The causes of the Genoa disaster are very deep and point to devastating cracks in the role of the state as a strategic entrepreneur, a role to which we have been accustomed since the unification of Italy but which has now lost its sail and rudder. The changes needed to restore infrastructure management penetrated to the heart of the state’s structure.

When, in December 1853, the Turin-Genoa railway was inaugurated, the Savoy state rejoiced at the feat of the first Italian connection between two large cities, realised with genius and hard work, especially in the Apennine section with the first large tunnel. Cavour pushed and facilitated the line that gave the plain and Turin an outlet to the sea, so that new industrial production could interact in international markets, as befits those with long-term strategic development plans. So far, so good.

It is less well known that Cavour took up the programme of a link between the two cities that had been promoted by Genoese entrepreneurs, twenty years earlier, anxious to take advantage of the end of the isolation of the Maritime Republic and the forced inclusion of Genoa in the Savoy state.

But it is even less well known that in the same 1853 Cavour promoted the birth of Ansaldo, the Genoese naval and mechanical iron and steel industry, invested by the government with the task of reducing the Kingdom’s subordination to British production of ships and locomotives, that in 1857 he reorganised the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (founded in 1850) directing it to finance strategic works such as the railways, and that in 1859 he established the Scuola di Applicazione per gli Ingegneri (School of Application for Engineers), a prodromal of the Politecnico (which was established over 50 years later).

Cavour’s model of government approached the modernisation of the country as a systemic project, which did not reject complexity but rather made it a tool to achieve results through a set of coherent approaches directed towards the same goal. It coordinates public and private forces and puts the country’s resources in a position to tackle a complex programme. Tout se tien: the machine to ensure the availability of investment resources, the railway, the factory for rolling stock, the school to design, manage, maintain the new strategic service.

It is in this view of the world, of historical processes and the policies to govern them that the word ‘structure’ makes sense, meaning – in applied disciplines – ‘a system of relations that has internal rules of operation and adaptation’. Only if it is clear what ‘structure’ means does the word ‘infrastructure’ make sense, which is the primary service to the nodes of the structure, in that case ensuring the functioning of the connections between cities and between productive subjects.

Unified Italy makes Cavour’s systemic vision its own and draws up strategies to consolidate over time the glues of a country that had been united in just a few years and was in fact only united in 1861 by its official language.

The two main infrastructure strategies up to 1900 can be encapsulated in slogans: a school in every town, to make everyone literate; a railway network reaching every capital. It is an enormous effort, tackled by the liberal state making heavy recourse to private resources, but imposing without hesitation the prevalence of the public interest, from expropriations to massive investment in qualified personnel.

It is a very long-term strategic policy, which starts by building the tools to do and to manage indefinitely, just as the builders of cathedrals started from the design of scaffolding and winches before the design of spires and apses.

The modern, post-Napoleonic state takes care of the completeness of the operation of the strategies undertaken, knowing that, as in military strategies, success depends on controlling the totality of events. Technical skills are trained from the ground up, construction rules are minutely detailed, the control procedure scientifically applies the precautionary criterion to contain risks and, last but not least, the management and maintenance machine, on which organisation and personnel are invested to an even greater extent than construction.

The strategic programme is sustainable by definition: the public work is designed ‘forever’ and measures for the maintenance and indefinite management of the infrastructure are put in place alongside the construction.

For a century, being an employee of the state, at any level, was a factor of distinction and respect. After more than 100 years we still enjoy the approach of a state machine FOR DOING and FOR MANAGEMENT, which did not care about the cost-benefit balance of the individual work, but about the systemic affects of structural projects.

Other strategies of national interest were also set up with this criterion in the post-war period, such as that for electricity, which was the result of laborious unification and networking of local private initiatives.

(All this before degenerating into the dance of privatisations, which then also involved the railways, bringing not only numerous advantages, but also the disastrous loss of unity of purpose, whereby each piece of the structure competes with the other pieces instead of cooperating, as shown by the incredible management strategy of Trenitalia, which assaults the market of Alitalia, destroying it, instead of ensuring the metropolitan functionality that throughout Europe is the task of the railway companies).

For motorways, however, the story has been different, due to the concomitant evolution of numerous aspects of the country’s political and technical culture.

Trunk road projects were developed until the 1960s within a strategy of national interest but have since been promoted as a regional or even provincial development factor. At election rallies or inaugurations, the motorway is no longer presented as a coherent piece of a design that is useful for the structure of the country, but as a victory for one or other province or economic lobby, which has managed to obtain funding from the state for its own development.

On the other hand, the end of the unitary tension with respect to the territory is accompanied by a crisis in the entrepreneurial role of the state. Confidence in its ability to be the most important entrepreneur and the most robust manager of works of general interest collapses. The public interest is no longer a discriminating factor and the fact that the private entrepreneur looks after his own interests is overlooked even when he is entrusted with the task of building or managing public services.

