COMMITTEE AGAINST EXPANSION OF AMPUGNANO AIRPORT –
SIENA
PRESS RELEASE, 22 August 2007
The public recently learnt about plans for expanding
Ampugnano Airport (Siena) from articles in the Italian
press. Today Ampugnano Airport has a very small runway and
counts only 12.000 passengers per year, mostly originated
by touristic flights. According to these plans, the runway
will be extended from less than 1400 m to 2500 m “to
accommodate the new 737s”, and a second runway of 3800
m will subsequently be built. The airport will become
an international hub with a capacity of 4 million passengers
per year.
This project is in contrast with the guidelines of
the Regional Planning Document 2005-2010 which states, “Ampugnano
airport is situated in a plain with great landscape value”
and therefore “modifications to the runway to accommodate
bigger aircraft can be 
excluded,
considering the inutility of such operations and for reasons
of evident environmental impact” (Masterplan
del PIT sul Sistema aeroportuale toscano).
The area of the airport, set between the Montagnola Senese,
Siena and the valleys of the Farma and Merse rivers, is
dotted with Romanesque churches, towers and medieval villages
with 36,000 hectares of forests, rivers, fields and farmland
where human activities have remained at a level permitting
conservation of plant and animal species and habitats among
the richest in Italy. This priority conservation
area is one of the 20 most representative of biodiversity
in the Mediterranean ecoregion. It contains four regional
nature reserves, a national reserve and four Sites of Community
Importance under the European Habitats directive
(92/43/EEC).
It is impossible to understand why certain political forces
plan to build Tuscany’s biggest airport in such a beautiful
and important area at a time when world awareness of climate
change is high. An international airport is not merely a runway.
Its impact is similar to that of a vast industrial area, completely
paved over with infrastructures such as hangars, terminals,
hotels, fuel depots, parking lots, refuelling stations and
highways. It is associated with tremendous noise,
massive emission of combustion and semi-combusted products,
microparticles and toxic liquids such as antifreeze, oil and
aviation gasoline. All this in the plain of Rosia, on
and adjacent the largest acquifer in southern Tuscany, the
Luco, which supplies Siena and much of its province with water.
Siena’s poor road and rail connections have long been
considered a cause of the town’s “isolation”.
The railway has not been improved for decades and has a single
track with diesel locomotives that take more than an hour
and 40 minutes to cover the 70 km between Siena and Florence.
The airport project, sustained by exclusively financial motivations,
is not based an any type of analysis of costs for the community
in terms of damage to health, environmental destruction, cultural
impact and devastation of landscape. The project, alien to
the vocation of the area and its population, cannot be justified
in the name of a misconceived opportunity for “development”.
It will compromise the local heritage (cultural, environmental
and landscape), the health of the citizens of Siena and Sovicille,
and the provincial water supply.
