The horror of the bridge collapse in Genoa could hardly have happened in a more stunning city. I’m supposed to go there for work, but usually find myself idling to admire the sudden views of the sea from the hills. It’s a bit like Bristol: an elderly port that, with its rivers, summits and soul, has reinvented itself.

Genoa has always felt a strangely English place, too. The city’s flag is a St George’s cross. It was here that Italy’s oldest football team, still called Genoa Cricket and Football Club, was founded by an English doctor. It went on to win nine scudetti (championships) in the glory days of the early 20th century.

The English were just one of many influences. Genoa has always been an integral part of the Mediterranean basin and there are traces of Arabic and Portuguese in the dialect. The city’s music, especially that of “the Italian Bob Dylan”, Fabrizio De André, often sounds far more sophisticated than bubblegum Italian pop.

The stereotype of the Genoese is that they’re mean traders: they are, it’s said, tough seafaring folk. The adventurous spirit gave rise not only to (now controversial) explorers such as Christopher Columbus but mercantile success stories. We use the word “jeans” because it’s the pluralised, anglicised version of the dialect word for Genoa: Zena.

Although it’s a city made rich on petrol distribution, there is plenty of poverty. The narrow lanes of the old city are as destitute as they are chic. This is the kind of big, bustling space you might end up in if you’re looking for work or housing or just somewhere to hustle. There’s graffiti everywhere. The seafront has been ruined by a dual-carriageway flyover. Huge ships and tower blocks as far as the eye can see make the place feel crowded. As you head out of the centre, the suburbs cling to the hillsides of one valley or another. It’s not a city to visit unless you’re happy marching up thousands of steps on the scalinate every day. The long, vertiginous staircase down to the city’s football ground, the Luigi Ferraris, must be the best approach to a sporting stadium in Europe.

But that topography is one of the many reasons for this tragedy. The Morandi bridge is one of hundreds that straddle peaks throughout Liguria, like ribbons over the rocks. Every farm you see is terraced, clinging to the sides of a hill. And so the city is used to tragedy. There have been many fatal floods: the penultimate one in 2011 cost six lives and earned the city’s first female mayor, Marta Vincenzi, a five-year stretch for manslaughter.

‘Those massive dice and dominoes of concrete seem to belittle us, to taunt us that this was a manmade catastrophe.’ Photograph: Italian Red Cross Press Office/EPA

This disaster seems of a different scale, however. The surreality of it is hard to shift from your mind. Those massive dice and dominoes of concrete seem to belittle us, to taunt us that this was a manmade catastrophe.

Emotions are running high and the hunt for culprits has been immediate. One of the parties in Italy’s coalition government, the Five Star Movement, has blamed Autostrade per l’Italia, (the motorway operator, owned by Benetton through its holding company, Atlantia). Shares in the company plunged after Luigi Di Maio, the party leader, suggested he would revoke the operator’s national contract and impose huge fines. Autostrade said the collapse was unexpected and unpredictable. “The bridge was constantly monitored, even more than was foreseen by the law,” Stefano Marigliani, Autostrade director for the Genoa area, told Reuters. “There was no reason to consider the bridge dangerous.”

Matteo Salvini, the far-right interior minister from the League, has blamed the European Union’s budgetary constraints for impeding maintenance. That kneejerk reaction comes in the context of Salvini limbering up for a face-off with the EU over immigration and budget deficits; if he doesn’t get what he wants, he’s threatening to suspend the building of the high-speed train link between Lyon and Turin.

So infrastructure is, for once, at the very top of the political agenda. But infrastructure is a complex issue. The construction industry is deeply infiltrated by the various mafias and any national building project is surrounded by suspicion and insults. Projects are often accompanied by allegations of concessions to, or battles with, organised crime.

What’s clear is that Salvini wants to commission some major building works. A selfie-obsessed politician, he can’t resist vanity projects, such as the endlessly debated bridge over the Straits of Messina. But if the cement mixers start rolling again, there might be another breakneck building boom like there was in the mid-1960s and, on last week’s evidence, that’s something to be imitated only with humility and caution.

But the tragedy raises deeper issues about modern Italy. Even though it has produced fine civil engineers, without a meritocracy they rarely get the gigs. Contracts go not to the most competent but to the best connected. Before Genoa’s bridge was even started, another bridge by the designer Riccardo Morandi, in Venezuela, had partially collapsed. That he went on to build dozens more (two closed, one demolished, the rest at risk) is perverse. The lack of meritocracy is as felt today as in the 1960s: so many of the finest doctors, scientists and financiers are émigrés. Italy is being shaped not just by the arrival of immigrants but by the departure of its own people.

It is used to the hand-wringing about how everything has gone downhill since the Romans and the Renaissance. But last week such laments were off the scale. It seems unfathomable that we still use Roman bridges, but that a 20th-century one has lasted barely 50 years. The insult is made worse because the Roman infrastructure, as well as enduring, is aesthetically breathtaking. Just cross the Tiber on foot few times when you’re next in Rome to see the strength and delicacy of Roman bridges: Ponte Sant’Angelo, Ponte Cestio, Ponte Fabricio. The precompressed concrete, with all its corrosion and pollution issues, was grim and grey. There was no artisan nous in it, no hands that placed stone and studied the ascent of the arches. It was the lazy man’s medium, lumped together from cranes.

Perhaps that’s why the mourning has felt so sharp. There was something in that bridge that points to all our failings: the ambition, the frenetic innovation, the greed. Because the bridge was part of a motorway in a petrol city, it seems to warn of the cost of modern transport, of what happens when you elevate cars above humans, literally and metaphorically.

• Tobias Jones is a journalist and author who lives in Parma