Reggio Calabria, Italy
Mission Title: Highway to Hell - A3 Between Salerno and Reggio Calabria
Mission By: Antonio Letizia, Stefano Sellitto
Mission Finished on Date: 16-07-2008
SCRIPT
- Spend one day on the Salerno
- Reggio Calabria.
- Tape the landscape as it changes, and all the work yards slowing you down. Highlight queuing and try and record any traffic information from the radio regarding the troubles.
- Stop by any gas station or Autogrill and show the conditions of parking, shops and toilets as you proceed.
- Interview some of the people you meet about the highway and chat about its problems.
- Pay attention to the time it takes you to get from Salerno to Reggio Calabria (443 km), subtracting the total time spent in your stops.
- Highlight traffic and any difficulties in entering Reggio Calabria. Shoot the highway from a certain distance, trying to include the landscape in the frame.
- Think of this reportage as a portrait of the highway, the landscape, and your interaction with it. Capture the problems and successes of the road trip. Be sure to appear in the reportage yourself.
TRAVEL BAG
How can a structure be a symptom and a metaphor for the imaginary of a territory?
Following the route down to southern Italy, time slows down till it almost seems to stop, the moments dragging out until progress nearly disappears. The further south, the slower (and harder) it goes. A good hint is looking at the toilets at every piss stop you make: the dirtier they are, the closer you're getting to the last, infamous stretch of the A3 highway, going from Salerno to Reggio Calabria. More than half of it has only one lane and traffic has to crawl through perpetual construction. If such a lacking service does no good to the regions it crosses, the regions themselves do even worse by the highway. 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrese mafia, has reportedly infiltrated the highway construction and different clans each have their own stretch of road. Adding up to the Salerno-Reggio Calabria issues, the A3 also carries the burden of the Messina strait bridge, another public works project that likely won't be completed anytime soon.
If state commitment in the Salerno-Reggio Calabria area is irregular, uneasiness is steady. Accidents are not infrequent on the narrow lanes, the intermittent speed limits due to construction work doesn't help much either. Pietro Ciucci, president of Anas, the public company in charge of Italian highways, stated the troubled road will be finished soon, and that 40% of it is already completed. Ciucci's words sound promising, but given the pace so far, not that promising. Perhaps time wll take care of the highway, and maybe in another generation the road to southern Italy will be shorter.
Mission Report
In this mission we’ve tried to document through images and some interviews the situation of the A3: Salerno – Reggio Calabria highway. It’s the only connection by land that connects, or better, “should” connect, all South Italy, but it still takes approximately 7 hours to drive through these 443 kilometers. All this because of the countless interruptions, as well as stretches of road that are literally closed.
The Autogrills play a different role to their normal one, since they become “compulsory stopping places” for drivers to get some rest and recover from the tension stored up in the traffic.
The hardest stretch has been the one from Salerno to Eboli, where there’s only one lane available for about twenty kilometers. The central stretch instead seems to be the smoothest flowing one, with few road yards, even though there’s still no sign of the new tract.
When you arrive at the outskirts of Reggio Calabria the works become more imposing: a new stretch of road is being built, together with new and much bigger galleries; the new way should be almost without bends.
There’s still a lot of work to do to complete this highway, but the positive thing is that in every road yard we’ve met we’ve seen men at work nonstop.
Antonio Letizia, Stefano Sellitto
