“It should be remembered that ours is the country with the most UNESCO sites in the world. But for the bodies that are awarded them, be they municipalities, provinces, regions, there are great efforts and different attention would be needed. For years I have asked the Anci to establish a delegation to UNESCO sites. We are too accustomed to Italian beauty, and we risk having ‘difficulties’ in understanding the difference between a site protected by the World Heritage and one that is not a world heritage site the difference it is enormous: I don’t want to say that the tourist who comes to Italy should not see Rome, Florence, Naples, Venice, Pisa and our other world-famous cities, but I am convinced that that tourist could decide to spend one day less there , to dedicate one instead to the many UNESCO sites that represent Italian excellence in the world of culture, history and also our identity”. Thus to Adnkronos the president of the Italian World Heritage Association, Alessio Pascucci.
An association that was born, explains Pascucci, “about 30 years ago, in 1997, by some local administrators so that the requests of the sites that had been recognized as world heritage by UNESCO could be defended, which often takes not only a single municipality, but even in the case of Rome it is a transnational site with the Vatican. Our work has led for example to the writing and approval of the law that finances these cultural sites, number 77. Unfortunately the only one and also very poor: the average allocation. And less than 2 million Euros per year, significantly lower than other nations or real needs.
Honors and burdens in hosting a site protected by the World Heritage on one’s territory, “but the former far outweigh the latter, which however are many and tiring. In Cerveteri – recalls Pascucci, who administered the municipality north of Rome for 10 years – the UNESCO recognition for its Etruscan necropolis arrived in 2004: a public transport shuttle connecting the train station to the necropolis had never been thought of, making it impossible to reach it from Rome We decided to put a shuttle every hour, so that any tourists could use it. And it is only one case among many cities. Unfortunately there are no transport supports given to the municipalities that have a site in their territory and therefore we had to taking resources away from local public transport that were perhaps used to connect hamlets and the city centre. This is just one of a thousand examples.”