Taranto is sick.
This city of 190,000 in Italy's southern Puglia region is sick from a virtually permanent state of economic crisis and runaway unemployment; it's sick from the polluted sea and unhealthy air; and it's sick of being ostracized for one particular resident of the city, continuously singled out as Italy's ultimate societal ill: the massive, aging Ilva steel plant.
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Once again, promises were made and just as quickly broken. At the beginning of January the government was supposed to find an agreement together with the ArcelorMittal multinational steel manufacturer and former owner of the plant. But that hasn't come through. The huge debt that must somehow be recovered continues to hang over the head of every single Ilva worker.
Marco Desiati, a Taranto native and the 2022 winner of Italy's most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize, wrote an open letter to his hometown: "I was ten years old and I had a school diary made of comic strips that talked about the benefits of steel and its factory."
Because this is what it was at its origin back in 1960: a gigantic monster of a fixture that rose up along the coast, which promised to bring so many good things for the locals, and the nation. Now, six decades later, that monster has turned out to have a dark side, an environmental and health disaster that gets worse with each measurement.
Yet also inherent in the debate is the impossible demand to choose between working with deadly long-term consequences or not working at all.
North-South divide
Taranto was chosenbecause of its large industrial port on the Ionian sea capable of accommodating large tankers to transportmaterials and shipping products. Yet to open such a big company in southern Italy was at least as much a political as business decision. The gap between north and south has always been part of the Italian story, though it has shifted decidedly in the past century from more cultural features to more important economic problems.
Ilva was a direct challenge to the status quo.
The stereotype has it that people are reserved and industrious in the north , while the south is friendly but impoverished and chaotic. The truth is that investments, due to both historical and geographical reasons, were always significantly lower in the south than they were in the north, stunting development and making it vulnerable to corruption and organized crime.
Ilva was a direct challenge to that status quo, and in the 1970s doubled its capacity, adding more than 20,000 workers. While keeping promising of higher paychecks to the local workers, the city itself grew too. People were finally making investments across the region of Puglia, with ships passing through the ports at every hour — and Ilva held out the prospect of fundamentally changing Italy's national economy.
But by the 1990s, the collapse that we are witnessing today was already showing its first signs, with strikes called by workers who complained not only about stagnating wages, but about the environmental and health risks they faced. In 2012, Taranto prosecutors accused Ilva of culpable and malicious environmental damage, poisoning of foodstuffs, malicious failure to take precautions against accidents at work, aggravated damage to public property, and spilling of hazardous materials.
The courts ordered the seizure of the entire area willed by the government, a standoff that led to the loss of clients — and a deepening erosion of trust of, not only the workers, but of the nation and beyond.
Archbishop's view
Ilva was conceived of a way to help the south overcome poverty while contributing to Italy's economic ambitions. Steel is a foundational sector thatreflects the “health” of the economy becauseit flows directlyinto the electrical appliance, construction supplies, shipbuilding and othersectors. Stoppingit, or evenpausingit, meanscurbing economic growth.
Yet it is the impact on the environment and public health that has become the way most Italians think about Ilva. The damage to the soil and the air that the inhabitants breathe is undeniable, even if many locals still also look to the steel plant as the only real source of both work and hope. Because even if it destroyed everything, the factory gave and is still giving a job to more than 10,000 people. To close the establishment would be a very immediate form of destruction.
The Archbishop of Taranto, Monsignor Ciro Miniero, has been a strong opponent of closing Ilva, which he said "would mean not thinking about the good of a community." A Taranto resident responded to his appeal in a letter on La Stampa daily: "You are supposed to be representing the physical and moral good of the community, to defend indeed our lives with gritted teeth. I invite you to come with me someday for chemotherapy at the Moscati Hospital in Taranto."
Still, Miniero's letter contained real points of truth, including the fact that Ilva is a problem for all of Italy, not just Taranto. Beyond the North-South gap, the real tension is that the government is asking people to choose between health and a job that pays — to live penniless or to live with an atmosphere being poisoned every day.
Arcelor on ice
Tarantines are exhausted. They arestanding up for whatshould be basicsrights. The link betweentumors and polluted air wasscientificallydetermined in 1992, and thus it has been more than 20 years that everyone knewthe workersweregoing to suffer, theyhad no choicebut to keep working for the samefactorythatwasslowlykillingthem and everyone around them.
It can lead someone to take extreme measures.
The situation is now at an impasse: in order to maintain current operations and pay suppliers Ilva needs €320 million now, and at least one billion starting from May. All expenses that Arcelor, the last owner, no longer wants to face, not even by halving its share of the capital by moving into the minority.
The failure to find an agreement between Arcelor, the Luxembourg-based multinational, and the government initially threatened the total closure of the steel complex. That has now been replaced by a temporary pause that will serve as a moment to decide who the next owner will be.
Antonio Motolese, one of the 1,500 furloughed workers who should have been reintegrated after 2023, following the completion of the environmental work, described his situation to a journalist of La Stampa. "In these five years of layoff, I've had to mortgage my home, take on more and more debt," he said. "It can lead someone to take extreme measures, put a rope around your neck, because you can't figure out what else to do."
Magna Graecia to the future
Still, even if individual stories are heart-wrenching and the Ilva saga is unlikely to finish well, the city itself must find a way to imagine a different future. Taranto is sometimes called the city of contradictions, and in that way is indeed emblematic of Italy's untapped potential: it is ideally located on the upper-inside coastline of the heel of the Italian boot, but there's no clean beach to swim; there are several collapsed walls around the city that are now used as spots for poetry and art.
Tarantines also can find lessons from the past, and the passage of time. What is now dismissed as Italy's archetype polluted city was founded by the Spartans in the 8th century BC during the period of Greek expansion, eventually becomeing among the most important capitals of Magna Graecia,
Today, there are glimpses throughout the city of the archaeological traces of what used to be. MARTA, the archaeological museum, exhibits one of the largest collections of artifacts dating back to the Ancient Greece.
Economic crisis and environmental degradation has unfortunately obscured most of these wonders, transforming Taranto into the symbol of the defeated rather than a cultural and tourist hub. The bittersweet lesson of this place, like much of southern Italy, is that the current hard times are just part of a much longer history. We can only imagine 1,000 years from now, Tarantines stumbling upon the archeological findings of a steel plant called Ilva. What story will they tell?
