From the G8 Summit website:"The Italian Government has decided to move the G8 Summit venue from La Maddalena to L’Aquila, the city symbolising the earthquake that hit Abruzzo on 6 April.
The Guardia di Finanza Non-Commissioned Officers’ School is the venue for an austere G8 increasingly alive to the issues of natural calamity-related risk prevention, aversion and management.
The School complex, already dubbed “Guardia di Finanza City” is located on the outskirts of L’Aquila, in the Coppito district, and since 6 April, after verifying its safety, it houses the Civil Protection Department’s Di.coma.c, or Direzione di Comando e Controllo of the Civil Protection System, which is coordinating emergency work in the wake of the earthquake. Since mid-April, the college also houses the institutions that lost their premises on account of the earthquake.
The college takes in 3,500 non-Commissioned officer cadets every two years. Building began in 1986, the first lot, comprising about 700,000 cubic metres, being completed over the subsequent six years.
The college’s perimeter wall, which is over 2 km long, encloses about 45 hectares of hilly ground, where the headquarters offices, the parade ground, the auditorium, the sports facilities, the cadets’ quarters and the multi-purpose unit are laid out. The classrooms and mess are located behind the cadets’ quarters, linked by raised walkways with arched glass roofs. The upper part is home to the permanent staff’s quarters, the infirmary, the vehicle fleet and the technology control rooms. Last but not least, the top of the hill features a helipad equipped for both day-and night-time take-off and landing.
Other facilities for the college’s exclusive use are located outside the perimeter wall, as is a car park capable of accommodating a thousand or so vehicles in an area of about 4,000 square metres.
Since the Cabinet meeting held on 23 April, which set the seal on the G8 Summit’s move right there in the college command room, officials and technical experts have been at work to ensure that the Guardia di Finanza campus will be able to play host to the foreign delegations from 8 to 10 July."
Available from: http://www.g8italia2009.it/G8/Home/G8-G8_Layout_locale-1199882116809_LaNuovaSede.htm
