Urban plan and land property regime: a few doubts and a few certainties. Fifty years after the Sullo Reform.

In the history of unified Italy, whenever someone has tried to undermine the inviolable rights of the landowners for the noble purpose of (urban) community wellbeing, he always failed. From Mayor Nathan (with the Plan of Rome, 1909) to Minister Bucalossi (with the Law 10 of 1977, strongly impaired by the judgment of the Constitutional Court, no. 5 of 1980), to mention two of the most famous and emblematic cases. In Italy, the private property, one of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, still has a high content of “sacredness”, probably related to the fact that for decades and even today – despite repeated and heavy tax offensives – has proved to be one of the few sources of economic security. No wonder if the proposal for a reform of urban planning law submitted in 1962 by the then Minister of Public Works, Fiorentino Sullo, reformist exponent of the Christian Democrats Party, has been substantially erased before being approved. For the first time his proposal prefigured the general preventive expropriation as an instrument for the certain and egalitarian implementation of the municipal plans. The provision - perhaps a little ingenuous - of the preventive acquisition of all transformable and non-transformable areas by the municipalities and the subsequent sale only of the surface rights to those who would transform those areas, thus implementing the provisions and requirements of the urban plans, was a concrete response to the already widespread phenomena of speculation. But with improbable possibilities of consensus.