“Italy is a country where money matters more than anything”, despairs the mother of a victim

It’s noon, it’s raining on August 14, 2018: the huge Morandi bridge collapses. This building on which the highway passes is an essential axis for local journeys and traffic between Italy and France, collapses in the middle of the city, throwing dozens of vehicles and their passengers into the void.

>> Italy: four years after the collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa, a trial under high tension

Paola Vicini will lose her son Mirko, 30, one of the 43 victims. As the disaster trial resumes on Tuesday, September 13 – a brief opening hearing had taken place in July – we meet her on the belvedere which dominates the bridge and which is dedicated to the young man. “It is baptized Belvedere Mirko Vicini. It is a very beautiful belvedere if there were not what we see below”, she slips.

It was the San Giorgio bridge, inaugurated on August 3, 2020, which replaced the Morandi bridge in barely two years. This bridge under which Mirko was buried. “We stayed five days and five nights under the bridge, waiting for him to be found. It was endless and unfortunately, we could no longer hold him in our arms”, says Paola Vicini.

Since then, the city of Genoa, which was not in charge of either the construction or the maintenance of the bridge, has struggled to leave, explains Lorraine Barroso, in charge of legal affairs and social policies at the town hall of Genoa: “The problems that followed the collapse of the bridge, due to poor and even non-existent maintenance, created significant damage for the city, for transport, for the inhabitants who were displaced. And of course for the families of those who lost their lives.”

But these families find it difficult to believe in Italian justice. Paola Vicini is worried.

“We should already know that those who are at fault will have to pay. Unfortunately, with Italian justice, it’s not like that.”

Paola Vicini, mother of a victim

at franceinfo

“What’s going to happen? Italy is a strange, very strange country where money matters more than anything”, she regrets. The motorway company has already paid tens of millions of euros, but it defends itself by claiming that there was a construction defect and not a maintenance one, contrary to the conclusions of the investigators.