A ministerial committee gave, Wednesday, August 6, its final approval to a 13.5 billion euros project aimed at building the longest suspension bridge in the world, connecting the island of Sicily to the continent, a spokesperson announced.
“It will be the longest suspension bridge in the world. This kind infrastructure represents a development accelerator ”said in the meeting the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Italian infrastructure, Matteo Salvini, quoted by his spokesperson.
This approval for the construction of the bridge which will span the Strait of Messina, funded by the State, marks a “Historical page” After decades of planning.
With two railways in the center and three traffic lanes on each side, the bridge is designed with two pairs of tense cables between two laps 400 meters high, with a suspended range of 3,300 meters, a world record.
Preliminary work could start in the summer and construction should start next year. Scheduled to be completed by 2032, the government affirms that it is a technical feat, capable of resisting violent winds and earthquakes, in a region located at the junction of two tectonic plates.
The government hopes that it will bring economic growth and jobs to two poor Italian regions, Sicily and Calabria, Mr. Salvini promising that the project will create tens of thousands of jobs.
A titanic project that arouses debates and disputes
However, this plan has aroused local protests, due to its environmental impact and its price, this money that can be, according to detractors, better used elsewhere. Some of them also think that it will never see the light of day, recalling the long history of public works announced, funded and never completed in Italy.
The memorable world
Test your general culture with the writing of the “world”
Test your general culture with the writing of the “world”
Discover
The idea of building a link between Sicily and the continent dates back to ancient Rome and this project experienced several false departures, the first plans having been drawn up in 1969. It was relaunched by the cabinet of the president of the Italian council, Giorgia Meloni, in 2023.
The project was awarded to Eurolink, a consortium led by Webuild, an Italian infrastructure group, which won the call for tenders for the construction of the bridge in 2006 before the project was canceled in 2013 after the debt crisis in the euro zone. Webuild built the Detroit des Dardanelles bridge (in Celanakkale, Turkey), which is currently the longest suspension bridge, with a main range of 2,023 meters, open to traffic in 2022, and built using the engineering model originally designed for the Messina bridge.
This time, Rome has an additional motivation to move forward: she classified the cost of the bridge as a defense expenditure. Italy, riddled with debts, has accepted, with other NATO allies, to massively increase its defense expenses to bring them to 5 % of GDP, at the request of the American president, Donald Trump. On this amount, 1.5 % can be devoted to domains “Defense linked”such as cybersecurity and infrastructure.
Italy affirms that the bridge would constitute a strategic corridor for the rapid troop movements and the deployment of equipment on the southern NATO flanks, calling it as“Security strengthening infrastructure” : Sicily houses an installation of NATO, the Sigonella air base, north of the province of Syracuse, about fifteen kilometers southwest of Catania.