A criminal court in Genoa sentenced Giovanni Castellucci, the former chief executive of motorway operator Autostrade per l’Italia, to 12 years in prison on 16 July 2026 for his role in the collapse of the Morandi bridge, which killed 43 people on 14 August 2018. The three-judge panel also handed down custodial terms to 31 other defendants, including an 11-year sentence for the company’s former head of maintenance, Michele Donferri Mitelli, and a five-year term for Mauro Coletta, a former director at the infrastructure ministry. The prosecution had requested 18 years and six months for Castellucci and a combined total of nearly 400 years for the 57 individuals charged. The verdict is the first judicial finding of individual criminal liability in a disaster that exposed deep fissures in Italy’s infrastructure governance.

According to the prosecution’s reconstruction, presented by Genoa’s public prosecutor’s office, the collapse was the result of years of neglected maintenance on the Polcevera viaduct, driven by a corporate strategy that prioritised dividends over safety. Investigators argued that the operator and its engineering subsidiary, SPEA, were aware of serious corrosion in the stay cables of pylon 9 yet repeatedly deferred essential works. The defence teams, representing former executives and ministry officials, maintained that the failure originated in an undetectable construction defect dating to the bridge’s inauguration in 1967, and that the cable deterioration was impossible to monitor because the steel tendons were encased in concrete. Castellucci, who is already serving a six-year sentence for a 2013 bus crash on another Autostrade-managed viaduct, told the court he felt “responsible but not guilty.”

Viewed from European capitals, the trial has been followed as a benchmark for holding corporate officers accountable for public infrastructure failures. In Italy, the disaster triggered a political reckoning: the then government forced the renationalisation of Autostrade per l’Italia, which had been controlled by the Benetton family’s Atlantia holding, at a cost of €9.3 billion. The current CEO of the now state-owned company, Arrigo Giana, issued an open letter of apology on the eve of the verdict, a gesture that victims’ families described as overdue. Egle Possetti, who lost her sister and her sister’s family in the collapse and leads the victims’ relatives committee, said the 12-year term for Castellucci was “acceptable” but stressed the need to study the full written judgment before drawing conclusions.

The trial, which opened in July 2022, spanned 284 hearings, heard 282 witnesses and examined 112 separate charges ranging from multiple manslaughter to forgery. The companies themselves had already reached a corporate liability settlement earlier in the proceedings, paying approximately €30 million in financial penalties and around €60 million in civil compensation to the families, while also funding the demolition of the ruins and the construction of the replacement San Giorgio bridge, inaugurated in 2020. The first-instance verdict is not final; the court is expected to deposit its detailed reasoning within six months, after which both the prosecution and the defence can appeal to the Genoa court of appeal and ultimately to the Court of Cassation in Rome. Legal observers in Italy note that the statute of limitations on some of the lesser charges may expire before the appeals process concludes.