When the taxi driver slips into the narrow and teeming alleys of the Spanish neighborhoods you understand that " Napul'è" . Luciano De Crescenzo, who really knew the city of Totò, Pino Daniele and De Filippo, was not joking: in Naples the red light is not a prohibition, it is just a suggestion. Needless to point out that that street has an obvious one-way sign. Who first manages to cross it passes, the other rings and protests. The Neapolitan slang of the metered driver is tight, but daring a question doesn't trigger the tour guide's fare. If you ask him to take you to the Giant of Mont 'e Prama, he doesn't think twice.
Totò and the bones of the Giant
He will never tell you that he does not know what you are talking about and re-launches, exactly as Prince de Curtis would have done: "the bones of the giant?". Not the bones, just the Giant of Mont 'e Prama. It is exhibited in the Museum. The face is of one who knows perfectly where to take you. After a bit of crossroads and despots in the wrong direction, he exclaims: "here we are". Too bad it was the Museum of Contemporary Art, that of via Settembrini, where the boxer on the road was not really old enough to enter. He does not lose heart and adds: "I understand perfectly where they have put it, if it is an ancient statue it is at the Archaeological". Another lap, another race. To welcome you there is a Covid format ticket office, distances and plexiglas for everyone. The hanging signs in the monumental Archaeological Museum of Naples recount the exhibitions on the main floor.
Manga Heroes & Gigantes
There is that of the "Confreres". It was completed on 30 June, but the indications are peremptory: prehistory collection room 129, second level. The pedestals placed side by side announce, again on the second floor, this time Sala Plastico di Pompei, the exhibition of "Manga Heroes", the heroes and myths on the slopes of the volcano. superman in flying format. And, then, "Sardinia, Megalithic Island", Sala della Meridiana. In line for an 18 euro ticket there are the clogs of travelers and the t-shirts of tourists overwhelmed by 40 degrees of humidity on the skin . You cannot choose: you pay the entrance fee and you can see what you want. The tour guide is aimed at vacationers with an identification card hanging around his neck. He promises a guided tour for individuals and groups, three languages to choose from: Italian, Spanish and French.The French grab it immediately.
Green slum
For those looking for the "Giant" there is no escape, they must do it themselves. The guided tour is only for the Museum, its rooms and permanent archaeological exhibitions. The flight of stairs is imperial, but it is hidden by a dry and bare subspecies of "garden" that rises impetuously like a "green slum" right at the door of the staircase. Stones picked up who knows where, as ugly as expired bills, erected in a semicircle to try to hide the equally horrible plastic pots. Everyone dodges that dry pig festival forest. Yet it is the entrance to one of the most renowned archaeological museums in Italy. Contradicting the flow of visitors, the gaze turns to the commemorative plaque affixed to the right pillar of the monumental access. The explanation of that environmental mockery is all in one sentence squashed as an "epitaph" without appeal. A few words to devastate the image of a unique land: «Typical Sardinian landscape». It is useless to seek mitigating circumstances in myopia, in the Edict it is written just like that. A representation as out of place as it is surreal, capable of mortifying the unique and unrepeatable environmental heritage of the Nuraghi Island as never before. A real barrier of dry myrtle, holm oaks reduced to death by a water famine worse than that of northern Italy, strawberry trees transformed into foliage from pellets. The preamble to the "Nuragic Exhibition", however, is only at the beginning.
Outrage to the Royal Palace
Behind that “dry” wall stands what for a passing tourist, looking for an explanation, is a subspecies of “Maschio Angioino”, the Castel Nuovo stretched out on the seafront of Naples. Too bad that, even if it were, it would be in miniaturized format, stuff from lego constructions. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Stamped with paint on the floor there is an explicit indication that Giovanni Lilliu, the “Sardus Pater ”, would have taken straight to the first Carabinieri station to report his outrage. The images we post are more explicit than any word. The magnificence of the «Reggia di Barumini» reduced to a “polystyrene mignon”, with the Nuragic Civilization, that of the Giants, transformed into a pocket-sized millionaire format .
