Ferry from Sardinia dirty and expensive: Matteo Bassetti's social complaint goes viral

There are means of transportation that travel for years but, one fine day, gain media notoriety just because a famous passenger says something obvious that all the users of those means of that trip have known all along. This is what is happening in these hours with a Facebook post by noted infectiologist Matteo Bassetti about the filth (and more) found on a Moby Lines ferry bound for Genoa from Sardinia. A deluge of comments and likes, newspapers picking up on the news and others even fact checking it by scrolling through the reviews of hundreds of users on various portals all on the same wavelength and complaints: the conclusion is that the travelers’ reviews are “creepy,” with the result that the complaint by Bassetti, a doctor who has gained notoriety on TV news programs by commenting on the news of the day on Covid, appears “far from exaggerated.”

Bassetti, who is director of the infectious diseases clinic at Policlinico San Martino in Genoa, had chosen Sardinia for his vacation but on his way back he gave vent on social media to the treatment he received on the Moby Lines ferry with fiery words: “Rudeness, tardiness, filth, relational inability, crazy prices and a lot of anger for those few Italian companies that hurt Italy’s image. These are the ingredients I found tonight, with my family, on the Moby company’s Ship Aki on service from Olbia to Genoa.” It was a bit like they asked the writer’s father what the sleeper trains from Turin or Milan were like going down to the south (Reggio Calabria, Crotone, Bari...) in the 1980s and 1990s.

The infectologist starts with an account of the night that probably spoiled his vacation by immediately noting the 2-hour delay in departure, then moves on to a complaint about the price a monopolist can charge for its products (he does not write this but in fact complains about it): “Restaurant closed...we fall back on a pizza by the slice: 71 euros for 9 chewy, greasy slices, unworthy of being called pizza” (i.e., 6.90 euros the single slice of margherita, and 2.20 euros the price of a half-liter bottle of water). But in Aereoporto or Autogrill, after all, do products cost less than in the supermarket near home? It’s the same thing, they teach in the first year of economics: under a monopoly of service delivery, one cannot be surprised by the high prices charged given the lack of competition and especially the lack of alternative for the customer.

Interesting then is the alarm he raises about the calling card we give to foreign tourists with staff who, he writes in the post, do not know languages. Tourism in this case, however, is intertwined with the particularity of the territorial continuity service that the state and the Autonomous Region of Sardinia must guarantee to citizens. That is, the possibility for those who live on an island, in this case Sardinia, but the also for the island of Elba, to be able to get to the mainland whenever they want. And so, for example for Portoferraio there is a ferry from Piombino every hour. The routes are put out to tender and given in concession where the shipowner guarantees the service even if it is uneconomical (the trip perhaps only with one passenger on board, as with buses or streetcars in the city) but since it is then the same one that in high season provides the service certainly that Tuscan saying “poggio e buca fa pari” will come back to him.

Can anything be done? Shipowners there are few of them around in the first place, and to those who propose to have a state-owned company carry out the service let’s remind them that the ferry companies that used to carry out territorial continuity services were precisely state-owned. But then they were privatized and opened up the market. The fault certainly does not lie with those who live on an island and have a just claim to see the promise of “territorial continuity” fulfilled with connections that allow them to come and go -- and thus live -- from the mainland for work or study or whatever. We will elaborate on this issue in a future article.

Pictured are some of the photos posted by Bassetti

Ferry from Sardinia dirty and expensive: Matteo Bassetti's social complaint goes viral

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