The news of the victory in the city council elections of list nr. 2, led by major candidate Maurizio Cisternino, has arrived on Monday afternoon. After a campaign rally featuring really bitter confrontations, Melendugno has chosen to change the leading political faction.

We take this opportunity to with the new administration good work and to voice once again our concerns and our hopes.

As far as we are concerned, our greatest hope is that, just as before the election, what sots in store for Torre dell’Orso keeps standing and is finalised in the best way and as quickly as possible. The project fo the renovation of Piazza Chiesa, a plan for which was drafted and approved by the past administration, is a great thing in itself.
However, we feel like saying that the beach and the pinewood, which have been laying in abandonment for years but are, at the same time, the soul and heart of Torre dell’Orso, are the top priority. consumed by coastal erosion first, by wild mass tourism afterwards, after every year that goes by we have the impression that they are less and less likely to be recoverable…
The simple act of removing the sand from the street next to the pinewood, now that a wooden fence has been built, fixing the lights, all of which are almost permanently dim, would bring some more decency.

Nest is the seafront which, after a small piece of the tower has crumbled last winter, is -as of today, still dotted with crush control barriers, which do not make a good impression for visitors. To finish, the trash collection service, based on door-to-door separate refuse collection, would be ok -perfectly ok to be sure- if collectors could perform it frequently enough. As far as we are concerned, for instance, it is not enough a weekly collection of plastic…we process way too big an amount. The same story holds true for glass and aluminum, which are collected every second week.

Finally, as we have already said elsewhere, we hope that the project by Vivarch Aps, which has won the publicly announced “Puglia: Capitale Sociale 3.0“, about which we have written in the linked article, will be 100% supported by our new administrators, as they were by the former ones, in the hope that Torre dell’Orso may be born again.

Mirko Serino and Franz Panarese