Mr. Massimiliano Pitzanti, a registry office employee, is already counting the overtime hours that would follow the arrival of the prison's new residents. "Between certificates, new identity cards, and the issuance of various documents, it will be as if a new neighborhood suddenly sprung up here," he says, spreading his hands . Fifty-two years old, he has been a municipal employee since 2004. Over the past two decades, he has seen the town grow, registering new births and new residents. So much so that—excluding deaths and the natural emigration— Uta has grown from 6,970 inhabitants in 2005 to 8,914 in 2024. This represents a leap of nearly two thousand new citizens, mostly young couples with young children, singles working in Cagliari, and a few returning retirees. This steady growth has been accompanied since 2014 by the presence of a prison in the Macchiareddu area, a border that could soon become the residence of dozens of prisoners under the 41 bis regime, many of whom the government plans to pack up and send to Sardinia.

This move cannot have any negative consequences for the town and its surrounding area, with Mayor Giacomo Porcu announcing "an urgent city council meeting to reiterate our justified opposition."

The conditions for hosting these inmates, the mayor explains, "are not there. Starting with the healthcare system, which is completely unable to cope with this impact, given that the costs of managing prisoner healthcare in Sardinia are entirely borne by the regional health service." "The government justifies this decision by citing the law that identifies the islands as the preferred areas for these transfers," he adds. "Parliament must intervene and amend this now anachronistic law."

Meanwhile, voices of protest are rising from all over Sardinia: "Never again will the island be Cayenne."

The full story is available on L'Unione Sarda at newsstands and on the L'Unione Digital app.

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