1580 Puglia Toxic Scandal

thank goodness someone actually is prepared to explain to expats why puglia is cheaper than the Costa del Sol- Italy is not up for the taking. No quick profits can be made. Buy in Italy by all means but do so because you love the people-warts and all and not because you will make profit on your home. Every area has its issues and we must accept them - we have earthquake and possibly when Naples goes up (has anyone been to Pozzuoli recently?)we will lose everything in Italy - It's part and parcel of life here

Although I didn't buy in Puglia to make a quick profit. I'm here for the duration. Apart form Puglia I havn't even beeen to any other region of Italy and to be quite honest, not bothered at the moment. I,m just happy to discover the region I've bought in and go out for a fantastic meal and the menu comes in one language (ITALIAN), could the same be said of the Costa del Sol, I think not. . :p. I like the fact that very few Italians in the area speak English, and feel disapointed sometime when we can tell somebody is obviously an English tourist. For us the whole point of buying another home abroard was to chose somewhere where hoards of people dont head for their holidays.

As for the report, oh well, just have to wash fruit and veg a bit more. :rolleyes: so what!

[QUOTE=paula hampson]As for the report, oh well, just have to wash fruit and veg a bit more. :rolleyes: so what![/QUOTE]

you can wash the outside of a contaminated fruit all you like, but that will not get rid of the chemical nasties which collected inside it when it was growing.

If you dont grow your own fruit, all the fruits and veggis have tons of sprays all over them and yes washing the outside is not going to do much good as they are sprayed when the fruits are small just for the point of making them grow bigger. Its really easy to grow your own here I have to say. Its just another scare of the day and we cant go on reading the newspapers and watching the news and worrying about it. Soon enough no food will be good to eat.

Now there could be a plus side to this situation, if we end up as human neon lights in the dark at least it will save us a packed on the expensive electricity bills :p and anyway what can be more toxic than a Big Mac and fries :eek:

The people of Puglia are very aware of pollution issues in OUR region and to say nothing is being done is completely untrue.

Berlusconi ( with the help of his side-kick Tony Blair) is trying desperately to build a huge Gas depot at Brindisi and the local communities are fighting them tooth and nail despite the fact it would bring an enormous amount of much needed employment into the region. The reason ...POLLUTION issues from the plant.

There is a lot being done locally on all pollution issues and these first arrests are only the tip of the iceberg.

The best way to find out what is being done is to talk to the local people and to read the local papers...something you can't do if you do not live here. As usual national news reports only concentrate on the scaremongering issues which make headlines.

......and just as an afterthought.....will we ever know how much damage was done to the whole of northern Europe following the Chernobyl disaster ?

good to see some intelligent replies...alex and lyn have it right in a way ...there is a small but growing oposition in italy to the scandal of syndicate controlled waste disposal... the party lege ambiente works hard to make people aware.... and to galvanise some action from local populations...

however there is a historic/geographical factor to the problems associated with pollution and contamination in puglia/campania...

when the first laws came in to say that heavily toxic waste had to be disposed of safely the costs were huge and the mafia...a generic term for all the different syndicates here saw an oportunity....to make "loads of money"...

at first they used to take the waste from the heavy industries in the north and dispose of it locally...however they soon found that they did not have the ground support iin those areas to virtually do as they want and there have been sevral scandals about people dying...whole contaminated areas throughout the north of italy.... ie around venice and part of tuscany are now regarded as unsafe to live or produce from

so they needed to move the stuff where they had good local cooperation and it just happens that puglia on the east and campania on the west are the first two areas you reach on the drive south where organised criminality via their own local form of mafia has good control of politicians and localities.... and a large workforce of their own to carry out the disposal....

so this is no flash in the pan news report.... puglia does not have cheap prices because it is undiscovered... everyone here in italy knows this has been going on for years and therefore you find the lower prices... if you look at abruzzo you will find up until a few years ago no one much had heard of it....however the marche yes.... you will have found as many of you did that looking here there was not much price diference between the two.... why...because it has always been popular with italians also.....

so i regard alex and lyns comments as justified...they are trying to change things... but they have been trying to do that ever since organised crime took there chance to move into puglia....

i do however think comments of washing veg etc are as rediculous as some others have already pointed out and fine if you accept going through life with your head in the sand is your way of coping.... which is maybe why the problems here continue and increase... not only was this waste being spread about on fields.... it was also being milled into animal livestock food.... maybe you want the cow shampooed before you eat the meat....

What do the UK and America do with their Toxic Waste ?

If you're genuinely interested, here's a link to a US website about the subject.

[url]http://www.p2pays.org/ref/09/08460.pdf[/url]

Adriatica,

[size=2]As much as many of your posts are informative and helpful, I get the feeling that you hate the south. For those of us who wish to have part of the Italian life in an area we like and only have a limited budget, this is an option for us.

