Paola Alagia, Massimiliano Iervolino. Preface by Gian Antonio Stella. Reality Book Edizioni. 152 pagg. 14€
Review by Roberto Cavallo
I’ve just finished reading the book by Alagia and Iervolino.
I’ve devoured it. Not only because it’s about an issue that I’ve been studying for twenty years, but also because it’s well written. Fluent. It’s seems to be a novel.
When you go back to read a paragraph you found it true. What you are reading is dramatically true. The names, the places, the dates: everything is true.
And with them it’s true the pollution of a vast area of Rome and the connivance of the administrations that let it happened.
“What is Malagrotta? I believe it will become ‘Buonagrotta’* for the service it provided to Rome and to almost the whole Lazio region…” This is one of the sentences of Manlio Cerroni, “the lawyer”, owner of Malagrotta and of many others dumping grounds and waste disposal plants in Lazio. These sentences are extracted from the statements he issued to the Corriere della Sera newspaper and from his auditions in the Commission for the Environment in the Chamber and in the Senate. They are at the beginning of the book.
Then you read the book. You get involved into the story of the “king of the rubbish”, of the politicians who governed Rome, its Province and the Lazio Region and of the place where there’s the dumping ground. And then you arrive at the recent analyses made by the ARPA (Regional Agency for the Protection of the Environment), where it’s said: “the results from the 2010 survey confirm the ground waters contamination observed in the previous monitoring campaign of the site, both for inorganic and organic compounds… On the basis of these results we stress the need of measures for securing the site from the diffusion of the contamination, and we suggest subsequent recovery plans of the site […]. The most important information is not the peak of the 2010, compared to the 2009, but the fact that the numbers of the last year show that the pollution is not decreasing, but increasing instead.”
So you think that maybe it hasn’t really become “Buonagrotta”!
The seriousness of the situation is confirmed by several attached documents, including analyses, graphs, scientific publications about the impact of the dumping grounds on human health, as long as copies of the reports to the Public prosecutor’s office.
The subtitle “the disaster of the ‘partitocrazia’**. The Malagrotta case: the eight hill of Rome” describes part of the book. Because the work by Alagia and Iervolino is not only a denunciation, but also an attestation of the efforts made by the Malagrotta Committee and by its resolute president, Sergio Apollonio. It’s also suggested a regional plan of waste management, which should stress the relevance of the prevention and the waste separation so that, if dumping grounds have to be there, at least they’ll be marginal and not dangerous.
It’s a book that leaves a door open for the hope, because, if “the problem is difficult to unravel […], two points are sure in this story: the citizens, that won’t accepted the decisions made by the top, and Europe, which likely keeps an eye on this situation.
* Malagrotta, which is the name of the dumping ground site, literally means “bad cave”, while ‘Buonagrotta’ means “good cave”. It’s a wordplay alluding to the supposed goodness of the Malagrotta site.
** partitocrazia means a situation in which political parties control all the institutions.
I’ve devoured it. Not only because it’s about an issue that I’ve been studying for twenty years, but also because it’s well written. Fluent. It’s seems to be a novel.
When you go back to read a paragraph you found it true. What you are reading is dramatically true. The names, the places, the dates: everything is true.
And with them it’s true the pollution of a vast area of Rome and the connivance of the administrations that let it happened.
“What is Malagrotta? I believe it will become ‘Buonagrotta’* for the service it provided to Rome and to almost the whole Lazio region…” This is one of the sentences of Manlio Cerroni, “the lawyer”, owner of Malagrotta and of many others dumping grounds and waste disposal plants in Lazio. These sentences are extracted from the statements he issued to the Corriere della Sera newspaper and from his auditions in the Commission for the Environment in the Chamber and in the Senate. They are at the beginning of the book.
Then you read the book. You get involved into the story of the “king of the rubbish”, of the politicians who governed Rome, its Province and the Lazio Region and of the place where there’s the dumping ground. And then you arrive at the recent analyses made by the ARPA (Regional Agency for the Protection of the Environment), where it’s said: “the results from the 2010 survey confirm the ground waters contamination observed in the previous monitoring campaign of the site, both for inorganic and organic compounds… On the basis of these results we stress the need of measures for securing the site from the diffusion of the contamination, and we suggest subsequent recovery plans of the site […]. The most important information is not the peak of the 2010, compared to the 2009, but the fact that the numbers of the last year show that the pollution is not decreasing, but increasing instead.”
So you think that maybe it hasn’t really become “Buonagrotta”!
The seriousness of the situation is confirmed by several attached documents, including analyses, graphs, scientific publications about the impact of the dumping grounds on human health, as long as copies of the reports to the Public prosecutor’s office.
The subtitle “the disaster of the ‘partitocrazia’**. The Malagrotta case: the eight hill of Rome” describes part of the book. Because the work by Alagia and Iervolino is not only a denunciation, but also an attestation of the efforts made by the Malagrotta Committee and by its resolute president, Sergio Apollonio. It’s also suggested a regional plan of waste management, which should stress the relevance of the prevention and the waste separation so that, if dumping grounds have to be there, at least they’ll be marginal and not dangerous.
It’s a book that leaves a door open for the hope, because, if “the problem is difficult to unravel […], two points are sure in this story: the citizens, that won’t accepted the decisions made by the top, and Europe, which likely keeps an eye on this situation.
* Malagrotta, which is the name of the dumping ground site, literally means “bad cave”, while ‘Buonagrotta’ means “good cave”. It’s a wordplay alluding to the supposed goodness of the Malagrotta site.
** partitocrazia means a situation in which political parties control all the institutions.
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