In the days when the Ligurian capital is at the top of all the news in Italy and abroad, I want to share with readers a letter signed by Vittorio Emanuele II on 8 April 1849, one of the first documents of his long reign, in the middle of the Genoa siege:
My dear general, I have entrusted you with the Genoa affair because you are a brave one. You could not do better and deserve all kinds of compliments.
I hope that our unhappy nation will finally open its eyes and see the abyss in which it was thrown headlong.
It takes a lot of effort to get it out and it is in spite of himself that you have to work for his own good; that she learns for once to finally love the honest who work for her happiness and to hate this cowardly and infamous breed of rogues she trusted and in which, sacrificing every feeling of fidelity, every feeling of honor, she placed all his hope. After our sad events, of which you have had the details following my order, I do not even know how I managed in the midst of so many difficulties to find myself at the point where we are.
The letter of the king of Sardinia, from a few weeks succeeded to his father Carlo Alberto, is addressed to General Alfonso La Marmora: to read it today, it would seem to have been written by the president Sergio Mattarella to the mayor or prefect of Genoa, while rescuers still dig between the ruins of the so-called "Ponte Morandi". If they were not part of a correspondence between the king and his officer during the repression of the revolutionary movements, these words would seem to be addressed to a city that has twice delivered "head down" in the wrong hands: those of the administrators who in almost 35 years did not have the moral and political strength to solve quickly and efficiently the infrastructural problem that revolved around A10 viaduct1, but also in those of the NIMBY people (from English: not in my backyard, not in the courtyard of my house) headed and backed by the Five Star Movement. Like No-TAV, No-ILVA and No-TAP ante-litteram, the No-Gronda today symbolize a country that does not collapse, but lets itself collapse, more concerned with defending a few houses built under a viaduct, rather than making good service to the whole community, in short, deliberately ignoring its true good and happiness, as written by the Father of our Risorgimento.
The writer fears that this catastrophe will represent for Genoa what the record high water of 4 November 1966 was for the ancient rival Venice: the beginning of a rapid demographic and industrial decline, without the local ruling class doing anything different from the simple following the decadence. Those who know Genoa are already worried about the logistical and hydrogeological situation of the city as soon as a river of cars and heavy vehicles will pass on a road and bridges that from the 1967, when the infamous viaduct was inaugurated, do not know such pressure. Indeed, then there was not this traffic of goods and people!
What will then weigh on the GDP of the country a disaster of these proportions? Genoa is the port of the industrial triangle of the North West: it is not wrong to calculate in beautiful points of GDP the value of the goods that will end in this bottleneck. None of the leaders of this country seems worried about the avalanche effects of this disaster, in terms of exports and businesses. Indeed, hunting the Autostrade per l'Italia / Atlantia dealer2 before the end of the investigations have raised serious doubts about the rule of law in our country: a bad message for foreign investors, liable to cause a flight of foreign capital comparable to what happened in Turkey in recent years with the escape of Americans, well before Trump's arrival. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, moreover, already against the Euroburocrats who do not allow us to spend in deficit, ignoring the fact that in case the money for the infrastructure we get copiously just from Brussels and every year we leave in the plate dozens of billions, because we do not even know how to design new works: using this fortune does not seem to be in the plans of the Government of Change. Among other things, the "government contract" of major works and infrastructures talks about it as little as possible and when it does so is to postpone the discussion, given that to the Leghisti from the time of Berlusconi's governments the shipyards have to die, while their members Grillini likes to think that we should no longer build and that bridges, roads and aqueducts built after the war can last as long as the thousand-year Reich. To the writer it seems that the catastrophe of the Morandi Bridge, as well as the first serious test for the Conte cabinet, represents a turning point for the country: close between a statist government but without capital3 and a scenario for Italy never seen so fragile after the years of recovery wasted by the center, Mr. Mario Rossi, an average Italian attentive to the signs of the times, feels like never before the dismay for the future, his and his family and he does not see anyone, in Taranto as in Val di Susa, who works in spite of everything for the good of Italy, even if we play several points of GDP between deindustrialization and penalties. The deputy premier Di Maio writes on the blog "stupid people who emigrate", but Mario Rossi is now more tempted than ever to leave the country: he thinks that not only the bridge he is leading could collapse, but basically the whole nation could really fail, in all senses. Perhaps even at the time of the sovereign debt crisis, the prospect had seemed so realistic to him. What about the (few) young Ligurians, this time at risk of unemployment?
Attention: we are not talking about the umpteenth scandal of the usual Italietta: the Morandi Bridge, to read the news, was not made of bad cement, but very simply was built - in the years of the economic boom - in reinforced concrete, as hundreds of works in the same conditions. Which is equivalent to saying that it had an expiration date, like yogurt. An expiration date that has been ignored, by some for incapacity, by others for ideological fury. From the most, due to the ignorance, the typical attitude of a country that does not make the revolutions and does not take to the streets except when there are coaches to bring people to Rome with air conditioning and a bathroom on board. All this, for Mario Rossi, is a very bad sign: the country does not want to be saved.
Exaggeration? Well, someone can tell our Mario Rossi that this concern of the writer is a "fairy tale": yes, like that of two hundred meters of a two-kilometer viaduct that crumble as if they were made of wet sawdust. Now, with the rubble of Genoa still smoking and with so many thoughts on his mind, our Mario Rossi can only hope "that our unhappy nation will finally open its eyes and see the abyss into which it had thrown itself head down". For this reason, the writer likes to reread the wise and measured words of President Mattarella, who is aware that "this moment of common commitment, to face the emergency" will be followed by "a serious and severe examination of what has happened", he does not fail to strongly affirm that, despite the inaction or the nymby fury of politicians, “Italians have the right to modern and efficient infrastructures that safely accompany everyday life. Controls, the culture of prevention and the intelligent modernization of the communications system must always be at the center of the action of public institutions and private concessionaires, at all levels ".
1 https://www.corriere.it/cronache/18_agosto_14/gronda-storia-piano-che-po....
2 For the writer, the revocation of the concession seems not so much a feasible and serious operation, as an attempt not to make a fool of who first proposed it and then clashed with the certainty of billionaire penalties to pay ... on ' nail.
3 Ministers Di Maio, Salvini and Toninelli attacked the dealership of A10, proposing a withdrawal of the license, but without explaining well who would pay the multi-billion dollar bill of the necessary jobs in that of Genoa, if not the Benetton holding company ...
(photo: web)
