“In the current period of budget shortfalls, this is the only way not to raise local taxes,” the mayor assures, promising to use all proceeds for the repair of the municipal cinema and the construction of a nursing home.
Of course, the holy of holies – Piazza Mussolini and Berlusconi Boulevard, which are found in almost every Italian city – will not be sold. But the names of the small streets adjacent to them and the alleys in the outlying neighborhoods may well be bought by local residents. The only condition set by the city authorities is that in this way only the names of people who were born, lived, and died in San Giorgio del Sannio can be immortalized.
So far, the streets are being bought reluctantly. However, this is not because local residents have no relatives whose names they would like to immortalize. It is simply that the stated price of 15,000 euros for a street in the city center and 10,000 on the outskirts is quite high for a resident of a peripheral Italian town. So far, only one buyer is known – Giancarlo Capozzi. Now one of the central streets will bear the name of his father, a doctor who lived his entire life in this small town.
Moreover, as Capozzi himself admitted in an interview with French journalists, he bought the street much cheaper than the announced price. “I was given a discount because I was the first, and it cost me 6,000 euros,” he said, noting that he does not intend to stop there. It is not excluded that in the near future the town will also have a street named after Capozzi’s aunt: “I would like to name another street in honor of my aunt, but now it costs 15,000, so I’ll think about it.”
In world practice, this is perhaps one of the few cases where municipal authorities try to solve the problems of filling the local budget in such an original way. In post-Soviet cities, which also experience income deficits, they have not yet thought of selling “name” plaques with house addresses, although the authorities do try to listen to residents’ wishes regarding street names.
However, such cases are rare. Our compatriots mostly get streets for meritorious service, not for cash, and it is almost unrealistic to achieve such an honor during one’s lifetime. Unless, of course, one recalls that in certain periods of our history there were exceptions. For example, in the late 1930s, Stalin, as a gift to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, named the street where the director lived in his honor.
Some people got name streets as a bonus along with high state awards and a plaster bust in their historical homeland. So, for example, even the current Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov can boast that a street is named after his father in one of the district centers of the Smolensk region, the town of Demidov, where his parents were born. Moreover, as local authorities now justify themselves, the name was chosen “based on patriotic feelings, not political opportunism.” Hero Fradkov Street (Efim Fradkov was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union) appeared on the map of Demidov back in December 2003, when no one even thought of his son as the head of government.