If so, you will be aghast at what has been done to the piazza--everyone here is. Piazza Matteotti The slide show tells it all.

I read it this morning and it is indeed molto brutto.

Ah, that is so sad - Greve is probably my favorite place in all of Chianti; just last week I was thinking about taking friends there on another trip. I will be interested in hearing how this plays out.

Sad sad news. Barb Cabot

I have been to Greve and I hope they will remove the parking spaces when the new pay garage is finished.


Bill

quote:

Originally posted by Fibonacci:
I have been to Greve and I hope they will remove the parking spaces when the new pay garage is finished.


Bill

Yes, Bill, that is the plan. And I am not even sure that the new parking garage will be a pay one. It may well be free as the current one that it replaces is.

How unbelievably short-sighted. Brutto indeed.

It is so sad to see that picture ... but I guess the town must have felt they had no choice if they were going to keep the tourist business, which I'm sure many of the residents depend on. If people get there and can't park, they will likely just move on to another Chianti town.

Don't you think it will have to be temporary? The town must realize that much of the attraction that draws people there is the beauty of the piazza. But of course, as you say, in Italia there is no telling how long "temporary" will be.

- Roz

oh lordy... i am leaving for tuscany on monday and since my home village is radda, i know greve very well.

nothing surprises me - radda decided to "re-do" their main street right in the middle of tourist season!

i love the saturday morning market in greve, so i hope its there when i am on july 12th!

I did a double-take when I clicked on the web cam the other morning and saw the painted lines. Madonna! Are they going to move the Saturday market out of the Piazza?

the web cam link for what it is worth http://grevecam.ateliermedia.com/

April, If I know little tuscan acomunes the market will be done there on Sat morning, and parking will be closed on that date and day.

Jane,

little comunes react differently to same issues.

In Cortona we had parking problems, and indeed the piazzas were used-or abused- as parking lots for many years.

At the growing requests for more parkings, the town hall as answered closing the center to parking but finding -and making- new parking lots outside the gates, making new connections via elevators.

As a new of the last weeks, the comune is enlarging the closed zone and making more parkings outside the town.
It is also researching for new areas on the north west side of Cortona for a possible subterranean parking lot.

What Cortona does is preserving its treasures, keeping the town the way it was.

The major of Greve is maybe trying to make some shop owners happier by this...who knows.

Not wise.

quote:

Originally posted by April2Cats:
I did a double-take when I clicked on the web cam the other morning and saw the painted lines. Madonna! Are they going to move the Saturday market out of the Piazza?

I guess the plan is to still have the market there. Tomorrow is market day but that won't tell the story as the other parking lot doesn't close until Monday.

I am sure that nothing changes in real life!
the extra parking is ugly, but actually where people illegally parked for years!

In high season,there has always been a free-for-all, and people driving around with no sense of direction.

The big white lines are much more obvious than the old blue ones, but blue parking is pay parking and the white ones are free.

Everyone will calm down soon!

Thanks Diva. I thought we parked in the square a few times and was about to look through my photos to make sure. When there was no parking spots available we parked behind the COOP but that was also pretty busy.
Jill

there has always been parking along the sides of the square, which in my opinion if they really loved the piazza they would remove all the parking!!!

it is not far to arrive from the lots and there are lots of lots, just never enough for such a popular town.

The tour buses leave their clients at the outside end of town and they walk up the small street, smaller private drivers come into the piazza, and for years have illegally stayed with their vans, where they now have marked off spaces, as well as locals just stopping off to pick something up!
I lived out there for 4 years.... while working at Dario's. It is the price one pays when tourism is the major income!

The way it is working is that the sides of the piazza with the blue lines are paid parking as it been. The center with the white is one-hour parking using the window dial. This is all temporary--just until the new structure is completed. Supposedly (?), it will all be completed by next year.

Alex,it sounds as if Greve and Cortona are, actually, having the same approach to perserving the integrity of the towns. It will be interesting to see if once the new parking area is built the paid parking is also eliminated from the piazza. I suspect not because as Diva says, locals use that to do business at various shops. It is hard to meet the needs of residents and tourists alike.

But Greve is more than a tourist town. It is also a community of people who call it home outside of the tourist industry. In some ways it is like many places in California--a bedroom community with more and more people living here but working in Florence. This is true of the parents of many of Casey's school friends and other of our friends. A good deal of the economy, as in all of Tuscany, is dependent on tourism but beneath that is a social structure that goes back generations. What I enjoyed about living here was being allowed into the structure somewhat and gaining a different perspective on life. It is quite different here late October through April when the town returns to the residents.

Then I would be actually pretty trusty. In Cortona the works ended in time and are proceding with good timing. But we have closed the squares long ago, before the new parking lot.

I also think then that Cortona and Greve and many other places -Montepulciano, Montalcino and the vast majority of the nice hilltowns of tuscany and Italy in general -with maybe the exception of Pienza??- have a vast and think community that live in regardless the tourism.

Shops are filled with locals , expecially the food and tools stores, bars and restaurants too. Along with the foreigners.

This is my pet peeve, making people realize that the "real" Tuscany is exactly what you see, ancient towns lived in a modern way, sometimes lead by wise leaders sometimes not.

I also understand that combining the two groups expectations -tourists and locals- sometimes is hard, but we have to give credit where it is due, most of the towns preserve their integrity with minimal side effects!

The fact that locals have always been doing things this way is an old excuse, and it just needs a couple of vigili Urbani and few tickets written to get rid of this. Of course you can't make everybody happy.

Re the start of the works at the beginning of the tourist season versus at the end it has a very practical reason -I know this because we had the same issue here with the fixing and re-doing of the water city system- falls and winter will be rainy, so we would risk to have open roads and problems for the whole winter and then still have to have the works done.
As much as this is ugky and unpleasant, this is a sad necessity.

At least it has been here in similar circumstances, but I can tell you that works were done well and quickly, and now all are happy...excep the ones that are never happy, but you wouldn't make them happy anyway!

Maybe because so many of the towns we visited in Tuscany were "hill towns" we weren't surprised that we parked in the lower town or in designated tourist parking that were outside the historic center. But I was surprised when we ended up in Piazza Matteoti in Greve and were able to park (in a pay spot) right in front of Macelleria Faloma (I hadn't found the web cam at that point). We were actually looking for a parking lot, but my navigational skills have a lot to be desired.
It's sad that people like me wanting to visit their lovely town destroys what's lovely about the town for the people who live there. I don't envy the people who depend on tourism dollars to come up with solutions to these problems.

The answer to market day and parking is that on market day the comune will provide shuttle service to and from an outlying parking lot.