TARANTO, Italy (CN) — “We are the first city of the dead,” Giovanni Scialpi, a street-side mussels vendor in Italy’s bootheel, says without a shadow of a doubt on his face. “Taranto is called the city of the dead. Everything is polluted. The water, the air. Everyone dies from tumors. So many health problems, and it’s always tumors.”
Scialpi shrugs, shakes his head and goes back to a livelihood he's carried on for 25 years, selling mussels under the shade of an umbrella over his stand.
Will the environment here see major improvements now that Italy's government is run by the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement that’s vowed to close Ilva, a mammoth steelworks plant blamed for much of the pollution?
“Nothing's going to change with the new government,” Scialpi says with little enthusiasm. “To make things better, they need to get rid of Ilva, get rid of all the plants.”
Dangerous pollution, including deadly dioxin, is the tragic story of Taranto, a bustling but badly bruised maritime city on the Ionian Sea on the northwest corner of the bootheel.
Ilva is a coal-powered steelworks mill and the largest mill in Europe, long a pride of Italian industry. But now it’s a national embarrassment.
It was built by the former national steel company near old Taranto during the 1960s, a period of industrialization for Italy’s poor south.
Since the early 2000s, a series of investigations by law enforcement, environmental and health specialists, judges and magistrates, with much prodding by citizen groups, revealed that decades of contamination have left residents, neighborhoods, water bodies, pastureland and groundwater near the plant dangerously polluted.
Most troubling was the discovery of high levels of dioxins, considered among the world's most dangerous carcinogenic industrial toxins.
Flocks of sheep near Ilva were slaughtered after cheese made from their milk was found contaminated with dioxins in 2008. Grazing now is forbidden in uncultivated fields within a 20-kilometer (12½ mile) radius of Ilva.
Mussel cultivation is off limits in a large coastal lagoon next to the city called the Little Sea after high levels of dioxins were discovered in 2011.
Drinking wells too have been polluted, according to recent studies.
Since 2017, schools near the plant are closed on windy days to prevent children from breathing contaminated dust blown in from giant piles of processed and raw minerals sitting uncovered at the plant. Ilva is preparing to cover those piles.
Health studies have found high rates of tumors in plant workers and in the general population. Dioxins were even found in the milk of breastfeeding mothers.
Health investigators linked the deaths of 386 people over 13 years to industrial pollutants — one death every 12 days — and the most of those deaths to Ilva, according to prosecutors.
Italian judges ordered Ilva to close the most-polluting parts of the plaint in 2012. Political leaders balked at that. Italy’s center-left governments passed a series of decrees to keep the plant open.
Today Ilva is a crucial test for the 5-Star Movement and its 32-year-old leader, Luigi Di Maio.
In the March general elections, the 5-Star Movement was buoyed into power with the support of southern Italians.
The party has made pro-environmental stances central — among them a call to close down Ilva and clean up its grounds. The 5-Star Movement hauled in nearly half of Taranto's votes in March.