Environmentalists, actors and film directors are amongst those fighting to prevent 200-metre wind turbines from dwarfing the mediaeval town of Orvieto.
German company RWE has obtained permission to place seven turbines on an idyllic stretch of countryside between Orvieto and Lake Bolsena famous for its vineyards and olive groves. Landmarks include extinct volcanoes and historic sites.
The turbines will be four times as tall as Orvieto’s cathedral built in the 13th century, which is regarded as one of Italy’s finest Gothic buildings. Six centuries later, Pope Leo XIII declared it was “so sublime” that it would float up to heaven on Judgement Day.
Local groups and associations calling for a halt to the project now have the backing of actresses Isabella Rossellini and Claudia Cardinale as well as Cannes award winning film director Alice Rohrwacher. They and others have added their names to a petition now sent to Italy’s president Sergio Mattarella.
While committed to renewable energy, they maintain that the turbines will ruin an unspoilt rural area and will be visible for kilometres around.
“As we confront the climate crisis, promoting sources of energy other than fossil fuels is certainly an urgent objective, to be pursued with determination,” the campaigners wrote.
“But the transition to green energy should take into account the risk of radical and irreversible changes to the landscape.”
One of the towers will also be less than 500 metres away from an Etruscan burial ground dating from the ninth century BC.
This contravenes a law that requires at least three kilometres between a wind turbine and a cultural heritage site or monument, the campaigners argued.
It has also been suggested that there is insufficient inland wind to maintain onshore wind farms. “Italy is a country of sun, not wind,” Ripa, a group opposed to inland turbines, claims.
A 200-metre turbine needs foundations that are 12 metres deep, requires up to a 1,000 tons of concrete and 165 tons of steel, Ripa said. “But as well as requiring huge amounts of resources, they also pose a serious risk to local aquifers and the water table.”
Meanwhile, an RWE statement insisted that all “requirements, criteria and regulations” had been respected, and added that the local authorities have disregarded the activists’ objections.
Wind farms were already colonising large sections of the southern Italy’s coastline, Sardinia and Sicily, said Maurizio Conticelli, who belongs to the Orvieto branch of Friends of the Earth.
Now they were focusing on central Italy he claimed.
“But they reckoned without the local communities that are thwarting their plans,” Conticelli added.
