“Together, we write history”: the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Italian Infrastructure Matteo Salvini announced on Wednesday the final green light in Rome for the construction of the longest suspension bridge in the world, connecting the island of Sicily to the continent for 13.5 billion euros.
“This kind infrastructure represents a development accelerator,” said the minister, assuring that the project will bring economic growth and tens of thousands of jobs with two poor Italian regions, Sicily and Calabria.
This green light for the construction of the bridge which will span the Strait of Messina, funded by the State, marks a “historic page” after decades of planning.
The Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, for her part, qualified the project as a “symbol of engineering global scope”, demonstrating “the strength of will and the technical competence of Italy”.
The works should start “between September and October”, hopes Mr. Salvini.
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.
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.
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.
The infrastructure will be built on a protected marine area and could cause “a carnage” of “millions of birds” by disturbing their migratory routes, advanced in June Tommaso Castronovo, president of the association for the defense of the Legambiente Sicilia environment.
Many local elected officials and experts also fear that the local mafias do not largely benefit from this windfall, the Attorney General of Messina having warned of the risk of infiltration of the latter in the construction of the bridge, and whose power hides behind public works “.
«Insane choice “
“Not to build this bridge for these reasons would never be a project in these regions,” swept Mr. Salvini on Wednesday.
For the boss of the Left Party Avs Nicola Fratoianni, this bridge is “an insane choice in every way, (…) a mega-works that will divert a lot of public resources which would however be necessary to respond to the problems and the emergency room of millions of Italians”.
Some opponents of the project also believe that it will never see the light of day, recalling the long history of public works announced, funded and never completed in Italy.
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.
On this amount, 1.5% can be devoted to “defense” areas, such as cybersecurity and infrastructure, and Rome hopes that the Messina bridge will be eligible, especially since Sicily is home to a NATO base.
