A ministerial committee gave its final green light on Wednesday 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. An infrastructure of this kind represents a development accelerator,” the Vice-Prime Minister and Minister of Infrastructure, Matteo Salvini, quoted by his spokesperson said.
This green light for the construction of the bridge that will span the Strait of Messina, funded by the State, marks a “historic 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.
Local protests
Scheduled to be completed by 2032, the government affirms that it is a technical feat, capable of withstanding 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, Matteo Salvini promising that the project will create tens of thousands of jobs.
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.
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Defense expenditure
The bridge itself has experienced several false starts, the first plans having been developed over 50 years ago.
Eurolink, a consortium led by the Italian group Webuild, won the call for tenders in 2006, but it was canceled after the debt crisis in the euro zone. The consortium remains, however, the contractor of the relaunched project.
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 US President Donald Trump.
AFP/HKR