The head of Italy's highway management agency ANAS resigned on Monday after growing pressure over the degraded state of the country's road system which was underlined by a collapse on one of the main motorways in Sicily.
Pietro Cucci told Transport Minister Graziano Delrio he would step down as ANAS president in mid-May following the approval of the 2014 accounts, the agency said in a statement.
ANAS came under heavy criticism after a column supporting the main highway connecting Palermo in northwestern Sicily and Catania in the east gave way at the weekend following a landslide, cutting one of the island's main transport arteries.
A combination of squeezed public spending after years of recession, mismanagement and chronic corruption around public works contracts, have starved infrastructure of investment.
Further underscoring the problem, the ceiling at a primary school in southern Italy collapsed on Monday, injuring two children and prompting demands for faster improvements to the country's dilapidated classrooms.
The affected stretch of motorway in Sicily is expected to be demolished and rebuilt - taking months or years - leaving travellers having to add hours onto their journeys.
The closure of the motorway, just months before the beginning of the tourist season, also highlighted the lack of coordination between authorities meant to maintain the network.
"The truth is that the landslide that destroyed the section of the Palermo-Catania highway could have been made safe," said Erasmo D'Angelis, head of a unit set up by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to monitor infrastructure.
"ANAS and the regional government should have intervened 10 years ago and no one did."
In a statement on Sunday, ANAS said it was not responsible for the area in which the landslide occurred and had not been notified of any risk. The governor of the region of Sicily, Rosario Crocetta, also rejected any blame.
"The highway isn't managed by the region of Sicily, it's managed by the central government, so it should be ANAS and the central government that intervenes," he told SkyTG24 television.
Commenting on the school incident, the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement said a government plan to invest millions of euros in school buildings was "a drop in the ocean" and much more had to be spent to protect children.
"Everything is collapsing, but taxes are going up," 5-Star leader Beppe Grillo wrote on his blog.
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