BUSINESS CLOSED IN THE CENTER OF SIENA, BETS LOST OF TRADE
The crisis? There is … here!
The crisis of commercial activities in Siena? There … here. Many shops close in every part of the city and the points of sale become empty windows, dull eyes, with so many “for rent” and “for sale” signs that become aware of various bets lost in terms of trade.
The statistics speak for themselves, but just take a “stroll” in the center, look around, to understand how things are. Way of Paradise it was, in the years of the pandemic, plundered. There remains a hairdresser and a hardware store and at the end of the street, but already in the area San Domenico resist a stocked wine shop. All the other clothing, costume jewelery, optics, collectibles and liqueurs and sweets shops that for decades had overlooked the street have closed their doors.
It is a certain sadness to walk along a characteristic central street that connects Piazza della Posta to San Domenico, with many, too many, empty funds.
Here is the crisis, and if the owners of the bars, believing they can always live in Siena to drink, have continued to demand rents out of the market, they only now realize that they have contributed to exacerbate a state of precariousness that with a minimum of foresight perhaps they would have to be able to prevent.
And who knows if sooner or later there will be a recovery that will tear apart the many notices of rent and sale, also giving breath to the various real estate agencies that manage the many empty funds.
I believe that too the Municipal Administration Siena, before risking to end up like the neighbor, supporting the shops in the vicinity of and all the commercial and artisanal activities that characterized our Florence where bookshops, antique dealers, upholsterers and craftsmen of wool and silks close to make way for pizzerias, taverns, rotisseries and vintners.
Of course, in a city with a tourist vocation, even the refreshment points have their own reason for existing.The historical shops have their own charm and that the less foiled tourist still appreciates to offer only comfort to the belly, forgetting eyes, head, heart and everything. how much it can give the traveler some emotion that is not only culinary.
Meanwhile, Siena is preparing for Christmas. A great one is emerging at the Lizza playground which, I hope, will make children and older kids happy. I also expect a festively lit city, without unnecessary waste, but with taste and lots of colorful trees. I do not know whether to live with Christmas dinner and the lunch that gathered the whole family, after the absolute gray of last year, relegated to “seclusion”. We have made sacrifices, and many, and we have subjected ourselves to vaccination doses and now to the indispensable third recall, while the pandemic is raging throughout Europe, touching peaks that we have left behind us, thanks to the campaign orchestrated by Son and the introduction of the “Green step” which allows us to reopen cinemas, theaters, museums, sports halls and stadiums.
And even if too many reckless sing the novax choruses invoking a freedom that clashes with the real one and gained on the field by the vast majority of our people, I really hope that we can spend happy hours and that we return to see the stars again.
As I hope – since the November 25 it was there Day against gender violence – that an end to the barbarism of feminicides in our country. Every three days a woman, wife, mother, partner … mother is the victim of a man’s madness. We must say NO to this never-ending massacre!
Roberto Morrocchi