Locride, the most isolated land in Italy. The national and regional governments passed and little or nothing continues to be done for a piece of Italy condemned to irrelevance from chronic disinterest much more and better than it is already from its geographical position and the asperrime morphology of its territories. The ionic side of the metropolitan territory of Reggio Calabria consists of a de facto strip of subtle coast, crushed on the sea by an aspromonte that at the west precipitates brusque into the sea. Other than the sweet Declivi of the East, who look at the Tyrrhenian and after Scilla “open” to the plain of Gioia Tauro: on the Ionian the massif “grants” only forest walls that conceal percocated countries, anti and inaccessible cliffs, sanctuaries in the middle of nothing and the most powerful ndrangheta in the world. From there highway, railway, port; Here, isolation still without remedy.
Fast and modern communication routes, therefore: they have been invoked for decades, in vain. State 106 is the same as fifty years ago, and its doubling, without too much fantasy indicated as a new state road 106 connects only Locri to Roccella Jonica, covering 15 kilometers: a highly limited utility stump.
This “new 106”-through the Ionian-Tyrrhenian transversal, a dizzying two tough lanes that “flows” on the turbid stream between Grotteria Mare and Marina di Gioiosa-“accompanies” the arduous motorist who exits the Salerno-Reggio motorway only in Roccella to the north and (very tortuously) in Siderno and Locri to the south. Descending the tip of the boot, the “new 106” materializes, who knows why, only for a short stretch at Palizzi. For the rest (110 interminable kilometers between Locri and Reggio) there is only the old two -lane asphalt ribbon and double sense of which nothing makes the idea of the conceament with which it is known: the “road of death”. In short, an entire piece of Italy is barely connected to the rest, cut off from any communication route worthy of the name. A gap that 42 Municipalities and 120 thousand inhabitants in constant decreases heavily discount in terms of economic and social development.
There are two possible and hopeless intervention routes, even if impervious and of expensive realization. Above all, concretizable only by Ferrea political will, so far never found, at all levels, nationally in the first place.
The first is precisely the completion of the entire new 106 from Reggio to Locri. It would be a lifeblood for each commercial circuit and for an absolute beauty coast, villages of extraordinary charm, architectural places of enormous value and sensationally unknown. In short, a paradise of potentially enormous and yet “castrated” tourist attractiveness by the disconsolate difficulty of reaching it. The megalotto project between Marina di Gioiosa and Ardore, completed only in part, was a strategic work of the “Objective Law”, inserted among the priority infrastructures. It was not finished for insufficient financing but in a meeting of a few days ago the outgoing and re-attached governor Roberto Occhiuto recalled that during his mandate 3.8 billion were found for the sections already designed by Reggio in Catanzaro (including just 9 kilometers Locri-Ardore) while for those without the project he commissioned Anas to draw him back. “Now we are in the condition, as soon as there are resources available in the budget of the state to invest them in the 106 in the stretch that goes to Melito Porto Salvo”, his words. An intention that anyone who wins will have to remember to carry on. “As soon as there are resources of the state available”, of course.
The second intervention of unit importance for Locride is the other great unfinished: the Bovalino-Bagnara. Transversal almost even more strategic than that of the murky: building it would be like bringing water to a desert. A completely isolated territory, that of the lower locride, would be connected to the world. Also on this road Occhiuto has focused the spotlight, inserting it between its priorities, dividing the burden between region and national government. “It is – he said – to finance it with the development and cohesion fund: now we will also see to understand how much part of the resources we can put us and how much part we can ask the national government”. If it is not a book of dreams almost, but there is no alternative to hope.
On these infrastructure needs, the future of Locride is played. Any other intervention is a palliative because an isolated territory does not attract investments, nor opportunities or ideas, does not allow cultural exchanges, the wings to the democratic participation is targeting. In it they take root and resist marginalization, mental closure and cultural backwardness. In what was the heart of Magna Grecia, the cradle of thought and civilization that illuminated the world.