🇮🇹 Italy Experiences Food and Fuel Shortages After Truckers on Strike Block Roads. 90% of gas stations in Campania are out of fuel

Truckers protesting high gas prices have prevented deliveries to parts of southern Italy, leading to empty shelves and dry pumps.

On Wednesday night in Naples, Italy, a 72-year-old retiree walked into a supermarket to buy himself a snack and found it nearly bare.

It was out of milk, yogurt and eggs. Its shelves of pasta, oils and canned tomatoes were almost empty. The vast produce section was empty save for red onions, chestnuts, two melons and a case of ornamental gourds.

“It’s worse than I expected,” said Giuseppe Crisci, the retiree, who walked out with a bag of biscuits. “And what I expected was exceptional.”

Experiences like Mr. Crisci’s played out repeatedly this week across Naples, a sprawling port city in Italy’s south where residents faced widespread shortages at their gas pumps and grocery stores.

It is the fallout from a week of strikes and road blockades by southern Italian truckers who have slowed traffic on the region’s main highways, making it harder to distribute goods. The truckers are protesting spikes in fuel costs since the start of the war in Iran. The price of gasoline in Italy has risen 27 percent and diesel 32 percent since February, according to government data.

Naples risks “being paralyzed,” wrote Gaetano Manfredi, the city’s mayor, in a statement issued with the mayor of another southern city affected by the truckers’ strikes. The blockades were responsible, he added, for “supermarket shelves growing emptier and emptier.”

The truckers say they have no choice, blaming the government for failing to shield them from the price hikes. “We don’t want to create inconveniences,” said Salvatore Esposito, a trucker who has protested at the city port since Sunday. “But it’s necessary. At the end of the month, with our costs, we can’t live like this; we can’t work like this.”

About 90 percent of gas stations in Campania, the region where Naples is the capital, have run dry, said Gaetano La Rocca, president of a federation representing gas station operators there. In addition to snarling highways, he said, truckers have blocked access to fuel where tankers fill up.

🔗 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/world/europe/italy-protests-shortages-truckers.html