Calabria
Corruption Is Seen as a Drain on Italy’s South.
Italy’s A3 highway, begun in the 1960s and still not finished, starts outside Naples in the ancient hill town of Salerno and ends, rather unceremoniously, 300 miles farther south as a local street in downtown Reggio Calabria.
Along the way, it frequently narrows to two lanes, with an obstacle course of construction sites that have lingered for decades. Perilous, two-lane bridges span mountain ravines high above the sea, while unlit tunnels leak in the rain — and occasionally drop concrete and other building materials onto passing cars.
Nothing embodies the failures of the Italian state more neatly than the highway from Salerno to Reggio Calabria. Critics see it as the rotten fruit of a jobs-for-votes culture that, nurtured by the organized crime that is endemic in southern Italy, has systematically defrauded the state while failing its citizens, leaving Calabria geographically and economically isolated.
Text by Rachel Donadio
Client
The New York Times
Year
2013
The A3 highway under construction in Scilla, Calabria
A segment of the A3 highway under construction in Scilla, Italy. Since 2001, nearly $10 billion has been spent on the highway.
Giuseppe Raffa, President of the Province of Reggio Calabria, smokes a sigarette in his office in Reggio Calabria
Nicola Gratteri, the anti-mafia prosecutor of Reggio Calabria, is here in his armoured office in the courthouse of Reggio Calabria
A surveillance monitor in the office of anti-mafia prosecutor Nicola Gratteri displays the armoured entrance door of his office in the courthouse of Reggio Calabria
A young man sits on the side of the road in Gioia Tauro
One of the hundreds of unfinished concrete buildings in the 'Ndrangheta stronghold of Gioia Tauro
A truck selling religious and pagan plaster statues in Rosano
A boy stands outside a Cafe with older men in Mileto
One of the hundreds of unfinished concrete buildings in Rosarno
A man walks by an unfinished home in Gioia Tauro
A Mercedes passes by on a hill overlooking the cemetery of Gioia Tauro
Unfinished tombs at a cemetery in Gioia Tauro
An ad for a jewelry store is seen here in Polistena, a town in the mountainside of Aspromonte. Aspromonte is a mountain massif which mean "rough mountains", so named by the farmers who found its steep terrain and rocky soil difficult to cultivate.
An unfinished home in San Luca, in Calabria, a region that is economically isolated, with nearly 20 percent unemployment
A mist-shrouded street in the Aspromonte mountain leads to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi, a 'Ndrangheta stronghold in Calabria
Three men stop for a view on their destinationn their pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi
A tile decorated with the image of Our Lady of Polsi (or Our Lady of the Mountains) is sold here by the Sanctuary of Polsi together with other toys
Castellace di Oppido Mamertina, Calabria. Francesco, a 32 years old worker for the non-profit organization Libera Terra, operates a crane to remove the burned roots of olive trees set on fire by the 'Ndrangheta. Three days earlier a digger was set on fire in the same field
The president of the Calabria region Giuseppe Scopelliti sits in his office in Catanzaro