The long games played on Taranto

cs for the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina, the approach to the 2026 Mediterranean Games assigned to Taranto proceeds in fits and starts. It’s not just the funding match that makes it disconnected. Rather, the methodological devaluation of an event that cannot be classified as just a competitive event worries us, with the subsequent risk of nullifying the triangular work carried out at the time of Giuseppe Conte’s first executive from the Puglia Region (through the Asset coordinated by Elio Sannicandro ), Municipality (mainly in the figure of mayor Rinaldo Melucci) and Coni (prompted by its president Giovanni Malag). The controversy over the delays, at the local level, has already flared up. Awareness raising, at a central level, is underway given that the dossier has ended up in the hands of ministers Raffaele Fitto and Andrea Abodi. However, the general picture lacks the brushstroke that raises the status of the Games without relegating them to a sowing of sports facilities, which are very useful, or to a distribution of medals among athletes from 26 countries. Only the government can give that touch. Reaffirming the stature of Taranto on some sensitive levels: its geopolitical role, its reactivity to lend itself to battles in defense of the environment, its immense cultural heritage.

In all three cases, the story to argue. The city has always had a military (naval base of the Navy) and commercial (the port) weight on the Mediterranean. Declining it under the sign of peace and interaction with the states of the other shores, just as Europe is celebrating the anniversary of the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine, can function as a complement – for example – to the energy strategy implemented by Giorgia Meloni with the gas agreement in Algeria. If that were not enough, the Games represent an escape route from the former Ilva pond and travel parallel to the reconversion route that the president of Acciaierie d’Italia himself, Franco Bernab, announced a few days ago with the switching on of the electric furnaces within 2033. After decades of poisons, deaths and investigations, highlighting a model of industrial metamorphosis brings lifeblood to the contents that Italy must unroll on the European table of ecological transition. As for the great beauty, to be promoted as a magnet for global tourism, the most faithful testimony remains the MarTa museum. These are cards that have already been discovered, which the government can play without spending too much effort. It is enough to use the 2026 Games as a means to an end: to change Taranto for the better and with it the narration that is made of a highly symbolic piece of the South.