Dark Days in Sunny Italy

For 700 years, four gilded bronze horses have majestically guarded St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice. The horses survived Napoleon's looting armies and two world wars, but not the dirty air generated by petrochemical plants on Venice's mainland. The bronze is now so pitted and weakened that the horses must be removed from St. Mark's Square. Humans are removing themselves as well. The young in particular are fleeing, and Venice may soon resemble a crumbling geriatric ward.

What is happening to Venice is symptomatic of a widespread malaise: much of Italy has become an environmental disaster area. About 85% of the country's 5,000-mile shoreline is polluted by oil spills and industrial wastes, plus the vinyl bags in which Italians wrap their garbage and then blithely dump it, littering the land and the once lovely beaches. Moreover, 80% of Italy's coastal cities have no sewage-treatment facilities. Even Milan, Italy's second largest city, has no such plant. Most wastes--industrial as well as human--are simply dumped into local rivers, which then strew filth into the Adriatic Sea. Flowing southeast from industrial Turin, the River Po alone dirties the Adriatic with effluents equivalent to those of more than 4,000,000 people.

Deadly Fumes. Because the Adriatic and the Mediterranean are fed mainly by such rivers, some scientists fear that even the seas may soon become irreversibly polluted. French Oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau has predicted that the Mediterranean may be devoid of any life up to 25 miles out from its coasts within two or three generations.

Italy's other major problem is the automobile. In 1960, the country had 2,500,000 autos; now it has more than 10 million--an average density of 86 cars per sq. mi., v. 24 in the U.S. At the current growth rate. Rome will have enough cars to cover every foot of road surface by 1977. Because most urban Italians go home for lunch, city traffic is thickened by four horrendous rush hours a day. Auto fumes have already reached dangerous levels, partly because Italian automakers, like other European automakers, are not yet required to install emission controls. Last month the sulfur-dioxide reading in Milan hit more than two parts per million. In London in 1952, a level of 1.34 p.p.m. caused 4,000 deaths.

London cleaned its air by enacting tough antipollution laws. Milan, like the rest of Italy, is just now getting around to considering environmental legislation. Laws are severely overdue to control, for example, the unregulated building boom that threatens to turn much of Italy into a concrete wilderness. "There is not the slightest evidence of conscience or concern for the future," complains Conservationist Antonio Cederna. "Every protest suffocates against the mattress of political inertia." A spokesman for the powerful Farmers Union warns that unchecked water pollution has cut the production of fodder by 60% and increased mortality among cattle. Though industry is hardly the sole culprit in polluting Italy's waterways, he says, "it is necessary that certain industries stop acting like the cat who hides its own dirt with its paws."

The Italian government has been notoriously slow in prosecuting polluters, even slower in legislating to protect the environment. Noxious airborne chemicals continue to suffocate great swaths of Italy's famous umbrella pines. Rank upon rank of concrete box apartments and factories march into the countryside, sprouting on beaches and even in "protected" national parks. Most Italian politicians are still afraid to curb such destructive practices because, in a country with high unemployment, construction provides needed jobs.

Italy does have ardent conservation groups like the Rome-based Italia Nostra (Our Italy), which has prodded the government into curbing commercial development in at least one of Italy's forest areas. Now the public, the courts and regional governments are beginning to stir. A Rome magistrate, for example, has ordered Mayor Clelio Darida to install equipment to treat the city's sewage, much of which now flows raw into the River Tiber, or spend three months in jail for every day he fails to fulfill the order. Such a system, say city engineers, will cost $160 million and take at least five years to complete. Moans Mayor Darida: "I may have to go to the clink for 35 years" (a low estimate).

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