“An immediate and urgent hearing with the competent parliamentary commissions to clarify the desire to build the SA/RC high-speed railway which represents a fundamental infrastructure for the overall development of Calabria, the South and the entire country”. This is what the mayor of Cosenza asked, Franz Caruso, during the press conference held this morning in Rome at the end of his speech in which he underlined: “Today is an important appointment for Calabria. This initiative was born, in fact, from the strong concern of seeing any ambition for growth vanished due to the failure to create the AV, which is the pillar on which to materialize it. For this reason we have involved the entire Calabrian delegation, the MEPs and all the regional councilors, without distinction of belonging because this battle is for the future of Calabria and cannot be locked up in party and/or ideological barriers”. Franz Caruso then explained the reasons that give rise to fears of the work’s failure to be carried out in a packed room at the Hotel Nazionale where he reported the concreteness of the events that have occurred over the last two years, starting with the sudden change of route.
“We were alarmed – he claimed – by a series of data that we have recorded since the study and project of the high-speed train in Calabria was presented in 2022 in the regional citadel, in the presence of our governor Roberto Occhiuto, by the then CEO of RFI Dr Vera Fiorani. On that occasion we were presented with the project that started from Salerno-Battipaglia, Romagnano – Praia – Tarsi as the only one that could be achieved by overcoming all the route difficulties and going beyond the original idea of placing a different high-speed line alongside the railway route already present on the Tyrrhenian coast. It was explained to us at the time that there were structural geomorphological problems on the Tyrrhenian Sea which prevented the construction of the work on that route. Politically, as Mayor of the capital city I believed and believe that the route on the internal ridge is the best to reconnect Calabria to the rest of the country, but above all to reconnect a very important part of our province and our vast region, the upper and middle Ionian and the Pollino, which has always been isolated due to lack of connections and transport infrastructures to the rest of our territory. We embraced and learned about this high-speed project with great enthusiasm. We were therefore waiting for a public debate on this work. Furthermore, the backbone route was not identified due to an abstract choice, but, as mentioned, in relation to a feasibility study costing the State 35 million euros.
The call to the public debate, however, never took place, while I learned from the press that the same public debate would be held in Praia where, worried, I went. On that occasion, the same interlocutors who had presented the project to us in Cittadella argued that the ridge route could no longer be built by proposing the line alongside it on the Tyrrhenian Sea. In this, using arguments contrary to what was previously argued and, therefore, showing a clear underlying contradiction which, obviously, I strongly contested. Also on that occasion I also raised what the technicians of our committee had highlighted in the document for the construction of the AV, namely that it was necessary to build a particularly powerful electricity line which, therefore, required a significant investment for a structure capable of producing enough energy to support the AV. The latter structure is not foreseen for the Tyrrhenian route but exists for the ridge route. From these contradictions the suspicion arose that in the silence of our higher institutions, a robbery could be carried out in Calabria. This is our real great fear and not which route to choose. We fear, rightly I believe, that high-speed rail will no longer be built in Calabria and this would be a theft that we cannot allow. We then paid attention to the financing foreseen for these works: the PNRR funds for a total of 191 and a half billion euros had been implemented by the Draghi Government with the establishment of a complementary fund for 30.6 billion, of which 11.2 billion euros were intended for the construction of the Calabrian section and included lot 1A Battipaglia – Romagnano, lot 1B Romagnano – Praia a Mare and lot 2 Praia a Sea-Marquetry. Well, following the update of RFI’s planning contract we noticed that of these 11.2 billion euros, only those destined for the doubling of the Santomarco Tunnel remained, which is an absolutely necessary and indispensable work for safety, but which has nothing to do with AV. From reading the official documents, we found no trace of all the other funds in the update of the program contract. So it is completely clear that our concern of never seeing the infrastructure built is more than concrete as not only are there no executive projects, but to date, there is also a lack of funding.
Hence our need to bring the AV problems to the Government’s attention, in particular the Ministry of Transport, where we were received by the general director, to whom we delivered the detailed report produced by the technicians of our committee and who had given us guaranteed a subsequent conversation directly with the Minister or with Deputy Minister Rixi. However, we were never contacted again. We have therefore appealed to the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarellain which we have a lot of confidence. Today we are here and ask to be heard in the competent parliamentary commissions because if the AV robbery were to materialize, our land will remain at the rear of the country. Since we are talking about important infrastructures such as the construction of the Bridge over the Strait, we believe, finally, that building this pharaonic work has no reason to exist if it is not connected to the rest of Italy via high-speed rail”.