Pisa, mayor's program proposes demolishing three arches of the Medici Aqueduct to run the bypass road through it

This Tuesday, Pisa Mayor Michele Conti presented to the city his 2018-2023 Mandate Program, a document, now also published on the City of Pisa’s website, aimed at defining, as the foreword states, “the programmatic points and major underlying options, as announced in the election campaign.” Many of these points, however, the text specifies, “remain intentionally generic and others necessarily suspended, while waiting to know the results of the analyses and due diligences already commissioned.”

Among the programmatic points, however, one particularly puzzling one stands out, under the heading The City of Tomorrow, chapter “Accesses to the City”: for some time Pisa has intended to equip itself with a ring road capable of disposing of the intense traffic coming from the north, but it is of great concern that the Mandate Program calls for the revision of the project at the point where the ring road should cross theMedici Aqueduct. The latter is one of the city’s most important monuments, erected by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinando I de’ Medici (but already wanted by his predecessor Cosimo I) starting in 1592: the purpose of the Aqueduct was to convey water from the Pisan mountains, near San Giuliano Terme, to the center of the city. Completed in the seventeenth century and in use until the twentieth century, the Medici Aqueduct is about six kilometers long, consists of more than nine hundred arches and flows through the Pisan countryside, now flanked by a bicycle path. Depicted in several works of art, it has also often been used as a location for films set in the Renaissance.

The Mandate Program calls for the project to be revised so that there is no underpass to allow traffic to cross the Medici Aqueduct underground-the idea is in fact to demolish three arches of the Aqueduct to save costs. “It is absurd,” the program reads, “to make a cut in the territory about 250 m. long in order to underpass it; by demolishing three arches, with what would be saved it would be possible to rebuild at least 10 of those now missing and consolidate the rest that are now disrupted.” In practice, the mayor’s program proposes the demolition of three original arches in order to rebuild ten new ones (with all the arbitrariness that a reconstruction entails), thus going to undermine the historic integrity of the monument.

Thus, one of the most famous scenes in Italian cinema of the 1970s, the one in Amici miei in which the five protagonists are seen swooping into a small village in the Tuscan hills (which in reality is Calcata Vecchia, between Viterbo and Rome) proposing to level it to make way for a highway, could become a reality (although it is highly likely, almost a foregone conclusion, that the Superintendence will prevent it): and perhaps no one at the time could have imagined it.

UPDATE: Medici Aqueduct, Pisa’s mayor: “let’s dismantle the arches and to enhance them, put them in a traffic circle.”

Pictured: the Medici Aqueduct in Pisa. Ph. Credit Francesco Bini

Pisa, mayor's program proposes demolishing three arches of the Medici Aqueduct to run the bypass road through it

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.