Italy's Low-lying Regions in High-level Scam

The town of Palagiano in the "heel" of Italy stands on a plain that stretches, flat as a billiard table, to the nearby Mediterranean. Santa Giusta in Sardinia sits by a saltwater lake not far from the sea. Low-lying would be a suitable adjective to describe both.

Yet both have succeeded - along with dozens of other less-than-elevated places - in getting themselves classed as "mountain communities", in an adroit piece of bureaucratic manoeuvring to raise cash.

According to the authors of a book of investigative journalism to be published this week, boroughs throughout southern Italy have been quietly nominating themselves as mountain communities to take advantage of subsidies and other benefits intended to alleviate the difficulties of life at high altitude. A law dating from 1971 enabled boroughs to federate into mountain communities. Today, there are more than 350.

Not least among the attractions of establishing one is that it creates a layer of bureaucracy. Palagiano is one of nine boroughs in the Mountain Community of Murgia Tarantina where, as the book's authors note, the average height above sea level is slightly less than that of a hill outside Milan that was once a rubbish dump.

None of the boroughs is officially classified as mountainous. But that has not stopped the Murgia Tarantina from equipping itself with a president, a six-strong executive and a 27-member assembly.

Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella, authors of La Casta, found that Campania, the area around Naples, with barely half as much mountainous territory as Lombardy, had twice as many officials working for mountain communities. There are six such authorities in pancake-flat Apulia, yet only four in the region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, which extends into the Alps.

The president of Italy's local authorities' association, Enrico Borghi, was quoted in yesterday's Corriere della Sera newspaper as saying "at least a third" of Italy's mountain communities should be wound up.