Landslide on the Amalfi state road, mayors speak of arson

This morning the newspaper reported on the extinguishing of the fire front between Vico Equense and Agerola and the reopening of a stretch of State Road 163. In the afternoon two separate developments have emerged: an explicit accusation of arson by local administrations and a landslide that forced a new, albeit brief, closure of the road.

Several stretches of the Amalfi Coast and the Sorrento Peninsula remained on fire for several consecutive nights. The mayor of Amalfi, Daniele Milano, stated: “In eleven years I have never seen anything like this,” ruling out that it was a natural phenomenon. The mayor of Positano, Gabriella Guida, took the same line: “The hypothesis is that it is an arson fire.” On the Amalfi Coast side the fire is now essentially extinguished, with cleanup operations underway for remaining embers and ash.

The news about the landslide and the intervention of Deputy Foreign Minister Edmondo Cirielli currently comes from a single source (SalernoToday); no independent confirmation is available. According to this source, following the fires a landslide occurred that made it necessary to close the Amalfi state road and required intervention to secure the slope; the source does not explicitly establish a causal link between the fires and the instability. The road was later reopened in the afternoon with alternating one-way traffic.

In the same context, Cirielli criticized the regional management of civil protection in Campania, arguing that the regional structure had been dismantled by the previous administration led by Vincenzo De Luca. Available sources do not report a response from the Campania Region to the deputy minister’s criticism.

The picture emerging in the afternoon is therefore more complex than the one from this morning: not only a fire brought under control and a road reopened, but also an accusation of arson shared by two different municipal administrations and a political clash over the management of regional civil protection, against the backdrop of a landslide that required a new, albeit temporary, interruption of coastal traffic.