On the one hand Italy attracts many tourists thanks to its beautiful landscapes and its artistic and historical places that you can find all over the country, but on the other hand it is also true that sometimes the beauty of Italian cities is not properly enhanced, as streets and building are not always cleaned with sweepers and other professional tools that can make those cities even brighter.
Without speaking about some extreme cases, like the sadly famous rubbish of Naples, and of other cities, too, which is not a good presentation of the city to the tourists coming from abroad, you only need to have a look at the streets, parks and bus stops where sweepers might be very useful or to the dirty walls of historic buildings of some cities to realize that sometimes the beauties of the Italian cities are threatened by dirtiness and neglect, as well as by the disrespect of some people to this artistic and historical heritage. A clear evidence of this is given by the writings that dirty the walls of many historic buildings, buildings that are visited every year by many Italian and foreign tourists, as they are considered as part of the artistic heritage not only of Italy, but of the whole world. Slashed cathedrals with useless writing left by megalomaniacs that want to leave their mark signing the historical walls of the building they have just visited, internal walls of important palaces carved with writings that are not necessary at all … the list of the wounds inflicted on monuments by ignorant or simply ill-mannered people can be very long. And to clean everything, economical efforts are required, but they are not always made in a consistent way.
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Also the streets of some Italian cities are not very clean; although streets do not belong to the artistic heritage of a city, also their conditions, as well as the conditions of pavements, squares and so on contribute in presenting the city to visitors in a given way. For this reason it is essential to use professional tools like street sweepers, and we cannot deny that technology is helping a lot in this sense, offering more and more innovative models of sweepers. What is sometimes missing is a sort of carelessness not only of city administrations, which are not always to be held as guilty as they have budgets to respect and costs to cut, but also of citizens – and of some tourists -, who do not seem to be used to to keep their city clean and throw litter and chewing-gums on the ground instead that in litter bin.
To sum up, the enhancement of a city does not only depend on a policy of care and maintenance of streets and monuments, which still is essential, but also on the education, sensitivity and respect of people for the urban landscape that surrounds us.