Eyes only for the Sundial
The tour guide in French has already reached the Meridiana room, the one that houses the "Giant Boxer". The Francophone explanation, shrill and professional voice, skips any reference to that "poor" statue deported by Mont 'e Prama, in the name and on behalf of a golden affair , complete with tours for four international museums, from Berlin to Thessaloniki, from St. Petersburg to Naples. Here, in the Meridiana room, the “orphan” Giant has placed him at the extreme corner of a royal space. In reality, hardly anyone notices the Giant. The room, in fact, is dedicated to the sundial which is activated only thanks to the entry of sunlight through a small hole in the ceiling. The tourist who looks out, therefore, has his gaze completely turned to the sky and to the diagonal of the "Meridian Line" that traces the floor. In the Grand Hall that projection on the ground of the hourly rotation of the sun marks the passage of time, the one that marks the mortifying loneliness of the "Boxer" of Mont 'e Prama, deprived of glances and attention.
Sardus Pater betrayed
The plasticized panels that flank it erase all charm, desecrating the greatness of that statuary ensemble that Giovanni Lilliu had urged "never to divide". Separating them would have had the result that you can touch with your hand in Naples: a devastating historical archaeological " diminutio" , as if only one of the Riace Bronzes were brought on display, or that the terracotta soldiers of the Chinese army were touring one by one. The synthesis is a commercial in reverse: patched bushes, abandoned Giant, four opaque panels and not even a guide. It could be said of a low cost operation, but this is not the case. The reality is, in fact, another: the damage to image is very significant, to which we must add an astronomical amount allocated and, by now, spent for this “Giant Tour”.
Crazy expenses
The budget chapters of the sums dedicated to this traveling exhibition, “Mediterranean, the millenary and Nuragic civilization from Sardinia to St. Petersburg and surroundings”, mark the gigantic sum of 2 and a half million euros. There is no trace of the commitment of the entire figure: certainly there is only a direct entrustment of the Tourism Department of the Region made to an unknown company in Mogliano Veneto, the "Villaggio Globale International", a srl that has proposed to organize this tour for the "modest" sum of 360 thousand euros for each of the four trips. The cost of each trip, to understand the extent of the expense, is worth the same as the rental of 36 aircraft, or 7,200 seats, 28,800 if we consider all four trips, with a resident rate from Rome to Cagliari. For all four stages, the determination, number 132 of 11 March 2020, ordered the payment of the beauty of one million and 433 thousand euros. The poker of exhibitions, of course, cannot be measured in any way: neither as the number of visitors, nor as a possible tourist return, without considering the potential damage from “ diminutio ” of image for the Nuragic Civilization. Each exhibition, in fact, did not have an entrance dedicated to the "Giant", thus preventing the true number of visitors from being counted. In St. Petersburg, for example, “il Pugilatore” ended up in a very marginal passage of the Hermitage Museum and in Naples in a corner of a room destined for another attraction. Finally, it remains to understand the history of this direct entrustment to a company that boasts a bond as exclusive as it is anachronistic precisely with Putin's Russia. Then there is the utility chapter. Huge sums are revolving around the Giants that clash with the absolute degradation of the site of Mont 'e Prama in Cabras, reduced to a sort of potato field, with weeds everywhere and a disconcerting abandonment, with archaeological excavations managed as the poor maintenance of a urban water supply, occasionally a trench only when a pipe is punctured.
Mont 'e Prama abandoned
On propaganda, not to be confused with promotion, however, an avalanche of public money is continuing to be spent on an archaeological site that is still totally forbidden to tourists and visitors. Even a minimal serious project of excavations and overall enhancement of the area does not exist. Not to mention the expansion of the Cabras museum: it was supposed to be completed in January of this year, but it is still at sea. The thorniest case of this story, however, is that which concerns the “direct” assignment of this tour, without any public tender, to the “Villaggio Globale International Srl”. In the appointment resolution it is written that the lords of Mogliano Veneto would be "exclusivists for the service requested". The documents show, however, that the Region did not request anything, but that it was the company with the keys to the Kremlin who proposed the operation.
Money to Putin's friends
Entrusting a figure of this amount, one million and 433 thousand euros, to those who simply request it only because they "boast" an exclusive relationship with Putin's friends is stuff to make anyone pale. It is evident that all these expenses will have to be weighed in detail. Figures that, in a transparent management of this immense archaeological heritage, unique and indivisible, should be made public without further delay, complete with a list of new archaeologists turned into tourists by chance. Last entry. When the taxi driver discovered the amount of the frightening amount spent to transport the Giant to Naples, he limited himself to commenting on his initial mistake with the words of Pino Daniele: "Je so 'pazzo".
