Inclusion in Southern Italy: How the High-Speed Rail Is Reintegrating Prisoners

A red helmet, a work uniform, and a life transformed. For four inmates from Benevento Prison, a path of reintegration into civil society has begun with a contract on one of Southern Italy’s largest infrastructure projects: the Naples–Bari high-speed/high-capacity railway line.

This marks the first concrete implementation — made possible thanks to collaboration with the Campania Regional Directorate — of the Protocol signed in 2023 between the Webuild Group and the Department of Penitentiary Administration (DAP), aimed at training and reintegrating prisoners into employment.

The first operational stage of the project — which foresees the hiring of around ten people — began with the selection, carried out together with the DAP and the employment agency Randstad, of the first four candidates.

Within the framework of the “Cantiere Lavoro Italia” programme, a free training and employment pathway offered by Webuild, they were given the opportunity to gain new professional qualifications in order to work safely on the Group’s major worksites.

After completing the “Scuola del Territorio”, a pre-employment training course delivered directly inside the prison, the participants went on to attend the “Scuola dei Mestieri”, an intensive training programme.

Once trained, they were employed on the Apice–Hirpinia section of the high-speed rail under construction between Naples and Bari, commissioned by RFI (Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane Group).

After Benevento Prison, the programme moved to Ariano Irpino (Avellino), where selection interviews are currently underway for five new participants who will be trained and employed on the Hirpinia–Orsara section, also part of the Naples–Bari high-speed train route.

Not just infrastructure, then, but also education.

In South Italy, major worksites do more than build high-speed railway lines, bridges or dams. They also provide professional training to equip people with new skills. “Cantiere Lavoro Italia” was created precisely to address the shortage of skilled labour that has plagued the sector for years.

A challenge turned into an opportunity: transforming worksites into real schools capable of teaching trades and passing on skills that can be put to use straightaway. This is how many technicians and workers have been trained, who today are employed on the projects reshaping the nation’s sustainable mobility.

The high-speed trains on the Naples-Bari line are the emblems of this process. A strategic infrastructure for the Mezzogiorno, but also a vast training ground, where thousands of people are employed, including those who have taken part in Webuild’s training programmes.

If work is the means of personal redemption, infrastructure is the lever for collective renewal.

And in the South of Italy this renewal has a clear name: high-speed railway. Today Webuild is engaged in an unprecedented rail modernisation programme across the southern regions, with worksites that are both symbols of progress and engines of employment.

The Naples–Bari high speed line is the most advanced of these worksites. Webuild Group has been entrusted with four sections (Naples–Cancello, Apice–Hirpinia, Hirpinia–Orsara and Orsara–Bovino), covering 74 km of new railway line, six tunnels requiring the use of eight TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines), ten viaducts and six new stations and stops.

High-speed trains will travel at a maximum speed of 250 km/h, reducing journey times from Apulia to Campania, Lazio and the rest of central–northern Italy, while also strengthening east–west connections across the country.

The 145 km Naples–Bari high-speed/high-capacity project is an important part of the TEN-T (Trans-European Transport Network) programme for sustainable transport, which by 2050 aims to shift 50% of freight currently carried by road onto rail, triple the high-speed network, and reduce transport emissions by 60%.

Once completed, the Naples–Bari journey will take two hours instead of the current four, while the Rome–Bari connection will be reduced to three hours, saving about two hours.

Not far away, other major worksites are also active, from the Salerno–Reggio Calabria line, which will bring high-speed rail to Calabria, to the Palermo–Catania–Messina line, a double-track railway set to transform Sicily’s internal connections and integrate it with the mainland system.

These projects involve some of the most complex tunnels ever attempted, sections across challenging terrain, and works that intertwine engineering with geography, ultimately giving the island a modern and competitive infrastructure.

Each worksite is a training ground, each railway track an investment in the future. It is within these projects that young people trained through “Cantiere Lavoro Italia” — and prisoners rewriting their life stories through work — find their place.

It is the tangible proof that an infrastructure is not just concrete and steel, but also community, skills, and opportunity.

When high-speed trains race between Naples and Bari in just over two hours, or link Palermo and Catania in record times, those journeys will also stand as symbols of an Italy that has chosen to look forward. Southern Italy will no longer be merely a place of waiting, but a testing ground for a model of inclusive development and sustainable transportation, made up of major works and of the people who, through them, have found work, dignity and a future.