A day on construction site: the Webuild podcast series

One day on site…. Definitely the day the rock fell and the two tunnels were joined up. It was the day when 28-year-old engineer Francesco Grasso Leanza witnessed his first breakthrough of the bypass on the 28th of June 2021. We are hundreds of metres below ground on the sites of the Third Giovi Pass – Genoa Node, the high-speed railway that will connect Genoa with Milan, constructed by the Cociv Consortium led by the Webuild Group. 

Francesco was very young when he “landed” in Webuild after gaining a Master’s degree at Milan Polytechnic and going on to work first on the construction of Genoa's Ponte San Giorgio and now the Third Pass. He left his native Sicily at 16 years of age to attend military college in Venice, then university in Milan. He’s been working on the construction sites for two years now, living in base camps with other Webuild engineers, technicians and workers, and he has no doubt about what he'll do when he's grown-up

Hasan Medlej left Lebanon when he was only 20 years old, choosing Italy as his second home. Here, he studied engineering, joined the construction world and won a place on the Webuild Group’s “Manager of the Future” programme. 

“I didn’t know the language, I didn’t know the country,” he said. “But I did know about Leonardo da Vinci and all those great thinkers, scientists, artists and architects who made Italy a magnet for those who dream of building something.”

His day on site was the 13th of October, 2019, when he bade Russia farewell to start a new adventure in Georgia. Today, he is back in Italy where he works on the Quadrilateral project, a road network that will connect Umbria with Le Marche. His entire future is in the suitcase that he has been carrying with him since his first trip. Heavy baggage that brings together the experiences and teachings of all those who have helped forge his path.

One day on construction site. Surely the 20th of December in 2018, the day of the call that tells you: it’s time to return home. When Dario Campisi left for the Middle East, he was a young engineer who wanted to travel the world. First to Qatar, where he went to work building the Doha underground, then to Dubai, on the construction site of the largest shopping centre in the world. Always with Webuild, the Group that called on him to take part in the construction of those two major works. Ten years later, that 20 th of December in 2018, it was time to return home, to his Sicily. This time, Dario would build something for his own land: the high-capacity Palermo to Catania railway on the Bicocca-Catenanuova stretch, a work that Webuild is constructing that will revolutionise railway transport on the island. He is the technical coordinator of the site, the engineer who is responsible for negotiating agreement between those who designed the work and those who are building it. “The added value of us Sicilians," he relates in the second episode of "One day on construction site", Webuild's podcast series, "is that of taking the best from other peoples and bringing it back to Sicily. And that's exactly what I have tried to do in my professional career.”

A day on the construction site. It';s very difficult to choose it 30 years later. It is difficult to distinguish between mixed memories, from the construction of the works that triggered the

Italian miracle of the Second World War to the inauguration of the new Genoa Bridge. Renzo Rossi was there.

First, with the Lodigiani company, then with the Webuild Group. At the age of 22, he began working with Lodigiani, one of the first Italian companies in the large infrastructure sector. Thirty-one years later, he became the site manager of the new San Giorgio Bridge in Genoa.

Today, he is busy coordinating the Terzo Valico project, the high-speed train that will connect Genoa to Milan. His testimony “lights up” the first episode of “A day in the construction site”, the podcast series of the Webuild Group.

Through Rossi's unpublished story, the figure of Vincenzo Lodigiani re-emerges, the last heir of a dynasty of builders, who died on March 1, at the age of 88, and together with him the pieces of a legacy that over the years led up to establishing the Webuild Group, today one of the best players in the sector, globally.