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In the heart of the down-at-heel city of Messina stands the Caronte & Tourist Ferry terminal, where cars, coaches and lorries drive on to ferries for the 20-minute boat ride from the island of Sicily to the Italian mainland.
Besides costly flights, ferries are the only way for Sicilians or their wares to reach the continent, a dependence that contributes to a sense of isolation and neglect in one of Italy’s poorest, least developed regions.
But Italy’s new rightwing governing coalition hopes to revive Sicily’s fortunes by resurrecting abandoned plans for a highly contentious, multibillion-euro 3.3km bridge across the Messina strait. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government sees the bridge as key to bolstering Italy’s influence in the Mediterranean region and positioning the country as a gateway to Africa.
In Sicily itself, talk of reviving the infrastructure project is generating cautious optimism and weary scepticism.
“Sicily is considered a territory apart from the rest of Italy and the bridge — a physical link — would unify it with the continent,” said Federico Basile, mayor of Messina.
Basile said he believed the bridge — if built — was a “fundamental work” that would catalyse job-generating investments across Sicily and reinvigorate his stagnating city. But he admitted his wary constituents fear the project would wind up like many public works in Sicily: stalled indefinitely.
“The city is not only afraid of the work but the prospect that it will start and not be completed,” Basile said, adding that talk of reviving the bridge had also created fresh uncertainty for a city that was planning its future without it. “I’m not waiting for it.”
Italian politicians have dreamt of binding Sicily to the mainland since the late 19th century. But an ambitious plan for the world’s longest suspension bridge was scrapped in 2013, amid doubts about its financial viability and structural integrity in a geologically volatile region. Concerns that powerful mafia organisations could infiltrate the project also cast a shadow, especially after one was found to have attempted to bid for part of the contract.
Yet infrastructure minister Matteo Salvini has expressed hope to start work on the bridge within two years. In Brussels last month, he sought financial support for the endeavour from Adina Vălean, the European transport commissioner, who requested a detailed proposal for consideration.
Maritime policy minister Nello Musumeci, Sicily’s former regional president, said faster movement of goods from Sicily to the mainland with a new bridge would bring “renewed optimism” to Italy’s economically languishing southern periphery.
“The goal is to make southern Italy into a true logistics platform for the European continent,” he said. “Creating this big grand infrastructure becomes the first necessary step to secure a different future.”
Yet such claims are contentious in Messina, where anti-bridge protests galvanised up to 20,000 people on the streets of the small city, mainly driven by environmental concerns and overall scepticism about the project. The former mayor, Renato Accorinti, was an anti-bridge activist who wore “no bridge” T-shirts even to formal events. In the city, critics are gearing up to resume a battle they thought they had already won.
“This project — an old project — may have made sense a half century ago, but now it’s far from reality,” said Guido Signorino, a University of Messina economics professor, who was deputy mayor under Accorinti from 2013 to 2016.
Opponents say Sicily’s dire internal road and railway network limits the potential utility of the expensive bridge, while the growth of short-sea shipping as an ecologically friendly alternative to road haulage also renders the project obsolete.
Signorino said the bridge — whose cost, along with supporting infrastructure, would be far higher than the estimates of a decade ago — could never be economically viable, and would burden Italy’s already strained public exchequer.
“It’s impossible to have a balance between the costs and benefits,” Signorino said. “The volume of traffic that the bridge can generate will not be adequate.”
Attempts to bridge Messina Strait date back to 252BC, when a Roman consul moved 100 captured war elephants to the Italian mainland on rafts made of “rows of barrels joined together”, according to the Roman chronicler Pliny the Elder. After the 19th century unification of Italy, nationalists proposed building either a bridge or a tunnel, but engineers concluded neither were feasible. Efforts began anew during Italy’s postwar economic boom, and in 1970 it was declared a national priority.
Decades on, in 2006, prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government awarded a €3.9bn contract for a bridge to an Italian-led construction consortium. But under pressure to curb public spending during the 2012 sovereign debt crisis, Italy suspended, then formally cancelled, the project. That decision prompted a lawsuit from the contractor that has never been settled.
Sicily’s business community is enthusiastic about getting the project back on track. Pietro Franza, president of the Messina chapter of Italy’s business association Confindustria, said it would spur the much-needed investments in Sicily’s infrastructure, lowering logistics costs.
“If you don’t build the bridge, you will never invest in the rest of the highways and railways,” said Franza, whose family owns the Caronte & Tourist ferry company that stands to profit from hauling building materials for the project.
Yet sociologist Aurelio Angelini, author of the book The Mythical Bridge over the Messina Strait, expressed scepticism that the project would ever see the light of day. Rather than a serious proposition, Angelini said, the bridge revival was an act of political grandstanding to appeal to Italy’s poorest regions.
“It is a game to raise hopes. It is about the dream of bringing together economically, and in terms of equity, the north and the south. That is the myth of this work . . . Dreaming costs nothing.”
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