Now Napoli must think about removing the Scudetto banners

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More or less from the end of February, Naples began to fill up with murals, blue banners, tricolor flags and other decorations of various kinds to celebrate well in advance the probable Scudetto victory of the city’s soccer team, a victory which then materialized in the following months. Since then Naples decorated for the Scudetto has practically become a tourist attraction in itself, attracting to the city many people from outside curious and eager to participate in the general festive atmosphere.

Now that with the end of the championship most of the festivities seem to have ended and the official celebrations are over, the city is left with the problem of removing the enormous amount of banners and decorations present almost everywhere. On Wednesday, the municipality convened a “working table” to establish the methods and timing of the operation, which should start as early as next week. In the meantime, spontaneous initiatives have arisen in various areas of groups of people who have already begun in recent days to clean up their neighborhoods, organizing themselves autonomously.

The municipality’s plan will be made official in the coming days (other meetings have been scheduled) and at the moment an estimate of the costs has not yet been released, but it has been decided not to rely on an external company precisely to try to limit them, and it is expected that the work will take several weeks. In the coming days, each of the ten municipalities into which Naples is divided will have to draw up a list of streets in which action must be taken and murals to be removed in their area of ​​competence, signaling priorities.

In addition to the competent councilors, such as Vincenzo Santagada for the Environment, the meetings of the municipality are attended by various representatives of institutions and companies which in some way will be involved in the removal of the banners. The heaviest task will probably be up to Asia, the company that manages waste in Naples: it will have to dispose of and recycle an enormous quantity of plastic, the material by far the most used for banners and decorations (white and blue plastic ribbons are found in almost every neighborhood in the city). City councilor Nino Simeone, who heads the Infrastructure, Mobility and Civil Protection commission, has proposed that all the plastic collected in the dismantling be used to produce works of contemporary art, to be placed in some areas of the city that would need redevelopment.

The intervention of the Civil Protection will also be needed to avoid damage and possible dangers: just to give an example, it happened that some light poles bent due to the excessive weight of the banners. The fact that many decorations were hung from light poles also required the participation of Citelum, the company that manages street lighting.

The murals, writings and drawings made with paint on the walls on the stairways and sometimes even on the monuments will also have to be removed, an operation that will probably require the greatest financial commitment. In the case of monuments, it will also be necessary to seek the opinion of the Superintendence, the body responsible for preserving the assets of historical, artistic and cultural value.

(Alessandro Garofalo/LaPresse)

However, the municipality and the companies that manage public services on its behalf will only be able to intervene on banners and flags that are on public land, therefore only if they are attached to trees, benches, road signs, light poles, or on murals and writings painted on public walls and floors. For the removal from private properties, the collaboration of the condominium administrators will also be needed, for which there will probably be a special ordinance that will ask them to intervene by a certain date.

In this regard, some neighborhood committees have gathered many volunteer inhabitants through their groups on social media or by word of mouth, and have already started cleaning since Monday, collecting the money needed for these smaller and more partial interventions. Republic of Naples he recounted of neighbors who are organizing to remove the banners shared between two balconies, or of young people who have undertaken to remove from the church of San Vitale, in the Fuorigrotta district, the decorations they had asked the parish priest to be able to put up weeks ago. Fuorigrotta is one of the most decorated districts also because it is the area of ​​the Napoli stadium, the Diego Armando Maradona. In general, most banners are found in alleyways, where it’s easier to hang streamers across the street.

Several people have said they will keep some of the removed decorations as souvenirs, but most of the plastic is ending up in recycling bins. For the moment, the spontaneous cleaning of the inhabitants is avoiding the decorations deemed most representative, such as those in the Quartieri Spagnoli, the twenty-metre-long tricolor flag in via Vicaria Vecchia and the long tricolor cloth positioned at the entrance to Spaccanapoli, the long road that passes through the center and divides the old part of the city in two.

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