Ilva as the nation’s autobiography

Four letters, a local story, a national tragedy and a common thread that perhaps exists even if few are willing to see it: if it ends there, why not shut down Milan? In November 1922, in the famous ‘Elogio della ghigliottina’, Piero Gobetti – a journalist, philosopher, publisher and key figure in Italian anti-fascism, whose story has often been recalled in recent months, not least due to the commemorations marking the centenary of his death – defined fascism as ‘the nation’s autobiography’. Trying to imagine today what a true and representative autobiography of a nation might look like is no easy task. But if we were to step back for a moment from the temptation to regard the story of the ‘love bombs’ delivered to the home of a famous television presenter, or the story of a ‘descamisado’ general who promises to dominate the next few months of the election campaign thanks to his heart-eyed adoration of Putin, as a perfect snapshot of Italy, we might argue that the true, profound, distressing but necessary autobiography of a nation today corresponds to a four-letter word against which, for the past fourteen years, Italian politics has been coming up against a brick wall: Ilva.

Ilva is the autobiography of a nation because it embodies, in a single story, all the major vices and all the intractable taboos of our country. A judiciary that is out of control, trade unions that are dormant, a political class that is snoring, entrepreneurs who are dozing, investors who are fleeing, and deindustrialisation that is galloping ahead. Unfortunately, Ilva is not the sort of story we like – a story of optimism, a story that radiates energy from every pore. But it is a story that anyone wishing to attempt, in some way, to build a better Italy than the one we have seen in recent years needs to understand. When we discuss Ilva—or rather, the former Ilva, once one of Europe’s most important steelworks—it is difficult to find Ariadne’s thread to easily navigate this mad, complicated, intractable story. But whenever we discuss the subject of Ilva, we ought to have the courage to recall one small truth that holds all the others together: Ilva is not merely the autobiography of a nation; it is the perfect illustration of what happens in a country where ideological environmentalism runs completely amok, with no restraints or checks, and where – with the complicity of a judiciary without a compass, a trade union without a vision, and an incompetent political class – deindustrialisation ceases to be an evil to be avoided and instead becomes a goal to be pursued in the name of a better environment. The story of Ilva – if we are to tell it honestly by rewinding the tape to the early 2000s – is a dramatic one: the story of a steelworks around which a misguided political approach allowed the city and the factory to grow until they were almost fused together, and of a factory that, in the early 2000s, could certainly have done much more to protect public health.

The narrative surrounding the dismantling of Ilva has long held that reducing production is the sole means of achieving an environmentally sustainable plant. Beppe Grillo stated as much explicitly; he envisaged an Ilva stripped bare, to be transformed into a playground, and there are numerous instances of how the judiciary has sought to make it impossible for Ilva to have a future, because giving Ilva a future has always been seen as a threat to the environment. In 2012, during the proceedings that led to the first seizure of Ilva, BATs – that is, ‘best available techniques’ for reducing pollution – were also invoked. In short: stricter standards than those in use, standards which at the time had not yet been incorporated as mandatory requirements into Italian law. In 2013, as you will recall, 8.1 billion was seized from the Riva family, with the amount that the family had, according to the prosecution, saved by failing to carry out environmental measures being calculated as proceeds of crime: a few months later, the Court of Cassation quashed the seizure. In 2022, the commissioners claim to have fulfilled 90 per cent of the environmental requirements. But for the judges, not even 90 per cent is enough: they consider that the grounds for the seizure have not yet been overcome and the plants remain confiscated. The underlying logic remains the same: Ilva must be shut down to prevent pollution.

In 2026, just a few months ago, the latest development. The Milan Court of Appeal acknowledged that the statutory limits on particulate matter had not been exceeded, but stated that those limits did not sufficiently safeguard public health and ordered a halt to operations, ruling that Ilva may resume operations once particulate matter levels are brought back within ‘safety limits’, no one knows what these are, and furthermore, despite the Higher Institute for Environmental Protection and Research having stated that the residual asbestos was fully contained and that the affected areas did not currently pose a risk, the Court deemed that assessment insufficient, set aside the Integrated Environmental Authorisation (AIA) – the public permit setting out the conditions under which a factory may operate – on this point, and replaced the criterion of containment with that of total removal prior to restarting operations. The result: if we take production as a benchmark, in 2025 Ilva produced around a quarter of the steel produced in 2012 – approximately two million tonnes compared with over eight million. The impact on the blast furnaces: AFO1 remains under court-ordered seizure, AFO4 is shut down for maintenance and AFO2, despite the recent accident in August, has remained the only blast furnace in operation. It is no coincidence that the fourteen Italian steelmakers who expressed an interest in Ilva did so solely for the cold-rolling division.

Summary: Taranto can only have a future by processing steel produced elsewhere, without producing primary steel any longer. But to fully understand how Ilva, in recent years, has become the perfect reflection of an Italy held hostage by its demons and ideologies, there is a passage in the Court of Appeal’s ruling that needs to be highlighted. This passage runs from pages 33 to 37 and reaches its conclusion on page 44, when the Court explicitly argues that new limits must be set for fine particulate matter – both those up to 10 micrometres, PM10, and those even finer, up to 2.5 micrometres, PM2.5 – because it considers the limits currently laid down by law to be insufficient to rule out health risks. According to ARPA air quality data, in 2025, at the Tamburi-Orsini monitoring station – the one that measures air quality in the neighbourhood closest to Ilva – the annual average concentration of PM10 was 22 micrograms per cubic metre, and the annual average concentration of PM2.5, that is, the finest and most penetrating particulate matter, was 12 micrograms per cubic metre. In Milan, during the same period, the figures were 35 and 21 micrograms per cubic metre respectively. This means that in the neighbourhood closest to Ilva, PM10 levels were 37 per cent lower than in Milan and PM2.5 levels 43 per cent lower (the law sets annual limits at 40 micrograms for PM10 and 25 for PM2.5). The point is clear: if the judiciary considers Ilva to be out of control, then not only must the Taranto steelworks be shut down, but the whole of Milan as well. If this option is regarded as extreme, it may be worth asking when Italy began to regard as legitimate a form of environmentalism—coddled by the trade unions, embraced by the public prosecutors’ offices, and unchecked by politics—which has transformed deindustrialisation into the only possible path towards a better country, with plenty of playgrounds, fewer jobs, less industry and less of a future.