It’s Luigi: Meet the Italian immigrant leading Amtrak’s Baltimore tunnel project

For Amtrak to build a tunnel in Baltimore, Luigi Rosa needs to be a bridge.

Rosa brings decades of building high-speed rail to his role leading the construction of Amtrak’s Frederick Douglass Tunnel under West Baltimore. But he’s learning that the job requires more than engineering expertise.

Not only is he navigating fierce community resistance to a project that will disrupt neighborhoods for years, he’s responsible for a $6 billion project proudly funded by the previous federal administration only to face skepticism by the current one.

He’s an immigrant leading the largest capital project in Amtrak history, even as immigrants and the national passenger railroad are in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. Administration officials have called Amtrak service “embarrassing” and suggested privatizing it.

The tunnel project has been the subject of warnings about cost overruns and delays, a civil rights lawsuit and residents’ claims that the railroad has little regard for their well-being.

The affable Rosa proudly leads the effort, but credits his team and gratefully accepts the challenges.

“It’s my reward for many sacrifices,” he said.

From Italy with love

Rosa’s parents still live in his hometown of Frosinone, a small, industrial city about an hour southeast of Rome.

Much of what makes him who he is — his love for cooking, his legacy in the Italian railroad — gives him reasons to return often.

But after visiting in 2006, he fell in love with New York City.

“I felt it was my place,” he said.

Later, after an opportunity arose to work on one of the Middle East’s first high-speed rail projects, he proposed a two-year sabbatical in New York to master English for the project.

He studied at New York University and split rent with another Italian — an actress and singer. He’d make dinners that reminded them of home, and lent his project management skills to her off-Broadway show.

They fell in love, and 11 years ago Rosa married Simona Rodano, known in New York City schools as the "Italian Fairy" who taught students to sing. Three years ago, they became U.S. citizens.

“America has given us a lot of great things, including a new perspective,” Rosa said. “It’s helping us to open our minds and pushing us to also help each other and be more understanding.”

Since taking the helm of the West Baltimore tunnel, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor has become another home.

During the week, Rosa sleeps in a one-bedroom South Baltimore apartment. He spends his sparse free time getting to know the city’s charms — meandering its streets or spending an evening with a friend at Ministry of Brewing. Last May, he spent a rare Saturday in town at the Mt. Vernon Place Flower Mart. As fall began, he participated in Mayor Brandon Scott’s neighborhood cleanup.

Baltimore reminds Rosa of Naples — an Italian coastal city that has fought a rough reputation for crime and uncleanliness but teems with history and culture. Like Naples, he said, Baltimore just needs more opportunities.

Early in his career, Rosa worked on Italy’s first high-speed rail project to connect Rome and Naples, which made it so people could live in one city but work in the other.

Gilberto Cardola, Rosa’s boss on that project, wrote in an email that he tried to bring Rosa onto every project he’s led since, praising both his technical acumen and his vision.

“I have consistently admired his ability to remain calm under pressure, to build trust among project stakeholders, and to demonstrate a strong spirit of collaboration and leadership,” Cardola wrote.

That first project with Cardola, whom Rosa considers a mentor, transformed how he thought about his job.

“I was an engineer thinking about bridges and tunnels, but when we opened that segment, I understood that this is not about concrete tunnels and bridges, but it’s about changing the lives of thousands, maybe millions, of people,” Rosa said.

“This is what high-speed [rail] means, it brings opportunities.”

Getting community buy-in

Roughly seven stories below the surface of what was once a grocery parking lot in Midtown-Edmondson, a construction team recently excavated rock and muck. Soon, they’ll start using controlled explosives to dig the tunnel.

This tunnel isn’t for trains — it’s a utility shaft. The work to relocate utility lines for the Frederick Douglass Tunnel is a yearslong process, a preview of what’s to come.

The real show could start later this year when two tunnel-boring machines — think the giant worms from “Dune” but made of metal and really slow — start eating away at the rock in a barren field by North Payson Street.

If the tunnel brings future opportunities for West Baltimore, they’ll come after roughly a decade of disruption.

Construction has completely upended life in Midtown-Edmondson — with noise, closed streets, debris and airborne dust. Some residents say the pounding and shaking has damaged homes and sent rats scurrying into basements and alleyways.

Last summer, about 60 people worked at the site on an average day. When construction peaks, there will be closer to 600.

Years from now, the neighborhood will have new bridges and a West Baltimore MARC station on Amtrak’s dime, but only after West Franklin and Mulberry streets, major east-west thoroughfares, are closed for extended periods.

Those closures and, in particular, how they impact students getting to school, have led to an increase in recent constituent complaints, said City Councilman John Bullock, whose district includes the area.

The project is needed, Bullock said, “but it’s a lot of pain in the process moving forward.”

Some residents, remembering what the Highway to Nowhere and its legacy of racial discrimination wrought in their neighborhood, worry that history is repeating itself. They fear that West Baltimore is yet again bearing the burdens of a project that only benefits people outside the community.

Though his team is doing everything it can to mitigate the construction impacts, Rosa said he recognizes the disruptions for what they are — a huge pain.

Bullock credits Rosa and his team not just for using diagrams and videos to explain all the work in a way non-engineers can understand, but for consistently showing up to do so.

“I need to be able to explain to my mother what building a tunnel underneath her home means,” Rosa said.

Community meetings have gotten tense. That doesn’t make them any less important, Rosa said. Residents may not care that his graduate thesis involved generating artificial earthquakes to observe the impact on soft rock, research he turned over to structural engineers who were trying to keep a historic Italian town from collapsing. They’re worried about their historic brick rowhouses.

In time, the disruption will turn into new opportunities, Rosa said, pointing to the new MARC station and a $50 million commitment to community-led development initiatives. A delay in that program led some to wonder whether the funds will survive the Trump administration, but Amtrak announced it would start accepting grant applications later this month.

“You have all this activity going on in the community, but [residents] also want to see some investment,” Bullock said.

Some might see him — or even Amtrak in general — as an outsider, but Rosa is focused on the tunnel’s greater meaning.

“We are building something that goes beyond just this project,” he said.