Genoa bridge collapse: Crumbling roads crisis casts shadow over holiday weekend in Italy

Italians will this weekend be enjoying the Ferragosto summer break, escaping the hot towns and cities for the seaside, lakes and mountains.

But this year the disaster of the Morandi bridge in Genoa has cast a shadow over the holiday season.

The bridge collapse has raised uncertainties about the Italian superhighways, the autostrade, on which so many will travel to their holiday destinations.

The crisis over Italy’s transport infrastructure, the highways especially, has been coming for a long time.

“The infrastructure is terrible — a real worry for the tourist business,” Donatella Cinelli Colombini, a pioneer of the “agriturismo” farm stays, told me. “The highways are falling apart.”

The autostrada networks are a crucial part of Italy’s development since the war, as it became one of the top seven industrial nations.

In engineering and innovation, the autostrada systems, the high bridges and viaducts, the deep tunnels from the Brenner and Mont Blanc to the Gran Sasso tunnel in Abruzzo, have been works of genius.

In the last century Italy produced some of the most inventive structural engineers and architects.

But transportation, the autostradas in particular, has seen more than its share of the political intrigue, patronage and corruption that have plagued post-war Italy.

It has led to bad planning, short-termism and accusations of contracts being given to political pals and Mafia-friendly businesses using inferior concrete.

The Morandi disaster was the fifth major collapse of a bridge or viaduct in recent years.

Ten years ago there were serious concerns about the huge pillars holding up stretches of the A1 Autostrada del Sole, the highway to the sun.

The Morandi bridge stretch of the A10 autostrada in Genoa, and 1,800 miles of autostrada besides, is run by a company belonging to the Benetton franchise.

Autostrade Per l’Italia, the managing company itself, is accused of putting profit before safety and now faces criminal investigation.

The sadness is that questions about Morandi’s design had been known for years. For the past 10 it was a main topic of criticism in the civil engineering course at Genoa university.

Italy’s new prime minister Giuseppe Conte has offered an immediate €5 million fund and put Genoa’s road system into a state of emergency for a year.

But it will take a lot more money and time to address Italy’s infrastructure crisis — a phenomenon that all ageing advanced nations now have to face.