In Irpinia a local firm reopens with €13.2 million the factory ArcelorMittal left behind. In Taranto the State has spent €3.6 billion and the former Ilva has gone cold
7 November 2026, 16:07
On 4 November, at the Ministry of Enterprise, a preliminary agreement was signed under which Tecno Meccaniche Moderne, an Irpinian maker of metal structures for trains, transport vehicles and defence, takes over the Luogosano plant, in the province of Avellino, which once belonged to ArcelorMittal. The company's plan for 2027 to 2030 provides for €13.2 million of investment: the firm takes back the thirty-one workers who were employed there and, by 2030, will hire another 35, trained with the support of the Campania Region and the local higher technical institute. The dispute had lasted fifteen months.
What is more, the buyer did not come from far away: the firm already has two sites in neighbouring villages, and it was the provincial industrial-area consortium that called it. To get a factory abandoned by the steel giant running again, all it took, in short, was someone with work to do inside it.
The same Franco-Indian group had also entered the former Ilva in Taranto in 2018, the country's largest steelworks, and that story has ended too: since February 2024 the plant has been under extraordinary administration and is run by the State, waiting for a buyer who has yet to appear. In recent days it switched off its last blast furnace, because the Court of Cassation upheld the halt ordered at the end of July by the Milan Court of Appeal over pollution from asbestos and fine particulates. "Since this morning nothing is switched on any more," the general manager of Acciaierie d'Italia told the unions at the Ministry of Labour; the company has applied for wage support (cassa integrazione) for 8,622 employees until February. In Irpinia the workers the group left behind are going back into the factory; in Taranto, where the State has taken its place, they are going home.
To keep the steelworks alive, according to the tally reconstructed in January by a business daily, since 2012 successive governments had spent €3.6 billion between loans, capital injections and wage support; in May a further €100 million was added, lent to pay wages, suppliers and maintenance. That money comes out of every Italian's taxes and has gone to the steelworks company and its employees. Today the furnaces are cold, and the company, now out of resources, is asking for the wage support to be paid directly by INPS, the national social security institute: once again, a public body. For the Irpinian plant to start up again, a sum equal to less than four euros for every thousand spent on the former Ilva is enough, and it is a private company putting it up.
The method, after all, is different. In Luogosano the provincial consortium went looking for a local firm. In Taranto the government is counting on bringing in Leonardo, Fincantieri and Ferrovie, companies in which it is a shareholder, and an investment timetable is still nowhere to be seen: the State, to find someone to invest, turns to itself.
Bids to buy the Taranto steelworks close tomorrow; for the Irpinian factory the buyer has already signed, and the new recruits will first spend time at the desks of the technical institute in Grottaminarda.
This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Mattino on 5 November 2026.