Genoa bridge CEO guilty; eight years on, infrastructure reckoning deepens

An Italian court on Thursday sentenced Giovanni Castellucci, former CEO of Atlantia, to 12 years in prison over the 2018 collapse of the Morandi motorway bridge in Genoa, according to CNN and the Associated Press. The court also convicted 29 others in connection with the disaster, which sent vehicles plunging to the ground on August 15, 2018. The verdicts mark the conclusion of one of Italy's largest criminal trials and come eight years after a tragedy that killed 43 people and exposed serious lapses in the maintenance of one of Europe's busiest transport corridors.

The bridge collapse, which occurred without warning on a summer afternoon, brought international scrutiny to Italy's ageing infrastructure and its management. Al Jazeera reported that the trial examined whether the tragedy could have been prevented, centring on the question of whether Atlantia and its subsidiary Autostrade per l'Italia had neglected their duty to maintain the structure. The Morandi bridge had been built in 1967 and was a critical artery for traffic moving through the port of Genoa and southward toward Tuscany and Rome.