First They Took Rome by David Broder

Author:David Broder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, Italian elites have, indeed, spent the last three decades asset-stripping the country while running the most fundamental services into the ground. A look at the map of the nation’s train networks gives us some idea what this means in reality. The state-owned Trenitalia shows that Italy can, indeed, have world-class infrastructure – the Frecce high-speed trains that link the main cities of northern-central Italy are clean, efficient, fast, and indeed less expensive than similar or worse services in Britain or France. But these Eurostar-style trains stand utterly at odds with what most citizens have to put up with in their everyday commutes, from the hot and overcrowded treni regionali that (very slowly) shuttle them around provincial Italy to the aged and fire-prone pullman services that arrive every half hour or so on the main bus routes through Rome.

The most alarming sign of Italy’s crumbling infrastructure came on 14 August 2018 with the collapse of the Ponte Morandi, a motorway bridge running through the heart of Genoa. Coming just a day before the traditional ferragosto bank holiday, the disaster claimed some forty-three lives, from commuters to holidaymakers. At least one bucket and spade was found among the debris. The worst of a series of such incidents in recent years, the Ponte Morandi disaster also alarmingly illustrated the failures of privatisation, after three decades in which vital national infrastructure has been sold off to the highest bidder. Privatised under the centre-left D’Alema government in 1999, the concession of public motorway firm Autostrade per l’Italia has since the disaster become a byword for neglect. Later ratified in parliament by both Forza Italia and the Lega Nord, the privatisation saw massive profits drawn from tolls on badly under-maintained roads.

According to OECD data, an Italy that invested €13.66 billion in roads in 2007 cut this to just €3.39 billion in 2010 before rebounding to €5.15 billion in 2015 – still just half the levels of Germany, France, or the United Kingdom. This is to be understood as part of a general dramatic fall in public investment. The tragedy is that even as parts of Italy’s infrastructure are visibly crumbling and the country struggles to recover from the crisis, meagre funds are continually channelled toward white elephant projects that serve business contractors (and in some cases, the politicians tied to them) more than they actually lead to the provision of public services. Yet, even where social movements criticise the planning of such projects, lacking a reformist perspective of their own they rarely articulate an alternative vision at the level of national politics.

Given the PD’s obedience to the dogmas of budget balancing and trimmed borrowing, it is richly ironic that it should be able to claim the mantle of public investment. Yet, in the post-crisis period, grandi opere – the kind of infrastructure projects that might help lift Italy out of its torpor – have become a lightning rod for discontent. Epitomising this is the centrality to

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