Unfortunately, in this case it's probably a bit of both. A bridge that was the direct precursor to this one, collapsed after a few years. Maintenance expenses for the Genoa bridge were already off the charts 20 years ago, and likely went down after its privatisation. It had been described a few years ago as a "failure of engineering" by several people.

Chances are that everyone involved in its maintenance knew that shit could hit the fan at some point, but there was no political will to close one of the main city arteries, and probably no budget (or even space, in that city) to build a replacement either.

Being a civil engineer can be tough, especially in complicated countries like Italy. The main architect is long dead; the country has been broke for decades now; the elements are unforgiving; and people are more than ready to lynch you if shit happens.

Do you mean the one which was hit by a supertanker?

It's most likely a corrupt contractor paired with a corrupt politician to blame. They usually use bad or sloppy concrete, or not the planned amount of steel the engineer demanded.

Really?

The country is broke, but our survival skills are so proverbial that the markets more or less trust we'll always come up with enough money to keep going. The day this stops being true, we'll go the Argentina way very quickly.

To be fair, that was 1992 so way before the euro. The problem is that ratings are easy to send down, but very hard to bring back up. Currently they are just two steps above junk, (despite having had pretty low interest until a few days before the current government swore in). Even just a single downgrading would be bad, two would lead to a massive sell and basically a disaster way worse than the Argentinian crisis.

And waste of resources. But broke no, thanks €!

https://www.thelocal.it/20170718/italy-european-union-most-h...

As soon as the markets get a whiff of potential instability in the country that would cause a deviation on the austerity policy imposed by the EU, the credit spread on goverment bonds skyrockets.

And with some good reason, as pre-EU governments used devaluation of the Lira to boost the exports and increase GDP (of course increasing inflation) on one hand, and kept borrowing money on the other, instead of trying to address historical problems like under-development of the South, unsustainable social security, rampant tax evasion, corruption in local administrations.

Even if currency devaluation were possible these days (basically only by leaving the EU), it would have to face a much more globalized economy than last century, where many exports depend on parts manufactured abroad, which would be suddenly more expensive to produce...

Italy is not broke as long it can pay interests on its debt, but every fluctuation in the global economy affect Italy way more than UK, US or Japan.

This number is kept higher than it needs to be for economic/political reasons. If your bridge is about to fall down at any minute it's easier to get federal dollars (or justify using your existing dollars) to build a new bridge. As a result there's lots of bridges that are past due with shovel ready plans for replacement but the local/state gov is just waiting for it to become a crisis so that they don't have to pay for as much of the fix. If the replacement bridge requires taking private land, disrupting traffic, etc, etc. there's even more reason to wait for a crisis.

For example, if someone dies in a car crash, it's a little out of context for you to focus on the responsibility and ethics of the car designer over and above the circumstances of the crash. Usually the latter focus is for when there's concern about said ethics and responsibilities.