Dreamt of since the Roman Empire, the men and women, taxpayers and taxspenders of the Italian Peninsula are preparing for an engineering project unrivaled by any in the nation’s history.
Set to begin in the waning days of 2024, a suspension bridge linking Sicily with the mainland across the Messina Strait would be the longest in the world if completed.
The country’s highly-popular Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose coalition took power in 2022, revived the idea for the first time since the early 2,000s. Meloni has asked the EU for assistance in funding the project, estimated to cost €4.6 billion.
The Romans had often suggested the idea of linking Sicily with the mainland, and may even have built a temporary soft bridge out of barrels. Monarchs including Charlemagne and Roger II also had ideas of building a bridge across the strait.
Dictator Benito Mussolini shared the dreams of the Romans, but it wasn’t until Meloni’s coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi’s administration that the dream took shape into something resembling a project.
Berlusconi, who passed away earlier this year, also succeeded in getting the EU on board, and in 2009, a contract for the construction was awarded to the Messina Strait Company.
During the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, then-Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti canceled the project over austerity measures.
The bridge is proposed to be both a rail and road bridge with a central span of 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) which would make it the longest in the world, passing Turkey’s bridge over the Dardanelles by a whole kilometer in distance. The bridge would be part of the Berlin–Palermo railway axis (Line 1) of the Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T).
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If you want to go to Sicily, you can fly, take a boat, or take a train that’s carried by a ferry. These methods severely limit the commerce of the island, and unsurprisingly the economy of Sicily has stagnated for years.
“Starting work on the construction of the Strait Bridge is one of my goals,” Matteo Salvini, leader of the North League party that forms part of Meloni governing coalition, told Italian broadcaster RAI last month. “The transshipment of ferries, in addition to pollution and time wasting, costs people more in a year than it would cost to build the bridge.”
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Not only would it allow direct shipment of goods on trucks and trains from the mainland, but imports arriving through the Suez Canal could offload directly onto Sicily, saving time and money in lengthy sea voyages up to Genova or Venezia, and allowing Scilian exports to be loaded at home—rather than being shipped up to northern cities first.
The rail and road connections on the bridge would also ease the pressure on the overcrowded ferry services, which not only deal with people, cars, and trucks, but also whole trains.
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It’s not all sunshine and dollar signs though, massive challenges exist in building the Messina Strait Bridge, as it would not only be the world’s longest, but sit in a famously active seismic zone.
Currently, firms from 6 different nations have been contracted for the build, including IHI Infrastructure Systems Co., Ltd. from Japan which oversaw the third-longest suspension bridge in the world in Japan, and Danish firm COWI A/S which built the Øresund Bridge, the second-longest bridge in Europe.
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