It is an eternal Italian dream that the ancient Romans, Charlemagne and Ferdinand of Bourbon already fantasized about. Now, the Italian government of Giorgia Meloni has revived the idea of ??joining the little more than 3 kilometers that separate Sicily and Calabria with a Pharaonic bridge. The right-wing executive has approved a decree that allows the reactivation of the public company Stretto di Messina (Strait of Messina) and which will now have the majority participation of the Ministry of Economy and Transport, in addition to the regions of Sicily and Calabria, to recover an old 2012 project buried so far due to its enormous environmental impact and safety concerns in an area of ??high seismic risk.
The intention is for the viaduct to begin construction in the summer of 2024 and, according to the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure, to be the “longest cable-stayed bridge in the world”, at 3.2 kilometers, and “the jewel in the crown of the art of Italian engineering. But the precedents indicate that there are many numbers of that never becoming a reality. The bridge over the strait is an old Italian aspiration, an idea that resurfaced in the 19th century. In the middle of the 20th century, work began in earnest, and in the 1960s and 1970s the first projects to link Sicily to the Italian peninsula were assessed, including a tunnel or a large suspension bridge. This concessionary company was born in 1981, when a monumental structure was envisioned for the construction of two 300-meter pylons, as high as the Eiffel Tower, one on each side, supporting a 3-kilometre arc.
Silvio Berlusconi, during the electoral campaign of 2001, promised that he would finish the bridge in ten years, and in 2006 he managed to sign a contract to erect it, but the arrival of the government of Romano Prodi, who saw it as a useless project, stopped his ambitions. Only in that year the expenses of Stretto di Messina cost the Italians 21 million euros in more than 100 employees working on a project locked in a drawer. When il Cavaliere returned to power, he took up the idea again, later stopped by the economic crisis and by the government of Mario Monti. In 2016 Matteo Renzi put it back on the table, without, again, having any practical effects.
Now, the attempt is estimated at the abysmal amount of about 7,000 million euros and is the great personal bet of Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League and Minister of Infrastructure, in low hours after being supplanted in the leadership of the Italian right by Meloni. Without being able to achieve his long-awaited Ministry of the Interior, Salvini intends to regain political prominence with the Messina bridge, which he considers will be, in addition to “an engine of growth” for southern Italy, an “important tourist attraction.” For this they have recovered the contract with the construction consortium Eurolink, led by Webuild and of which the Spanish Sacyr is a part. “It is a historic day not only for Sicily and Calabria, but for all of Italy after 50 years of talk,” said the also deputy prime minister after the approval of the decree on Thursday.
Italian public opinion is very divided on the idea of ??this colossal infrastructure. Beginning with the environmental associations, and also the residents, who are against it not only because many of the residents’ houses would be demolished, but also because this is an area with abundant biodiversity, a key place for fishing transit and also for birds, which have natural places to nest.
Then, the employer warns that the bridge will be of no use if it continues to take several hours to travel between Palermo and Catania, where there is no high speed. And, furthermore, below this strait is one of the most active faults in Europe, the Messina-Taormina fault, which in 1908 caused a terrible earthquake that killed almost 100,000 people and destroyed the city of Messina. However, representatives of the Civil Protection and the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) have given their approval to the project. “In Italy there is a seismic risk as there is, worse, in Turkey or Japan, and there are also great bridges in those countries,” replied Salvini, who assures that the bridge is “anti-seismic” and that “it will last for centuries.”
