Messina (gro) The new mayor of Messina likes to go barefoot. But no one takes offense to that. On the contrary, Renato Accorinti (in Italian), 59, is unusually popular with the people of the town of 250,000 on the Stretto, the strait between Sicily and the boot tip of mainland Italy.
The trained physical education teacher was elected as the first man in the town hall in June this year. Accorinti, a feisty pacifist and opponent of a bridge over the Stretto River, does not belong to any political party but has long been politically active in civic initiatives.
“Power doesn’t interest me”
Power interests the Messinian “not at all.” Politics, says Accorinti, is service. The state, the administration, must be “there for the citizen and not vice versa.” Until recently, the top municipal office was used primarily as an opportunity for personal enrichment. The wives of his two predecessors have been in custody since last July for embezzling public funds. Among Accorinti’s first acts in office after the June 24 election was the removal of the turnstiles at the entrance to City Hall. Anyone should have unimpeded access.
“Counter to Berlusconi”
Europe’s biggest political magazine, Hamburg’s “Spiegel” has devoted a two-page report to Messina’s new mayor. Accorinti, writes Fiona Ehlers, the Italy correspondent of the “Spiegel” in the in the last September issue of the magazine, is something like “the political counter-design to Berlusconi”. There the lusty man from Arcore, who went into politics for highly personal interests, here in Messina the champion of the anti-mafia movement, a bachelor, who with his mother still lives in the house where he was born 59 years ago.
Against nepotism and disenchantment with politics
.
The mayor, who likes to walk barefoot, looks exactly as one likes to imagine a Sicilian fisherman, with his face tanned by wind and sun, thick hair and graying beard. And Accorinti has remained a man of the people – and the people cheer him. He ran for office as the top man on a civic list with the slogan “Cambiamo Messina dal Basso” (“Let’s change Messina from below”). Meanwhile, Accorinti works up to 14 hours a day. At the center of his work is the fight against encrusted structures, the Mafia (which in Sicily is called Cosa Nostra), against nepotism and disenchantment with politics.
Against the bridge monster
.
To make clear to the citizenry what a monster bridge is planned by the Berlusconi party, Accorinti, as a matador of the “No al Ponte” (“No to the Bridge”) movement, had unfurled a banner 220 meters above the ground. To do so, he had climbed to the top of a huge electricity pylon in stormy weather. But the new mayor is anything but a notorious nay-sayer.
For a better ferry connection to the mainland
.
Accorinti also wants to improve the connection to the mainland. But not by a several billion expensive bridge construction with world record dimensions, but by an extended ferry connection, which brings Messina with the 200,000-inhabitant city Reggio Calabria better together, finally on the climatically and culturally blessed Sicily in the tourism, in hotels and vacation homes is further invested. The new, much more efficient planned ferry connection, unlike the existing connection to Villa San Gioivanni, is to be operated by the municipality.