Messina Bridge Back on the Agenda for Southern Europe

A key infrastructure project for Southern Europe, the bridge over the Messina Strait that would connect the Italian region of Calabria with Sicily, is being revived by the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. In an announcement on Sept. 27 during a ceremony for the 110th anniversary of Salini-Impregilo, Italy’s largest construction group, Renzi said that it’s time to “bring Sicily closer and remove Calabria from its isolation.”

The Strait of Messina Bridge would be the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, with a central span of 3.3 kilometers (2.05 miles), beating out Japan’s Akashi Kaikyō Bridge and China’s recently completed Xihoumen Bridge. The design of the bridge is highly advanced, to deal with the fact that the area is also subject to earthquakes.

After the bridge was championed by the governments of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the early 2000s, the Italian Parliament voted to abandon the project in 2006. The most common reasons cited for opposition – which continues today – are cost, the lack of adequate road and rail connections in the bridge area, and the risk of organized crime getting its hands on the billions that the project would bring to the local economies.

In terms of financing, the goal is now to involve private investment as much as possible, as there have been various offers from foreign groups over the years. The mafia aspect is tougher to counter, although it is an argument many consider useless: if you can’t build where there’s organized crime, then you will never be able to change the economic character of the region, and uplifting the region economically can contribute to combatting the gray economy and the power of organized crime.

As for the local transport connections, supporters of the bridge argue that the project is even more important precisely for this reason: it would require coordination between the national and local governments to rapidly rebuild the basic infrastructure in an important part of Italy’s South, which has suffered from a woeful lack of investment for decades.

The Strait of Messina bridge would represent an important rail and road link for the Mezzogiorno – as the southern regions are known – but would also play an important part in the overall infrastructure grid for Europe. Ambitious plans have also been drawn up to extend the Italian transport corridor all the way to Africa, with a multi-stage tunnel connecting Sicily to Tunisia. However, these plans have not yet been taken into consideration at the government level.