Just days after being nominated Italian infrastructure minister, Matteo Salvini has revived the ancient and controversial dream to build a gigantic, multi-billion-euro bridge linking Sicily to the mainland, in one of the areas with the highest seismic risk in Europe.
On Monday, Salvini, the leader of the League, a junior partner in a far-right coalition that won September’s general election, told the Italian state broadcaster Rai he would put in motion the long-discussed plan of linking Messina to Reggio Calabria, despite the fact that the project was repeatedly rejected by previous governments because of high costs, engineering impracticability and environmental impact.
“Over the next five years, starting work on the construction of the Strait Bridge is one of my goals,” said Salvini. “The transshipment of ferries, in addition to pollution and waste of time, costs people more in a year than it would cost to build the bridge.”
Salvini said the construction of the bridge would create about 100,000 new jobs.
The dream of building a bridge over the Strait of Messina dates back to the ancient Romans, who, according to some historians, were the only ones to ever build one. The author and philosopher Pliny the Elder wrote that in 251BC a bridge of boats and barrels was built to transport from Sicily to Rome 140 war elephants captured by the Romans from the Carthaginians during the First Punic War.
Almost 2,000 years later, it was the turn of Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, to dream of linking Sicily to the rest of the country. Even then, nothing came of it. Then it was the turn of Silvio Berlusconi and his government, who between the 1990s and early 2000s secured partial funding from Brussels for the €6bn (£4bn) scheme. But Romano Prodi, who replaced Berlusconi, won power with a manifesto that cast doubt on the scheme.
Berlusconi himself, also an ally of the coalition of the new government led by Giorgia Meloni, stated in August that he had not changed his mind. “The bridge remains my priority,” said the three-time former prime minister and leader of the Forza Italia party.
In a 2021 study, scientists located a fault on the seabed of the Messina Strait, which caused the devastating earthquake that killed 120,000 people in 1908 – the greatest seismic disaster of the 20th century. The location where the bridge is planned to be built is therefore one of the areas with the highest seismic risk in Europe.
But Salvini has not been put off. “We have been talking about crossing the Strait of Messina for decades, and, since 1981, hundreds of millions of euros have been spent without having achieved anything,” he said. “We finally intend to move from words to deeds.”
