Plan the Country’s future with infrastructure and employment to face today’s challenges and those of 2050

NAPLES, March 17, 2023 – “The bridge over the Strait of Messina envisions a unified Italy. The unification of the country, which we celebrate today, was accomplished with everyone speaking the same language. Today, we have the obligation to give every citizen the right to have access to mobility. A plan that has a high-speed train arrive in Reggio Calabria, interrupts its journey, only to have it start again on the other side of the sea would be an incomplete plan”.  

This was the comment made by Pietro Salini, Chief Executive of Webuild, during a panel discussion entitled “Reti di trasporto ferroviario veloce e reti digitali” (Fast Rail Transport Networks and Digital Networks) at the Euromediterranean Festival of the Economy. The panel participants included Adolfo Urso, Minister of Enterprises and Made in Italy; Nello Musumeci, Minister for Civil Protection and Sea Policies; Gennaro Sangiuliano, Minister of Culture; and, by video link, Paolo Gentiloni, European Commissioner for the Economy.

“We need to work together to think of how to connect country by 2050,” Salini says. “The bridge is part of a scheme that foresees the relaunch of the country from the south, which is still recovering from the ruins of a failed industrial plan, and the north, which has attracted all the best resources of the south through the years, and the main investments. The problem is no longer the distances but the ability to plan for the future of the country as a motor of the Mediterranean in the face of enormous challenges. We have to be able to manage great migrant flows and find a balance on the issues of welfare, sustainability and employment, the last of which will become, together with water, the scarcest resource in a future led by Artificial Intelligence,” he concluded. 

Webuild is deeply involved in southern Italy and the islands. It is building strategic projects for sustainable mobility, such as sections of the high-speed and high-capacity railway between Naples and Bari, and parts of a high-capacity railway that will connect Palermo, Catania and Messina. The 16 projects that Webuild is developing in the south today involve about 4,400 people, directly and indirectly. They also have an excellent supply chain of more than 3,800 direct suppliers who are present from the start of construction.