Italy: Learning from International Co-operation or Simply ‘Following Suit’ ?

For quite some time, ‘acid rain’ was not perceived as an issue in Italy neither by policy makers neither by the public opinion at large. Only in 1986 did this problem attract, for a brief moment, the attention of the ecological movement ² and of the media, but soon fell out of sight again. In essence, there was no demand to the political-administrative system to intervene on the problem. To the extent that there was – and now is – a concern with the questions of air pollution, it was due to the perceived threats to human health caused by local industrial and vehicular emissions.