This beautiful corner of Sicily will not become a landfill: superintendence places bond

After a year and a half of battles, the affair of the project for a landfill in the countryside of Muglia, Sicily, in the municipality of Centuripe (just over five thousand inhabitants, in the province of Enna) has come to an end. In the past few hours, in fact, the Superintendence of Cultural and Archaeological Heritage of Enna, subjected the area to environmental constraint (only the ratification of the Sicilian Region is missing): the landfill, therefore, will not be done.

The affair dates back to October 2018, when a project by the company Oikos had been filed with the Centuripe Municipality, which included the construction of a platform for composting, the development of urban garbage, and the request for a change of use of about 300 hectares of land for agricultural use in the Muglia countryside (to give a term of comparison, it is the size of 500 soccer fields). According to the plan, the landfill would handle and dispose of about 1,000 tons of residual municipal waste per day and about 90 thousand tons of leachate (i.e., special, highly polluting waste) per year.

The Muglia Valley today is one of the few remaining intact and pristine environments in Sicily. The postwar phenomenon of depopulation of the countryside effectively froze the landscape as it evolved over the centuries until the 1950s. The failure to return to the countryside and the low level of anthropization then prevented the construction of modern dwellings, in the valley, where the presence of recent buildings is completely absent, and all the dwellings are, in fact, important testimonies of the Sicilian peasant civilization. The stone structures in the Muglia area, in addition to bearing witness to the history of the Sicilian rural world, stand on clay hills that, visually, recall such celebrated landscapes as those of the Crete Senesi or the Val D’Orcia.

The countryside of Muglia

The countryside of Muglia

The countryside of Muglia

The countryside of Muglia

The possibility of this beautiful corner of Sicily being defaced by a landfill therefore leads citizens to come together in a committee, the No Landfill Committee, on November 1, 2018, capable of reaching one thousand seven hundred adhesions within a few days and organizing a major demonstration in Centuripe for the 18th of the same month. The event is successful and the committee manages to arouse attention even at the national level.

Thus, the “no” front widens, gathering local associations, archaeologists, environmental engineers and free citizens: they all participate (with sixteen interventions) in the city council meeting on November 22 to reiterate the reasons for opposing the project. At the end of the council meeting, the majority announces that the Oikos company will not be granted a change of use. The affair continues in January 2019: on the 31st, the popular petition against the landfill ends (with which citizens also ask for the superintendence to affix a landscape constraint ), which manages to collect 2,151 signatures of eligible centuripini (out of a total population of 5,265 inhabitants). The text of the petition, addressed to the mayor of Centuripe and the president of the city council, calls for initiating all necessary initiatives to prevent the construction of the landfill in the area of Muglia and to support the request for the affixing of historical, archaeological and landscape constraints with acts to be forwarded to the Regional Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity and the Superintendence of Enna.

In addition, the Committee also starts a petition on Change.org, which in a few days collects 2,600 adhesions, and draws up a National Manifesto to ask for the constraint on Muglia, obtaining the adhesion of important personalities of Italian culture (among others: Antonio Paolucci, Mina Gregori, Antonio Natali). “Intellectuals, who have always had a decisive weight in Sicily,” Paolucci declared in an interview published March 7, 2019 in the daily La Sicilia, “become more necessary than ever for a case like this of Muglia.” And indeed, pressure does come to the region: on March 9, the late Councillor for Cultural Heritage Sebastiano Tusa (who will unfortunately die the next day on a mission to Ethiopia, in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302) publishes a statement on the region’s website in which he specifies “that there are no plans to build any landfill in contrada Muglia in the territory of Centuripe.”

However, in the meantime, the Superintendence of Enna, after receiving a request for a change of land use (from agricultural to industrial), commissions an archaeologist to carry out a superficial investigation in the area affected by the project. The survey reveals that much of the affected land is at “high or very high archaeological risk” and expresses an opinion against the proposed change of use of the Muglia area, effectively rejecting Oikos’ request. The company, however, decided to appeal to the Regional Administrative Court, requesting the annulment of the superintendence’s decision since the opinion concerned an area that was not affected by constraints at the time (“the opinion,” the plaintiffs declared, “could be negative whenever, not already the position of territory directly affected by the intervention would rise to a landscape value deserving protection, but whenever a different portion of territory, distant to an indefinite extent from that which is to host the works, could present some landscape interest. So that the landscape value of a portion of the territory would be transmitted for an indefinite distance to other parts of the territory that possess no intrinsic value.”).

The countryside of Muglia

The countryside of Muglia

The countryside of Muglia

The countryside of Muglia

The road to constraint is therefore complicated, but the committee is relaunching its action and on July 8, 2019, a lectio magistralis by the former director of the Uffizi, Antonio Natali, will be held in Centuripe on the topic of the importance of constraints in valuable areas. Meanwhile, thanks to the support of a number of city councilors active in the committee, the Centuripe City Council, with City Council Resolution No. 18 of June 5, 2019, approves the proposal for “the establishment of the council committee of inquiry on the variance request,” and with the subsequent council resolution No. 37 of novemnre 4, 2019, approves the report of the investigative commission, together with the motion that intends to once again commit the city council, mayor and city council to declare themselves opposed to the variant proposal, and assume the request for the affixation of the archaeological, ethnoanthropological, landscape constraint, and then commit the mayor and city council to put in place the appropriate acts to promote this requested request. Finally, the motion commits the mayor and city council to put in place the appropriate acts for the constitution of the City of Centuripe in the lawsuit instituted before the TAR by Oikos. To date, however, the city council has not voted against the change of use, and the president of the Sicilian Region, Nello Musumeci, despite several appeals, has never granted a meeting to the Centuripe committees and associations.

We finally arrive in May 2020, when the committee is reached (just yesterday) by the news of the affixing of the constraint, which satisfies those who in this year and a half have been fighting to save this piece of the Sicilian hinterland, demanding economic progress capable of safeguarding the environment and history. Meanwhile, Muglia’s nomination to the FAI Places of the Heart is news from a few days ago: “we hope that people will help us save this place with their vote,” say activists of the No Landfill Committee. It would be “a simple gesture that would allow us not only to make this wonderful corner of Sicily better known but also, if we win, to set up an environmental and historical education center in the valley that will be managed by the Centuripe Associations already involved in the area.” At the moment Muglia is among the top 80 Places of the Heart: to vote, just go to the FAI website. Thus, should Muglia turn out to be among the winners, the dream of enhancing from an environmental and cultural point of view an area that would otherwise have been turned into a dump would be realized.

This beautiful corner of Sicily will not become a landfill: superintendence places bond

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