Roads and venues remain unbuilt as the southern Italian city struggles to be the 2019 capital of culture.
When the southern Italian city of Matera found out it had been selected as the 2019 European capital of culture, its ancient streets echoed with cheers. Thousands gathered in October 2014 to watch the announcement live from Brussels in a central piazza. “It reminded me of the day when Napoli announced it had acquired Diego Maradona,” said Daniele Kihlgren, an Italian-Swedish businessman who has invested in a hotel in Matera. “The same uproar was heard throughout the town.”
But the euphoria was quickly replaced by a sense of anxiety. “After the celebrations,” said Eustachio Nicoletti, Matera’s secretary for Italy’s largest labour union, the CGIL, “people began to wonder, ‘and what the hell are we going to do now?’”
Today, with little over three months remaining until 2019, that concern has become a real fear that the city’s big opportunity could instead be a colossal failure. Local organisations and business owners are warning that the city will simply not be ready. Rome and Brussels secured €400m (£360m) to organise the year’s events, money that was supposed to pay for restoring buildings and repairing streets in a place famed for its stunning but dilapidated beauty and history of dire poverty.
But, according to the unions, most of the money is still trapped in the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy and has not yet been spent.
“Of the seven buildings that should have housed the cultural events, at least five will not be ready in time for 2019,” said Nicoletti.
Concern also surrounds accessibility: half of the funding, about €200m, had been allocated for the construction of a new railway line. The station is there – it was built in 1986 – but there is no railway. Matera can still be reached only by a slow, secondary rail line from Bari, which takes nearly two hours to cover 60km, while work to complete the Bradanica highway, connecting the city with the north of the Basilicata region, began almost 40 years ago and has yet to be completed.
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