They wanted to attack the pre-Nuragic proscenium of Pranu Muttedu, the megalithic village downstream of the large Mulargia lake, in the land of Flumendosa, with wind turbines. An exclusive landscape, an archaic interweaving of a wild environment and ancient signs of the great civilization of the Sardinian people. Places without a future, according to the wind profiteers, who once again came from very far away. As they had already done throughout the length and breadth of Sardinia, here too they thought of making the totalizer of State incentives spin, intercepting the gusts that have always, in this place steeped in ancient spirituality, shaped ridges, smoothed the horizon and " disheveled” centuries-old holm oaks and junipers. It went badly for him, for today and, in all likelihood, also for the future. Last night's ruling by the Sardinia Regional Administrative Court is not an occasional decision. The administrative judges not only wrote a tombstone for those wind turbines that would have forever scarred that place steeped in ancient history and uncontaminated nature, but they wrote a decisive chapter in the future of the island. What politicians and institutions at all levels have failed to do, the officials of the Administrative Court of Sardinia are doing.
“Constitutional” verdict
Not simply a verdict, but a pronouncement that in many ways takes on a "constitutional" value, putting down on paper one of the most authoritative, enlightened and modern interpretations of the Charter of Laws. A sentence preceded by a careful reading of all the values imprinted in that Constitution which even today seems to represent the last bastion of common sense and foresight. What the TAR Judges do, with the ruling dated 5 April 2024, is an objective and timely balancing of those cornerstones introduced by the Constituents and recently innovated on the subject of the environment.
The question: who prevails?
The decisive issue can be summarized with a question: which comes first: renewable energy, wind turbines and photovoltaic panels, or the environment and the history of Sardinian civilisation? The response of Judge Gianluca Serra, author of the sentence, of Judge Councilor Oscar Marongiu and of the President of the TAR himself, Marco Buricelli is destined to mark the future of the Island. The passage is limited to a few concepts: « Indeed, the "territory", as a component of the "environment", constitutes the same object of discipline, also assuming, in its cultural and identity guise, the connotation of "landscape", evocative of other underlying constitutional values (articles 9 and 32 of the Constitution) and other interests to be reconciled" . In summary: it is true that renewable energies are important, but they cannot in any way prevail or, worse, be all-encompassing over other constitutional values, such as the landscape, the environment, the culture and the identity of a people. And it is the Judges themselves who define as irrelevant any other jurisprudence that does not take these values into account: « the balance achieved and the motivation given in concrete terms regarding the individual aspects of environmental incompatibility of the project, particularly in terms of the relationship with archaeological protection and landscape, determine the irrelevance, for the purposes of assessing the validity of the appeal, of the jurisprudence widely referred to by the appellant regarding the need for the protection of cultural heritage not to have an all-encompassing scope ". In other words: the point of balance for the Judges is not to put a few less shovels and "sacrifice" a few nuraghi and menhirs, as the three brothers from Bolzano Ernest, Thomas and Josef Gostner, owners of the project and of the Green Society, would have liked Sardegna 2 srl who proposed the massacre. The balance is therefore given by the absolute protection of those assets explicitly and intrinsically protected by the Constitution. The magistrates in Piazza del Carmine, headquarters of the Sardinia TAR, were not even worried about the avalanche of regulations that governments and parliament have passed in an attempt to facilitate the wind attack, in Sardinia first of all. And they say it without too many preambles: « the actual simplifications introduced... have not at all led to the affirmation that the protection of cultural and landscape values takes on a recessive value with respect to this interest, their protection remaining entrusted to evaluations - characterized by margins of technical discretion almost unquestionable by the administrative judge - of the competent bodies" .
Superintendent doc
The concept is clear: if the Superintendence, as in the case of the pre-nuragic village of Pranu Mattedu in Goni, has deemed the landscape and archaeological heritage of the area to be at risk, no one can review that assessment except in terms of logic, coherence and completeness of judgment. And those in charge of the Ministry of Culture were precise in rejecting the Gostener project without appeal: « the visibility of the facility is significant and difficult to mitigate. Over a short distance, the installation of wind turbines interrupts the open and characteristic perspective of the landscape with an archaic flavour, enriched by the presence of Nuragic garrisons, which stand mostly on the heights or at the edges of the cliffs of the plateaus; the presence of the towers, 200 meters high, effectively impoverishes the structure of the enjoyable landscape paintings".
Attack on Pranu Muttedu
According to the Superintendency, the most important archaeological site in the area was under attack : «the presence of the 200 meter high wind towers is especially relevant in reference to the important site of Pranu Muttedu (candidate in the Unesco tentative list) on which loom in an unsustainable way, both in terms of the objective degree of perceptibility and also in terms of the alteration of the "cultural landscape" that characterizes the area, characterized by the inseparable union of the work of prehistoric man/ protohistoric with the highly natural landscape that is still preserved today" . The sentence is already in the annals: «The Regional Administrative Court for Sardinia (First Section), definitively ruling on the appeal, as proposed, rejects it». The Sardinian institution, defended by Mattia Pani, Attorney General of the Region, with colleagues Andrea Secchi and Giovanni Parisi, brings home a decisive and significant success which marks a new stop to the unbridled wind assault on Sardinia: for the TAR Sardinia the heritage environmental, naturalistic, archaeological-identity of the Island are non-negotiable constitutional values. With all due respect to the lords of the wind who came from Bolzano.