Italian Tourism Essays - Transnational Organized Crime, Camorra

Italian Tourism YOU would not know it from the English-language signs promising to serve passengers ``quckly'', but Naples' Capodichino airport is British-owned. In August, 70% of it was bought by BAA, a company that also runs, among other things, London's main airport, Heathrow. For the Italian south this is a symbol of hope. Finding an international firm of this calibre willing to invest there has greatly boosted its confidence. BAA, for its part, was attracted by the south's tourist potential, but spent three years thinking hard about the $44m deal. What clinched it in the end was the enthusiasm of Antonio Bassolino, the mayor of Naples since 1993. He won round BAA bosses with his clear commitment to privatisation, and fought off opposition at home to foreign ownership, branded as ``colonisation by the British''. A former communist fundamentalist, Mr Bassolino is an unlikely champion of privatisation. But the BAA deal is no one-off. Mr Bassolino boasts about selling the municipal dairy-``What was a city council doing selling milk?''-and about pioneering, with Merrill Lynch, Italy's first international municipal bond issue, which sold well in America. The cash was used to renovate the city's public transport system. He is promoting public-private partnerships; and he has just persuaded the Chinese commercial fleet to use Naples as its main container port for serving Europe. The city's inefficient bureaucracy has been shaken up, with the mayor leading by example. His distinctly un-Neapolitan punctuality and long working hours have earned him the nickname ``the German''. Using money for hosting the G7 summit in 1994 as a catalyst, the city has cleaned and restored many of its vast number of tourist attractions. It has also extended its opening hours and cleared the main piazzas of parked cars (though not, alas, of moving mopeds). Mr Bassolino talks with passion of re-born civic pride, of the need for Naples to solve its own problems. ``The south has been living on money from the government for too long,'' he says; this has created a ``deadly dependence''. Mr Bassolino explains that he has been able to make these changes only thanks to a new system, introduced in 1993, for the direct election of mayors in cities throughout Italy. This gave him a mandate for four years, allowed him to appoint his own senior officials, and made him directly accountable to the electorate rather than to party politicians on the city council-who cannot now remove him without also triggering new city-council elections. Past mayors, chosen by the ruling party on the council, did well to last a year. Direct election has produced a crop of impressive new city mayors all over the south (and some in the north, too), many of whom have followed Naples' strategy of promoting cultural tourism and tackling inefficient bureaucracy. Their first test will come later this month, when some of them are up for re-election. But there is still plenty of inefficient southern bureaucracy left. Consider, for example, the startling statistic that in 1996 Italy managed to spend only 30% of its entitlement to EU money to help disadvantaged regions such as the mezzogiorno. The country's local and regional governments, it seems, are not even up to collecting hand-outs. The EU increasingly allocates money to specific projects instead of handing it over in a chunk. That means local administrators have to prepare a project submission and translate it for officials in Brussels, for which many of them at present lack the skills. But things may be getting better, slowly. For instance, a ``Europe Office'' with English-speaking staff has been set up in Palermo's city hall. Bassolino's new recipe for Naples Bureaucracy has also made it hard to do anything new. One big firm wanted to sink some wells so it could build a new plant in Sicily. Enzo Bianco, the mayor of Catania, tells the story of how, after two years of waiting, the firm made its fourth phone call to the regional government, only to be told that ``if you call a fifth time, you will never get permission.'' Mr Bianco has made some improvements in his city, including setting up a ``one-stop shop'' to help firms with permits. But much remains to be done, he says: over the years, the impact of bureaucracy on Sicily's development has been ``no less than the impact of the Mafia''. Who is the boss now? The Mafia (along with similar criminal organisations,