Abstract

In this paper, the author retraces Gioia Tauro's events from the building of the 5th Italian Iron and Steel Centre, which failed, to today's port, a key junction of worldwide transhipment. Nowadays, Gioia Tauro exemplifies a large investment for development and represents a successful case of collaboration between public and private sector - that public private partnership so much pursued in the European policy on infrastructures. Therefore, Gioia Tauro's port represents a positive experience with a strong symbolic value, enabling to modify the old idea on the "slow, resigned, far" South. It was inaugurated in September 1995 by the CMBT Concorde ship, and in only three years (1996-1998), a proper upsetting made what was considered as the "cathedral of waste" into the greatest challenge for innovation in the Mezzogiorno. Gioia Tauro's experience demonstrates that the Government can - and must - become, together with other lower and higher institutional levels, an active point for policies providing for a grid, a framework for territorial growth. Depending on how it will be performed in determining infrastructural choices within the district of Gioia Tauro, those areas will have different chances, very different fortunes. Their connection within larger-scale policies - on a European, national, regional scale - will change their placing in the world. That is where the challenge really lies for those who want respect market autonomy, but without being overwhelmed by it.