I showed up at the entrance to Villaggio Coppola with the same state of mind as someone who is ready to lose his camera or his life.
When I told friends and relatives that I would be facing an investigation in the territories of Castel Volturno I was seen as a sort of kamikaze before Pearl Harbor. Between pats on the back and invitations to desist, I collected encouraging phrases: “Are you crazy!” “What if they mistake the car for a gun?” “The Camorristi are threatening you” “Look, the blacks they rob you.”
Villaggio Coppola has such a negative reputation that it has managed to arouse in many Neapolitans reactions of intolerance worthy of a Vicenza native nostalgic for the Lombard League. And yet, until twenty years ago, there was no Campanian who had not spent at least one summer here.
In the end, nothing happened. In fact, the silence that accompanied me on the journey became the common thread of the reportage.
If Castel Volturno could present a business card, it would have the cyanotic and tired color of the sky above Parco Saraceno, the complex of buildings that was conceived as a sort of garden city for the wealthiest inhabitants of Villaggio Coppola.
Ironically, karma has wanted the luxury homes to become the most dilapidated and ruined dwellings in the entire holiday village, the symbol of the degradation of the Domitian coast. In fact, there are only homes occupied by hundreds of families who survive by trying to illegally connect to the public electricity in houses that often have neither doors nor windows. The view outside is a desert of sand that overlooks what was born as the “Europe's largest tourist port”, which is actually just an infinite series of empty docks in the dock.
It seems like a panorama from Fallout, the video game that teaches you how to survive in a city destroyed by a nuclear war.
The concrete ruins, however, offer spectacular views that vaguely recall the glories of times gone by, when the houses hosted elite tourism. This was supposed to be a luxury apartment in Parco Saraceno, with a terrace and a view of the sea. It is now accessed via a ladder leaning against a wall, since the original access road is a pile of rubble. On days when there is no fog, you can even see Ischia and Procida in the distance: a cruel sight for this village born to "steal" tourists from the Neapolitan islands and today reduced to a city in a vegetative state. The contrast between disaster and normality becomes even more ferocious when, on the other side of the abandoned building, you can see the facades of the buildings to the north of Villaggio Coppola, which instead remain dignifiedly empty, clean and well furnished.
The area to the north of the village was in fact the residential area built by the Coppola brothers, in a sort of utopian building of the 60s in which, in addition to the holiday complex, the village was supposed to host 12,000 people permanently. Even today some apartments are inhabited, but most of the buildings are uninhabited and for years the “FOR SALE” signs have been hanging on dozens of villas.
To visit the nearby hamlets of Pescopagano and Ischitella you have to cross empty three-lane roads where, silently, dozens of human shadows dressed in the bright and gaudy colors of Central Africa move on the sides. An endless transhumance of mute men who wander aimlessly among the skeletons of buildings and villas.
The only ones that say a few words are the signs announcing unlikely future openings in abandoned buildings, a bit as if thirty years ago they had all suddenly fled, still leaving evidence of their past life. Today in Pescopagano there are only empty and dilapidated buildings.
The only anthropomorphic figure encountered in Castel Volturno is that of a little angel hanged inside a wooden shack on a beach in the Oasi dei Variconi.
Behind him is a bottle of holy water in the shape of a small Madonna tied to the main beam of the hovel, almost as if it were meant to hold up the entire structure.
The beach is practically inaccessible because it is completely covered in garbage and tree trunks, except for the small area of white sand "cleaned" around the shack. In reality it is a bird observation point that was recently devastated by vandals.
At the height of Baia Verde there is a beach where the sea fights a daily war on the shoreline, with the waves trying to push back the tons of logs, cement and garbage that, more generally, are poured onto all 27 kilometers of beach of the Castel Volturno coast.
Behind the shack, on a pile of wood a couple of meters high, stands a tattered Italian flag.
It seems to witness the aftermath of a battle similar to the one Delacroix described in his painting Liberty Leading the People: silence, rubble and the vanquished flag dominating the scene. And there won't even be any beautiful ruins left to remember our time.
This article was published in the first issue of Inchiostro, the journal of the Suor Orsola Benincasa journalism school directed by Marco Demarco: https://www.unisob.na.it/inchiostro/inchpdfview.htm?nr=160
