The rain came down hard that August afternoon in 2018. I have never stood on the Polcevera viaduct, yet the images have stayed with me: a section of roadway simply gone, cars and lorries plunged into the valley below, the smell of wet concrete and diesel that must have lingered in the air. Forty-three people died when the Morandi bridge collapsed in Genoa. On 16 July 2026 a court in the same city finally delivered its first-instance verdict after years of hearings.
Thirty-two of the 57 defendants were found guilty of negligence, aggravated manslaughter and vehicular homicide. The rest walked free, some acquitted, others spared by the statute of limitations. The sentences ranged from one year and eleven months to twelve years. Giovanni Castellucci, former chief executive of Autostrade per l'Italia, received the longest term. He is already serving six years for another road disaster in 2013 that claimed forty lives. The weight of two such verdicts on one man feels less like justice than a ledger finally balanced in blood.
Michele Donferri Mitelli, once head of maintenance at the same company, was given eleven years. Antonino Galatà, former chief executive of the SPEA engineering firm, drew five years and six months. The court concluded what many had suspected from the first hours after the collapse: the disaster was foreseeable. A stay cable had defects. Monitoring relied on outdated standards. Maintenance had been patchy at best. The bridge did not fail in a sudden storm. It failed because those paid to watch it looked the other way.
The human cost of institutional failure
There is a particular hollow feeling that comes with preventable death on this scale. You picture the drivers caught in that rain, perhaps glancing at their phones or thinking about dinner, never knowing the concrete above them had been whispering warnings for years. The trial laid bare how commercial pressure and bureaucratic inertia can erode the most basic duty of care. Public safety cannot be treated as an optional line in a balance sheet. When oversight becomes mere ritual, citizens pay with their lives.
Autostrade per l'Italia and its subsidiary had already reached a corporate settlement, paying roughly 30 million euros and promising new compliance measures. The penalty feels modest against the ruin left behind. The full written reasoning for the latest verdicts will arrive within six months. Appeals are certain. Defence lawyers for Castellucci have signalled they will fight what they see as collective scapegoating. Victims' families, for their part, have expressed quiet satisfaction that someone has finally been held to account.
I keep returning to the image of that broken bridge because it condenses so much about modern infrastructure and modern accountability. We build monuments to engineering ambition, then hand their care to entities whose first loyalty is often to profit and schedule. When the cables corrode and the warnings are filed away, the distance between boardroom decision and families shattered on the rocks below shrinks to nothing. The Genoa verdict does not bring anyone back. It does, however, draw a line: repeated lapses in critical infrastructure carry real human costs, and those responsible can be made to face them.