This morning Strada dei Bugari was already closed, with the asphalt paver hard at work. Trouble is, the official order doesn’t take effect until tomorrow.
Resurfacing work began on Monday, November 9th instead of Tuesday the 10th, and residents who had planned around the official dates found the road barred.
After complaints from residents, AASLP appears to have scrambled into action: one of its technicians is on site “to sort out the situation.”
The paperwork leaves no room for ambiguity. Order no. 307/2026 from the Secretariat of State for Internal Affairs, signed on Friday, November 6th at AASLP’s request, closes the road to vehicles and pedestrians from Tuesday the 10th to Friday the 13th of November, between 7:30 am and 6:00 pm.
The Authority’s own announcement repeats the dates one by one: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Monday isn’t among them.
Yet yesterday, Sunday, yellow signs went up announcing the road closed from November 9th until “end of works,” from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm, except for emergency vehicles.
The dates and times were scrawled on in marker. Compared to the official order, the start day, the duration, and even the closing time have all changed.
Residents, one local told us, assumed it was a mistake — or at most that the contractor was simply delivering materials.
They had planned around the only official document available: the order.
This morning brought the reckoning: disruption for many, and one resident who couldn’t get back into her own home before heading to work.
We went to see for ourselves. The works were indeed underway, with paver and roller in full operation. We asked the workers from the contracted firm, an Italian company, whether they knew the order didn’t take effect until the next day.
They had no idea. Their supervisor, they told us, wasn’t on site.
We then contacted AASLP. Their response: “An AASLP technician is already on site and is coordinating with the contracted firm to bring the situation in line with the order.”
In other words: what was happening this morning did not comply with the order.
From what we could gather speaking with the Authority, it seems the Italian contractor moved up the start date on its own. Officially, though, no one is saying so.
There are only two possibilities.
Either the date in the order didn’t match what had actually been agreed with the contractor — meaning someone made an error writing it down or communicating it.
Or the contractor simply disregarded the order and went ahead with its own schedule, the one posted on the signs.
Either way, one simple principle applies: a public road isn’t closed by a sign scrawled in marker — it’s closed by an official order.
And the order itself spells out who is accountable: “all responsibility remains with the applicant.” The applicant is AASLP, which is precisely why it has a technician on site this morning trying to sort things out.
But the real irony lies elsewhere.
Residents had been requesting this work for months. Last summer, two young women crashed their scooter at that very spot, among potholes and patch-up jobs, and residents had already submitted a petition to the Captain of the Castello. The resurfacing had finally arrived.
A day early — and the first to pay the price were the very people who had asked for it.
We will update this story as soon as the situation becomes clearer.
Starting with the most obvious question of all: who decided to open the worksite a day ahead of schedule?
