Wikipedia / Tango7174
The prefect of Rome is moving forward with plans for a giant landfill just a few hundred yards from one of the world’s most historic landscapes, according to a report in the Belfast Telegraph.
Hadrian’s Villa, constructed by the Roman emperor Hadrian between 118 and 138 AD, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The ruins of this 200-acre garden city have inspired generations of designers around the world. Yet local officials are planning to open a landfill just 700 meters upwind.
The city of Rome is in the midst of a garbage crisis. Its main landfill is well over capacity, and Prefect Giuseppe Pecoraro told the Telegraph that the city’s failure to create a new landfill here soon could lead to a “state of emergency.”
Meanwhile, some of Italy’s culture officials have threatened to resign if the project is completed as planned, and Prince Urbano Riario Sforza Barberini Colonna di Sciarra, who owns a castle nearby, has taken his case against the landfill to the foreign press; he appeared on CBS’s Early Show. “It’s like putting rubbish in the pyramids,” he said.
CBS reported that the landfill’s environmental effects would not be limited to Hadrian’s Villa—it could also endanger the water supply for an ancient aqueduct that supplies some of Rome’s most famous fountains.
More than 6,000 people have signed an online petition asking officials to reconsider the location of the landfill.
[…] Read more: landscapearchitecturemagazine.org […]