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The former chief executive of Italy’s largest toll road operator was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday for his role in the devastating Genoa bridge collapse that killed 43 people eight years ago.
The conviction of Giovanni Castellucci, former boss of Autostrade per l’Italia (Aspi), for manslaughter and negligence marks the end of a four-year criminal trial with 57 defendants, as prosecutors sought to hold to account those responsible for the collapse of Morandi Bridge in August 2018. Of the other defendants, 31 were handed lesser prison sentences.
A 200-metre stretch of the bridge — which was built in 1967 and traversed a densely-populated industrial area — fell to the area below during a heavy summer rainstorm on the eve of a national holiday, sending shockwaves through Italy.
Among the defendants in the trial were former and current top executives of Aspi, and its engineering subsidiary Spea, as well as officials of Italy’s transport ministry who were responsible for overseeing the safety of the country’s then privatised road network.
Through some 280 hearings since 2022, Genoa prosecutors argued that Aspi’s managers had ignored a series of structural safety problems and failed to carry out the necessary reinforcement. However, defence lawyers denied wrongdoing.
The catastrophe, which left around 600 people below the bridge homeless, sparked a heated national debate over the condition of Italy’s road network, which had been privatised in the 1990s.
Critics, including populist politicians, called the tragedy a symptom of crony capitalism, which they said had allowed powerful Italian business families to profit from dilapidated infrastructure that posed hazards to the public.
After the collapse, the old bridge was totally demolished and a new one, designed by renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano, was built in just 15 months at a cost of around €202mn.
At the time of the catastrophe Aspi, which managed 3,000km of Italian toll roads, was owned by Atlantia, an infrastructure company controlled by Italy’s Benetton family.
In 2021 Atlantia — now called Mundys — agreed to sell Aspi to a consortium led by state-controlled CDP following a lengthy dispute with the Italian government.
Aspi’s new management later accepted a plea deal, allowing it and Spea to be excluded from the criminal trial.
On the eve of Thursday’s verdict, Arrigo Giani, Aspi’s current chief executive, publicly apologised in an open letter to “the victims’ families, to the people of Genoa and to all Italians for the suffering caused by the tragic Morandi disaster, fully aware that our gesture can never erase their pain”.
However, families of the victims said the apology was years late and demanded that Aspi fulfil its pledges to prevent similar disasters in the future.
Castellucci, who was also chief executive of Atlantia, is already incarcerated, serving a separate six-year sentence for his role in another fatal accident in 2013 on a viaduct near Naples that killed 40 people. Prosecutors had asked him to be sentenced to 18 years in prison for the Morandi Bridge case.
In Thursday’s verdict, around 15 senior Aspi and Spea executives and engineers were given a prison sentence of between 5.5 and 11 years, while a former senior transport minister official, then responsible for safety oversight, was sentenced to five years.
Another 17 people were given prison sentences of less than five years, and some were acquitted or accused of minor charges whose statute of limitations had expired.
Thursday’s ruling is just a first-level verdict, and can be appealed by those convicted under Italy’s three-level criminal justice system.
