Nothing is eternal. Genoa and Italy's pain is still palpable: on 14 August, a 200-metre stretch of the Morandi Bridge, a viaduct of the A10 motorway, collapsed causing the death of 43 people, the evacuation of 258 families that lived in the 11 buildings under the ruins, and the interruption of a fundamental junction for the viability of the Italian North-West.
Such structural failures are not only typical of Italy, but they are a threat also for Europe and the rest of the world.
Not all failures or collapses are caused by corrosion, but this represents a serious threat, because it is a subtle and difficult-to-assess phenomenon.
Maintenance is not enough.
Although there are no eternal materials, some of them can be defined as "maintenance-free", i.e. their first maintenance intervention is expected to occur after very long time, about forty to sixty years, and therefore performed by the generation following the one that made the work.
In the pages of this issue we deal with these problems, above all with technological information and analyses. Our generation has the task of maintaining what was built by previous generations, but it has above all the task of building progress.