Word: melfi
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Honorable Men Amendolara offers a tiny blip of hope on the otherwise bleak map of Calabria. Current local leaders have pushed to maximize the town's tourist potential and improve living conditions for residents. Beginning in 2001, Mayor Mario Melfi, a former union leader, implemented a municipal program under the grand slogan: "Amendolara wants to be in Italy, in Europe, in peace." Funded by $3 million a year in local property taxes and $630,000 in revenue from traffic tickets - plus additional grants from Rome and Brussels - the town has offered financial incentives and improved infrastructure to attract private businesses...
...strength of those initiatives, Melfi was re-elected in 2006 by a 15 percentage point margin over his closest rival. Talk to the locals and you hear the rare sound of southerners pleased with the direction in which their town is headed. One morning in March, Pasquale Salandria, taking a break from his work on a city clean-up crew, gestures toward two new seaside cafés and a disco. "Ten years ago there was almost nothing here," he says. Indeed, the town of 3,000 now seems to strike a nice balance between dynamism and coastal pleasantness, favoring...
Still, it would be a mistake to get seduced entirely by the mayor's efforts, or by the good-life charms of the town's refurbished 11th century chapel, homemade salami and Mediterranean breeze. For Amendolara's residents are still short on opportunities. Melfi himself says a lack of industry, large-scale agriculture and sufficient air and highway connections means that poverty and unemployment are bound to persist. "We're not some kind of 'happy island,'" he says. "We've got many of the same problems as the rest of Calabria. Too many young people are packing their bags, with...
...temporary public-works contracts - deemed "socially useful" jobs by a state welfare scheme - with a monthly stipend of $770. A father of five, he says he has had to supplement his income with cash-paid day jobs in construction: "You do your best to support your family." Meanwhile, Mayor Melfi's nephew, Sergio Zaccaria, 27, a business major at Roma Tre University in the nation's capital, says he is not likely to come back to live in Amendolara. "Young people here are bitter that we can't maximize our ability," he says. "So, many of us will never...
Back in Amendolara, Melfi doesn't claim to have the magic solution. "I make 100 errors a day," the mayor says. "But I know that if I hadn't made any mistakes I wouldn't have accomplished anything at all." Italy needs more leaders willing to err in the pursuit of the public good, and citizens who learn to discard - and not recycle - those whose sole ambition is to cling to power...