PALERMO – A high-speed railway network, on the Salerno-Villa San Giovanni / Reggio and Messina-Catania-Palermo lines, with trains that can reach 300 kilometers per hour to cover the journey from Calabria to Rome in three hours and connect in an hour and a half the three large Sicilian cities. A “smart road” in the South with the completion of the Palermo-Salerno motorway system both from a physical and digital infrastructure point of view, through the use of modern sensors and technologies that allow maintenance 4.0. The strengthening of the commercial ports of Gioia Tauro and Augusta with new infrastructures on the sea side and on the land side, as well as the creation of a single Port community system.
Here are the three interventions on transport in Sicily and Calabria which, according to studies conducted by a group of professors from the universities of the two regions, cannot be missing from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr): that is, the document of the national government which includes the investments that Italy wants to make with Next Generation European funds to restart after the Covid-19 pandemic.
The full professors of transport and construction of roads, railways and airports of the Sicilian and Calabrian universities enter into the debate on the distribution of the sums of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, denouncing first of all that under the 41st parallel, the one that connects Naples to Bari, there is nothing: «The reading of the draft of January 12 leads us to think that the regions south of the 41st parallel are a vacuum to be lost for which there is no plan and any project». Yet, they add, “these areas of the country are those at the highest risk of poverty in all of Europe: not just Italy”.
Faced with an unprecedented exclusion – however not justified by the parameters established by the EU for the allocation of the Recovery Fund resources – the academic world is mobilizing with a document, available to decision-making bodies, which will be presented on Friday during the a webinar entitled “Sicily and Calabria: the 3 interventions on transport that cannot be missed in the PNRR”.
“Without the South – put pen to paper Gaetano Bosurgi (University of Messina), Salvatore Damiano Cafiso (University of Catania) Anna Granà (University of Palermo), Massimo Di Gangi (University of Messina), Demetrio C. Festa (University of Calabria) ), Matteo Ignaccolo (University of Catania), Francesco Russo (Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria) and Giovanni Tesoriere (Kore of Enna) – Italy, by virtue of the parameters established by Europe, would have had only 98 billion euros. It is therefore due to the presence of the South, with its weaknesses, that the European commitment is 209 billion of resources from the Recovery Fund. The extra 112 billion should go to the South, but unfortunately this is not the case ”.
However, the idea that regions such as Sicily and Calabria are “stolen” of vital funds to relaunch the infrastructural system does not go down to the professors who are experts in the transport sector, who have prepared a real dossier of complaint and proposal. With lots of details on the interventions and estimates on investments (many of which at reduced costs), which could “determine important repercussions on mobility and the economy of the South”.
Roads, railways and ports are the guidelines on which the strategy suggested to the political world and the national government moves. “The overall system of transport and mobility for Sicily and Calabria – reads the document – appears unresolved and not clearly understood, relegating the problem to the now usual dilemma on the construction of the Bridge over the Strait of Messina, which becomes, as always, the focus of any discussion, ending up distracting from more comprehensive analyzes ».
The more comprehensive analyzes, as the Sicilian and Calabrian teachers call them, are condensed into “three major interventions that have the characteristic of feasibility by 2030 and may well find their place within the NRP”. Specifically, the overcoming of the geographical marginality of Sicily and Calabria is based on the introduction of high speed and on the reorganization of ferry services with the use of ro-ro ships capable of also allowing the Freccia and Italo trains to cross the Strict; while the bridge “appears necessary in a long-term perspective and does not affect the feasibility of the proposed interventions”.
These include the modernization of the three Calabrian motorway networks (near Cosenza, Vibo and Reggio Calabria), “for which there is currently only an extraordinary maintenance program”, and in Sicily the completion of the works already planned in the regional transport plan. As regards the two large core ports of the far south “it is necessary to proceed – reads the document – to the refinancing of the Zes” in addition to a series of interventions such as “the elimination of the landscape constraint on the port areas of Gioia Tauro, the nationalization of the Rosarno-San Ferdinando railway section, the inclusion of Santa Panagia in the Port Authority of Eastern Sicily to which Augusta belongs and the approval of the reclamation project ».