MEPs Press Brussels to End the Clock Change, and the Apennines Listen

Forty-four members of the European Parliament, drawn from fifteen EU countries and six political groups, have written to the bloc's transport ministers urging them to break the deadlock and restart the plan to abolish the twice-yearly changing of the clocks, The Local Italy reported on Wednesday. The initiative is cross-party and cross-national, which is unusual for a file that has sat idle for years.

The proposal to end seasonal clock changes has been on the European agenda for some time without resolution, largely because member states cannot agree on which time to keep permanently — summer time or winter time. Northern and western states tend to favour permanent summer time; states further east and south, where the winter sunrise already comes late, tend to resist it. The MEPs' letter does not, as reported, settle that question. It asks ministers to move at all.

The practical stakes vary sharply by latitude and longitude, and Italy's mountain interior sits on the unfavourable side of both. In the high Apennines, winter daylight is already short; under permanent summer time the sun in December would not rise until well into the morning, and in the deepest valleys — where the ridgelines cut hours off the day even at midday — the effect would be felt in the school run, the morning bus and the first milking. The Guardian and other foreign outlets have reported extensively on the emptying of Italy's mountain municipalities; the clock is one more small calculation in whether a place remains livable.

The MEPs' intervention is a procedural nudge rather than a decision. Any change requires agreement among member states in the Council, and the letter's signatories span six political groups precisely because the blockage has not been partisan. According to The Local Italy's report, the request is for transport ministers to break the deadlock — no timetable is given, and no minister is quoted committing to one.

For Abruzzo the question is not abstract. The region's inland comuni run on a rhythm set by light: the winter timetable of the buses that connect the villages to L'Aquila and Sulmona, the opening hours of the small shops that survive on passing trade, the schedule of the ski lifts above Roccaraso. None of these has been consulted in the Brussels file, as far as the foreign coverage shows. But each would be affected by whichever time the ministers eventually choose, and the interior's preference is unlikely to be the loudest voice in the room.

What comes next is a Council discussion with no fixed date in the reporting available. The MEPs have made their move; whether ministers take it up depends on a consensus that has eluded them for years. In the meantime the clocks will change again this weekend, and the valleys will lose their light an hour earlier, as they always do.