parking lot under this stretch of wall. Fortunately, there was no personal injury. The collapse has caused great upheaval in the city, not least because, the center-right group in the municipality has let it be known, the outside firm that had been contracted by the administration to carry out some cleaning work had pointed out the criticality and fragility of the structure, stressing the need for urgent intervention. According to Italia Nostra, this is also a problem of lack of maintenance: the association had even reported the walls of Montepulciano on the Red List of Endangered Assets back in 2018.

The layout of Montepulciano’s city walls, which stretch for 2km and have six gates, generally dates back to the 16th century, with a few earlier and later sections. The current state of preservation is worrying because there has been no systematic maintenance for decades, as confirmed in a municipal technical report from a few years ago that states the need for “generalized consolidation and restoration work, considering also that several collapses have occurred in recent years.” The critical issues, in addition to the absence over time of constant maintenance, also depend on the fact that the walls stand on steep escarpments subject to dangerous erosion phenomena, resulting in landslides and instability due to the action of weathering. Their maintenance, therefore, does not only involve aspects of conservative restoration of the artifacts, which in any case would already be supremely necessary in itself, but concerns in particular the geological safety of the historic center, considering that the walls also have a containment function vis-à-vis the tuffaceous relief on which the town lies, with an obvious fragility, as also indicated by the geomorphological analyses attached to the various Urban Plans.

“It can therefore be said,” Italia Nostra points out, “that we are faced with a critical situation, that the punctual interventions started in 2020 by the municipality on a small portion of about 40m of the slope immediately behind the apse of the church of Sant’Agostino, an early work by Michelozzo considered one of the most significant monuments of the city, although meritorious, do not solve the more general and overall problem. Unfortunately, they chase events instead of preventing them: as happened at the time for the collapse of the section of Via delle Case Nuove and the emergency interventions for the consolidation of the parts below Via Piana and Via della Costarella up to Porta dei Grassi. Italia Nostra hopes that, in light of what has happened to the Collazzi walls and also in view of the important financial opportunities of the Recovery Fund, a general multi-year project of planned maintenance will be launched as soon as possible, including the recovery and consolidation of the walls and related escarpments in an unstable state.”

Pictured is the collapsed section of wall

Lack of maintenance, section of Montepulciano wall collapses

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