What are you trying to say, what is your point? That we should all sell up and forget the idea. Of course it's terrible and we will probably all die of toxic poisoning, be subjected to Mafia intimidation, drown in the floods and anything else that you have mentioned about Puglia.

Maybe with the changes and influences that will occur as others buy in the area, the south will be less of a closed shop to intimidation from the Mafia and hopefully things will improve. OK, this may not happen for years and too many foreign buyers can be a disadvantage.

Yes it's good, very good to know all the facts but your posts do come across as biased and opinionated "anti-Puglia" Is this because you have had a bad experience, have never visited or some other dark reason?

Please tell me if I’m misunderstanding you. :(

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i get accused of being anti italian...let alone anti south.... in fact its no anti at all... its just a fact of life which people that choose to live where they want ...puglia...or otherwise ... maybe might want to ...or not know what certain areas of the world hold in store...

puglia i do not regard as anywhere worse than any other place...the south of italy as a whole the same... or for that matter the north..we all make our choices...if you read closely i have also mentioned tuscany and venice as places where the dumping first started...

if you live in puglia its just a fact of life that the sacred heart version of the mafia has taken control.... with there particular brand of income based on illegal immigration,drugs and as relevant to this reply the contamination of the place they live.....

its not an unusual thing here... they most probably have families,children grandparents that will suffer for the greed and short sightedness of importing what are particuly nasty types of toxic waste into their environment.... but have also posted on the school collapse in the molise where the commune and buildinng companies who blatantly flouted all the safety rules allowed a school to be constructed with inadequate materails and now a whole generation of their children have gone.... what can you say when the people responsable for this have taken money and kickbacks and now have no children....

and so it goes on.... everywhere...not italy or the south only.... i would not reccomend anyone to buy in certain areas in the north either... there are now major problems with gangs of eastern europeans treating it almost as the wild west... house robberies there where people are shot over little more than a few hundred euros....

now much as puglia has to offer and those who have chosen the place wish to inform us .... how wonderful it all is ... there are always two views... or more... if someone was to buy a house here for less than the market price ... i would say be careful...there must be a catch in it somewhere... if you look at italy as a whole if prices are much lower in one place rather than another... there must be a catch in it somewhere...

and really it does not work out as a south north divide on prices... the amalfi coast... try getting a bargain there and you might well find yourself with a sq m of ground for the price of a whole house in puglia...why... because it is stunning , it is affluent .... and it is an area free of most of the particular drug/toxic/abusive crimes of some areas in the south... there are other areas in calabria, sicily, campania which command high/normal prices ...

but if you look at sicily recently.... several people dying in their hospitals... for normal operations... and what comes out is that they have less investment and have less good doctors than in the north..... a person with money requiring an operation will travel to the north

i think what you have to understand is that i did not create these problems...they are there for all to see or read about.... that some people do not bother asking the question ... why does it cost less to buy a house in certain areas ...be it for causes that certain areas say are undiscovered.. .. or something else... i think the undiscovered part does not apply to puglia...in fact i had heard of puglia long before abruzzo...its tourist resorts on the coast have been going a long time and bari/brindisi have been pulling in tourists long before anyone had ever heard of pescara airport

so the long answer is.... i have a genuine concern that those that settle in a place...often to retire there have a good grasp of what they are choosing... there is no simple way back when you downsize..... and as someone that actually manages to live quite hapily whereever my feet land me i could most probably have happily chosen puglia and would still have the same comments to make.... i happen to live in abruzzo and hate the morning school run where i in general see several domestic animals laying by the side of the road having been run down often on purpose here by some crazed local from abruzzo....and i reflect on a society which has little or no respect for what to me are besides children the most honourable and innocent members of our world....would i happily shake the hand of the person who poisoned the village dog because it barked too much... i dont think so.... so life is never perfect anywhere

and if not for all the above personal concerns ... my sister in law and her husband are active in the lege ambiente... and i always hear campannia,calabria and puglia whenever they are talking about the latest environment scandal... they happen to live and come from the south... they are bringing up their children there.... i cannot really say to them to shut up because it might affect the house buying prices or influx of foreigners into these regions... their childrens future is there and there are some italians that are willing to speak up and try to change things at far greater risk than i face .... from digruntled puglians or indiscriminate lovers of italy on the forum... but then again i do like a good arguement

OK I understand were your comimg from. As I said, it is good to know the pitfalls of any area and I'm not disgruntled. I would not expect you to tell your sister-in-law to shut-up either, they are saying what they know. It's not what you say so much but they way you say it. You give the feeling that not a lot in life makes you very happy and that we are all doomed. Where ever we live there are problems, the grass is not always greener and we make a choice.

the problems in the south took a long time to grow and will not disappear quickly.the F.T this week carried a report highlighting the enormous gap between private equity investment,with lombardy taking almost a third in value of such deals and some poorer southern areas such as sicily and calabria failing to attract a single deal.