Palmoli Council Installs Two Hundred Bunk Beds in Forest Clearing to Host Reunification Hearing
Municipal authorities convert a village wood into a supervised family camp while the court weighs a reunification deadline, at a cost the mayor calls modest.
The municipality of Palmoli has relocated its entire administrative office into a forest clearing on the outskirts of town, where officials are now living in tents pitched in strict rows to demonstrate what a家庭 in the woods requires. The move follows the announcement that the Tribunale per i minorenni will receive written submissions on 30 October, and the council has decided that no one should judge the family's conditions without first sleeping in them.
Staff began the operation on Monday with the construction of a timber village of forty-one cabins, each fitted with a wood-burning stove, a hand-dug latrine and a notice board listing the day's chores. Every councillor is required to chop firewood for two hours before attending meetings, and the mayor has personally signed off a rota under which the registry clerks take turns milking a goat that was purchased for the purpose at public auction.
Councillor Lucia Ferrante said the cost, which has now exceeded ninety thousand euros, was justified by the seriousness of the task. «We cannot ask a court to weigh a childhood spent in the trees if we have not personally felt the wind come through the roof,» she said. «The children will be returned to a home we have built ourselves, and we will be monitoring it from the inside.»
The first wave of visiting inspectors, drawn from three neighbouring regions, has been assigned bunks in the clearing's newly built dormitory, and a waiting list for the remaining cabins already runs to several hundred civil servants who have requested to serve their deadline in the woods.
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