Building Like the Caesars

Back home in Italy they are dubbed Gli Insabbiati -- literally, "buried in the sand." Abroad, some 25,000 expatriate engineers, surveyors, carpenters, me chanics and truck drivers have helped make Italy a major force in the rich, ruggedly competitive field of interna tional construction. The Gli Insabbiati started with projects in the deserts of North Africa -- hence their nickname --but now they are spreading around the world. More and more, they resemble the Caesars' legions, who two millennia ago built highways, aqueducts and cities from Scotland to Syria.

Vatican Foundations. Completing projects at a rate of $200 million yearly are more than a dozen sizable Italian companies and several smaller ones. This month two Rome firms, Comtec and Ircom, jointly signed to build a 20-story skyscraper in Uganda's capital of Kampala. A group of three other Ro man companies, including a firm called Vianini, in which the Vatican is the largest shareholder, recently won a $40 million order from the Libyan govern ment to broaden 1,483 miles of coastal highway and erect 46 bridges.

Biggest of the builders is Milan's Impregilo, which is a permanent com bine of three firms. It is responsible for four African dams, another in Iran, and one under way on the Euphrates River in Turkey. Along with these projects, worth $300 million altogether, Impregilo recently outbid an Anglo-German consortium for a $250 million hydroelectric project on Peru's Mantaro River. Tackling smaller-paying jobs as well, Impregilo is helping move the temples of Abu Simbel before the area is fully flooded by a dam.

The Rome firm of Italconsult is participating in a $75 million bridge-and-viaduct job in Argentina. One of the Italians' specialties is designing long, lightweight bridges built with less concrete and steel than most spans.

Experience at Home. The builders got their experience 15 years ago in Italy, which was then a developing nation itself in need of dams and bridges in the north and land-reclamation projects in the south. Gaining knowledge and also running out of contracts at home, the Italians began bidding on projects abroad, got the jump on other foreign builders. Italian laborers were willing to put in longer hours and tours of duty than workers of other nations, and Italian managers were willing to take profits of less than 5% in hopes of getting additional work near by.

Lately, prosperity has begun to trim profit margins. Wages for the Gli Insabbiati are gradually rising; an Italian engineer abroad earns about $10,000 yearly in wages and fringes, a truck driver about $5,000. Moving beyond Africa also means higher costs for employers. Not the least of the problems is that the contractors stand to lose many of the hard-working desert veterans, who have a habit of settling where the job takes them. Cogefar, another Milan company, is about to begin a $56 million tunnel-boring job for a hydroelectric plant on New Zealand's Tongariro River. Many of the 400 skilled GH Insabbiati flying out to do it will probably never return to Italy.

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