What the commentators said

The story of the Morandi Bridge is “laden with symbolism”, said Matteo Pucciarelli in The Guardian. When it opened in 1967, the “Little Brooklyn” stood for a new era of optimism, rising prosperity and social mobility. Its downfall coincides with the emergence of a very different Italy: “insecure, angry and self-destructive”. Indeed, Italians will see the bridge’s collapse as a “metaphor for the rottenness of the Italian state”, said Nicholas Farrell in The Daily Telegraph. After decades of misrule, the country’s decaying infrastructure poses a constant threat to life. Experts say hundreds of bridges may be “deathtraps” (four viaducts and overpasses have collapsed in the past two years), gas leaks regularly destroy apartment blocks and 156 school ceilings have fallen in since 2013. Yet despite repeated government promises, nothing changes. That’s partly because the country is deep in debt – annual interest repayments total s80bn – but also because it’s cursed with a “labyrinthine bureaucracy”, an incompetent judicial system and “top-to-bottom” dishonesty in public life.

For good measure, we have a system of outsourcing that hands control of our infrastructure to companies that put profits above lives, said Elisa Moretti in The Independent. With the private sector in charge, Italy spent far less on road maintenance between 2010 and 2014 than many other EU nations. We “deserve better”. But our new leaders promise only more disappointment, said Federico Capurso in La Stampa (Turin). Not long ago, the antiestablishment Five Star Movement (M5S), which now shares power with the League, blocked a plan to replace the whole stretch of motorway in Genoa with a s5bn bypass. When one local industrialist predicted that the bridge would collapse within a decade, Beppe Grillo, M5S’S founder, called the warning a “fairy tale” (in a blog post since taken down). As a local MP put it, those responsible will soon, quite rightly, be put through “the meat grinder”.