A green lung for Sassari. It's the Rosello Valley, where a private individual, 73-year-old Andrea Oppia , a retired doctor from Sassari, has planted 180 trees on his hectare along Via Sorso since 2020.

"I wanted to reclaim this area," he says. And to the approximately five thousand square meters inherited from his grandfather, who had purchased them in 1920, he added another five thousand, embarking on a courageous undertaking because the Eden it now is, in 2023, was compromised by garbage.

"Since the 1960s," he recalls, "people have gotten used to using this place as a garbage dump. Half a century ago, it was used to dump waste from the nearby market, from fish scraps to pieces of meat, along with everything else they threw into the bushes."

A slightly different scenario occurred more recently when, after the cleanup began in 2023, a shocking amount of bulky waste emerged, especially household appliances, abandoned by the usual uncivilized people amidst the vegetation: "We collected 10,000 bottles alone."

Furthermore, the ravines in the land, a woodshed, and various other spaces were occupied by a large number of homeless people, mostly Nigerians, who lived there using makeshift mattresses, dozens of which were also taken away, and who used branches as coat hangers.

"Between clearing and cleanup," he explains, "it took at least a year to finish." Now the green hectare is home to holm oaks, carob trees, maples, hackberries, and heliotropes, plus a 2,000-square-meter orchard of plums, giant apples, grapes, and grapefruit.

A green reserve that, like other nearby ones, could be the subject of works related to hydrogeological risks. "But we've never seen rivers here," he points out, "and the sound of water you hear is from the nearby sewers. Where is the buried river?"

But Via Sorso itself, up to Viale Sicilia, including other private properties, as well as those belonging to the municipality, will in the future see, as they are called in official documents, "interventions to overcome the hydraulic problems of the covered canal."

At the moment, only the design and construction phases have been assigned by the Palazzo Ducale, and the timing of any work remains unknown. What remains certain is that this is a place that also holds a memory of a past when Sassari was home to numerous vegetable gardens and tanneries, and water, just as it is today, was the "white gold" that enabled people to live and work.

A space where there's an absolute ban on construction because, as Oppia says, "we need to put an end to the idea of constant real estate speculation." The green hectare, along with its neighboring hectare, thus serves as a barrier to the buildings that have sprung up for kilometers on its sides. "This is a sensitive area," the doctor defines it. Part of Sassari's environmental fate will depend on it.

© Riproduzione riservata