By Annalisa Coppolaro
It was a small but very visible demonstration, the one happened in front of the National Gallery on Saturday 12th January. No need to shout or do anything of the sort: the large posters were talking loud enough, attracting a huge amount of interest among passers-by, including... Tony Blair!
This was the last day of the exhibition Renaissance Siena, funded by Monte dei Paschi, who is also among the sponsors of the Ampugnano Airport expansion project: a terrible contradiction.
Save Siena, Stop Funding Climate Change, NO to Siena Airport: these were only some of the large slogans printed in red over many placards held by young people who do love Siena and who spend there a lot of time every year. It was a group mainly composed by noble British young people, VIPs but also children and families, Tuscan people who do not want Siena transformed into an international airport on the world map at all. Gabriele comes from Siena but lives part of his time in London: he says without hesitation that “Many, many people are against this project.” The press in Italy, and now also the Sunday Times, that wrote half a page on the topic on Sunday the 13th, are choosing to fight against the project of developing a small military airport, Ampugnano, in the outskirts of Siena into a large airport with hundreds of flights a day. Tuscany has Pisa, Florence and Grosseto airport, and, like the organiser Fred Lambton underlined, “Siena’s fascination is also in the fact that it has stayed the same and has no industries or pollution. Making an airport here would be like taking away the very reason we love it and we go there”.
Fred Lambton is the grandson of the Earl of Durham, who spent his last years in Siena, and his family owns the lovely villa Il Cetinale. He has managed to make his protest heard by writing on facebook and organising this protest through the site itself. The Sienese press has given attention to this demonstration, also because it shows that the airport project is not only seen as negative around Siena and Tuscany, but also outside the borders of our country.
Generally, if until two months ago some mayors of the area around Siena were thinking seriously of expanding Ampugnano, now the trend has changed. The very active committee that was created in Siena and Sovicille some time ago is clearly stating that we can not ruin such a beautiful landscape to make space for an airport which is not essential at all. Pisa and Florence are close by, and few people in Siena want to be woken up by planes landing in runaways that would be created in the fantastic landscape of Sovicille, not far from where the famous Abbazia was built over a thousand years ago.
Don’t pave over Tuscany: another of these posters was saying this, and everybody there, although often flying to Tuscany, agree that it would be a disaster to expand Ampugnano.
“We are happy travelling for a couple of hours from Pisa – says Anna – The town of Siena has less than 60,000 people and there’s no way such a huge airport will be actually used. Also, if we think of all the structures necessary to an airport (like parking areas, hotels, bars, etc.), the area would be transformed into an industrial place, something Siena hasn’t got. Can’t the local government see what a terrible waste this would be, at the expense of one of our last unspoilt areas?”
Siena and Sovicille are protected by Unesco; the Tuscan Territorial Policy Plan of 2005-2010 stated: “Lengthening the Ampugnano runway to make an airport suitable for larger aeroplanes is to be ruled out, since it is unnecessary and because of its obvious and proven environmental impact”.
So, as the leaflets produced for the demonstration state, “The Siena airport project is extremely dubious, being both useless and risky… the charm and appeal of Tuscany lies in the fact that it is not overly industrialized. For an airport to be functional and not a financial disaster, it must have a volume of passengers and flights that would have an environmental impact similar to that of a vast industrial area, unsuitable and unsustainable for a rural and natural area like Sovicille”. This would also have a large impact on the major Tuscan aquifer, the Luco, and on the entire ecosystem.
Let’s hope that, even thanks to the London protest, the idea of an expansion will be ruled out by the government. To keep the history and nature and perfect beauty of Siena just like it is now.
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