The new Genoa bridge

his story begins at 11:36 a.m. on August 14, 2018. At that precise moment, as the section of the Morandi Bridge that crossed the industrial area of Sampierdarena collapsed along with supporting tower number 9, all of Italy felt for the victims, their families, and a wounded city. Italy has often shown that it can react in times of emergency, and on this occasion as well, the institutions, the businesses, and civil society responded with firmness to the call fromGenoa and its inhabitants: to rebuild, and to do so quickly. Once the management of the emergency phase was over, on December 18, 2018, Webuild, in a joint venture with Fincantieri, was chosen to build the new bridge over the Polcevera River, an ambitious, modern work, designed by Italferr based on an idea by the architect Renzo Piano. In designing a bridge shaped like a ship’s keel, Piano was inspired by the Genoese people’s love of the sea. A viaduct 1,067 meter long, with 18 reinforced concrete elliptical piers, and 19 spans cradling the continuous steel deck. The commitment was to breathe life into a modern, sustainable bridge, equipped with a solar panel system to guarantee the energy supply, and air dehumidification systems to prevent the materials from corroding. An innovative bridge, in which the internal monitoring and the regular maintenance is done by robots tasked with carrying out the structural inspections and the management of the acoustic and solar panels. However, the technical features are not enough to tell the story of this work. The memory of the tragedy of the Morandi Bridge, the need to heal Genoa’s wounds, the imperative to do so in as little time as possible soon became the focus of life on the construction site, and of a race against time that not even a world emergency like Covid-19 was able to halt. After the first fewmonths spent setting up the building site and demolishing the old bridge, the birth of the new bridge began on June 25, 2019. At 3:51 p.m. the siren sounded and the concrete started pouring from the cement mixers to make A Choral Work The story in pictures of a building site watched by the eyes of the world Daniele Autieri T 66