Certainly the technology required for motorways, so close to the construction sector, irreducible in Italy to the public interest, contributes to this, but the fact remains that precisely in the sector of public works and roads we see the new season of officials and administrators, who have lost interest in participating in large strategies of general interest and prefer niches, small or large, of private interests. So much so that for decades Anas officials have been the subject of dozens of criminal trials, and it is ‘normal’ for ministers of public works to be involved in affairs contrary to the state interest involving roads.

An irresponsible regime of concessions to be ashamed of (so much so that they are secret) is the indecent outcome of this change of course, which consistently entails a series of disastrogenic failings: the relationship with the concessionaire is implemented without a discussed and shared strategy of territorial integration, without a management protocol that secures the public interest, without a regime of controls and performance checks that are automatically reliable, regardless of the good will of the controllers.

In the distance between the systemic and public-benefit approach of the 19th century railway network, now perishing, and the privatist and sectorial approach of the motorways as a whole, now successful, we can clearly see how far the process of deconstructing the state, which has been underway for over 50 years, has come.

The collapse of the ethical, cultural and political system that animated the strategist and entrepreneur State is clearly legible, but it is removed from public debate for reasons that should be studied.

Today we are witnessing in the institutions a sort of game of the four corners where each actor, even honest ones, bounces back and offloads their responsibilities, because it has not only become legitimate but almost obligatory:

1, not to have as an implicit commitment a unity of strategic ends for the common good, but on the contrary to let immediate marginal utility prevail, which in any case is privatistic (it is now obvious that the economy respects the interests of lobbies, politics aims at the electoralist effects of one’s own party, expertise carves out the specific sectoral field in which there are no comparisons and does not put its beak into the rest);

2, institutionally consolidating a culture of non-doing: laws and regulations induce the state’s best managers not to solve the problem, any problem, but if anything to complicate every possible solution. This aspect, combined with the previous one, entails as a corollary that control (from that of the technicians to that of the judiciary to that of the economy) is no longer a piece of the structural construction process of strategies, but is an aspect in its own right, independent of the overall result it generates, which is thus obviously entropic and increases the propensity to non-doing;

3, placing the institutions in competition and not in cooperation, particularly between territorial authorities, which are legitimised to block any initiative in the general interest, since it has become weak and without assertive defenders or is now burdened by sectoral and private interests that make one doubt the public value of the whole;

4, to take decisions with a horizon of a few months or a few years, avoiding all other decisions involving long-term commitments, to which it follows as a corollary that no one is concerned any more with the sustainability of the works, given that the contradictions manifest themselves in the medium to long term, and that there is no interest in the management and maintenance at the planning stage, which always takes place in the run-up, as a burden to be minimised.

So, in this broth of culture, it is obvious that such facts and non-facts happen:

The motorway network is not taken into account as a national infrastructure in need of integration and completion as a whole. A medium to long-term investment plan is not defined, not least to prevent it becoming a feeding trough for the corrupt: better not to do. Only the works demanded by strong territories are being done: for example, the foothills of the Po Valley are being done, but nothing is being done to overcome critical nodes such as Genoa, a city that is becoming less and less strong. The construction of the Gronda is downgraded to a matter of local interest, while it would provide an effective alternative to overcoming the city on the east-west axis, compared to the current stretch that includes the Morandi Bridge, which is to be reduced to an urban motorway (and therefore not indispensable to the primary network and interruptible for any necessary upgrading).
The existing sections are given in concession because the state is deemed incapable of doing business and managing infrastructure. The elected administrator assumes that the inefficiency of the state (the state that is supposed to participate in managing) is such that he assigns to private individuals a resource that guarantees 10% profit: an amount that could finance the entire network.
The concession does not specify the objectives of common interest, nor does it detail the requirements of the extraordinary maintenance works needed, postponing quality control and the safety of each section of the network to standard procedures that do not concern the sustainability of the network as a whole, but each individual piece, and to (short-term) programmes that are presented by the concessionaire to a large committee in which each represents specific interests.
For the Morandi Bridge, which is known to be decaying, no systematic monitoring is carried out, but a report is counted on that estimates the duration until 2030. Just as someone who falls from a skyscraper thinks ‘all is well for now’, for now patching interventions are planned (reducing the progressive thinning of the cables holding up the cable-stayed bridge): the concessionaire’s rules of engagement allow this and in any case ANAS also does this, as it does not have programmable resources for structural interventions.
The reasons for carrying out extraordinary maintenance work are technical and do not interest the commissioners, while the concessionaire’s technicians know that they will have to be convincing on the indirect aspects, which are the subject of diatribes between commissioners (each interested in costs, inconvenience to citizens, traffic restrictions,….).
So we gear up for works to consolidate the cables, worrying above all that they will not hinder traffic, since there are no alternatives to the incessant use of the bridge in sight.
And, until 14 August, we go to sleep thinking, just a moment before falling asleep…of course, whoever really has to fix the bridge will have a big problem…