At the heart of the dispute in Melendugno is the Tap gas pipeline, which will start from Azerbaijan, cross the Adriatic Sea, and come ashore for 8 kilometres across the Salento mainland.
On one side there are 10 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year. On the other, 200 olive trees in San Foca di Melendugno, which will have to be uprooted, sacrificed on the altar of the energy that will arrive from the East, from the other side of the Adriatic Sea, passing right through the olive grove of the Salento municipality. It is around this dualism that, for two years now, the fierce dispute has been playing out in Puglia — a dispute that pits the No-Tap protesters, who oppose the construction of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, the pipeline that will bring gas from Azerbaijan to Italy, against the police and the Italian government. As early as March 2017 there had been the first demonstrations, with police repeatedly forcing through human blockades at the construction site set up by around 300 protesters and charging in response to stone-throwing by demonstrators: the clashes resulted in eight people being injured, among them three regional councillors. Now, after the new government also gave the green light to the project, the protests have resumed.
The dispute is in fact also a political one because, while in 2017 the centre-left government had given the go-ahead for the felling of the olive trees — which will have to make way for the pipeline's final overland stretch (according to the then Environment Minister Gian Luca Galletti, "the environmental impact assessment committee evaluated the project for months with the utmost scientific rigour and then issued a favourable opinion with conditions") — regional governor Michele Emiliano has always maintained that "Puglia was never put in a position to choose where the pipeline would come ashore; we wanted it somewhere else." And now the new Lega-M5S government has given up on halting the project due to the high cost of the penalty clauses.
The olive trees are the tip of the iceberg of the No-Tap protests, whose participants are opposed to the pipeline in its entirety — 787 kilometres long according to the project, running from Azerbaijan to Melendugno via Turkey, Greece and Albania before diving beneath the Adriatic. For 105 kilometres the pipeline, whose estimated cost is 45 billion euros, with shareholders committing to invest 3 million a year towards its environmental sustainability, will pass through Italian waters before coming ashore on the Salento coast and, for the final 8 kilometres, overland to the construction site at San Foca.
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Here, 10 billion cubic metres of gas per year (roughly the annual energy needs of 7 million households) will be fed directly into the national grid. The project, classified by the Italian government as a strategic infrastructure — much like the high-speed rail line in the Val di Susa — counts among its shareholders many of the world's major energy groups, including Snam and Bp.