We’ve all heard of the great American road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking a great Italian road trip, you’ve surely come across this inevitable hitch in the plan: you can’t drive to Sicily. You can, of course, put your car on a ferry; you can even take a train that gets put on a ferry, the last of its kind in Europe. But a stretch of road spanning the volatile Strait of Messina, which separates Sicily from the mainland, has been a dream deferred since antiquity, when Pliny the Elder wrote of Roman notions of building a floating bridge — which, with its potential to disrupt the waterway’s considerable north-south trade, was eventually scrapped.
It seems that Italians have been joking about the impossibility of a bridge to Sicily ever since. These two videos from Get to the Point and The B1M explain the history of this continually frustrated infrastructural project, and the political maneuvers that have recently begun to make it seem very nearly semi-possible.
Though the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis of which Homer sung may not be a threat, the challenges are still many and varied, from the depth of the strait and the regional seismic activity that would necessitate building the largest single-span bridge in the world to the interference of local mafia groups who make their living by driving up the costs of construction works while also making sure that they’re never completed.
Two years ago, the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni approved a decree to proceed with construction, but whether it will realize its projected completion by 2032 is anybody’s guess. The very idea of such a structure has such cultural resonance that its existence — as well as its collapse — was envisioned to great effect in the recent Italian crime drama The Bad Guy. Though critically acclaimed, that series was also condemned in some political quarters for perpetuating negative stereotypes of the country: stereotypes that could potentially be refuted by getting some ambitious new infrastructure finished. If Italy can get the Strait of Messina Bridge built, after all, what couldn’t it do?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It’s largely a Mafia problem, just like the autostrada.
A great idea. A toll bridge would pay for itself over time.
Love to see it one day but me days are getting short at 82 so please begin the good work.
America.
I suppose it would help the mafia to infiltrate the mainland and defeat Scylla and Charybdis on their way over. Why not an undersea rail tunnel like the Chunnel?
This is one of many infrastructures that I myself envisioned, before finally Google-searching and realizing that it has already been proposed. I sure hope that they get enough fundings from any other Countries so that the costs don’t significantly reduce the chances for the bridge’s completion. I believe that the bridge, as a tourist attraction, even for locals, would be used at a greater rate than either the Golden Gate Bridge (California), the Mackinac Bridge (Michigan), the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (Virginia), the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway (Louisiana), or the Sunshine Skyway Bridge (Florida). Probably, the only one that would be used at a greater rate than the Messina Strait Bridge would be Florida’s Overseas Highway. Because of how far it reaches across not just water, but small islands, with many places to visit, shop at overseas, including gift shops, restaurants, hotels and towns, including Key West…and entire community all across the sea. Which is why I believe that it will be the only infrastructure over water, in the U.S., that the Messina Strait Bridge in Italy would not be used at a greater rate than. But the Messina Strait Bridge would still be a significant tourist attraction. And of course- reliable for local travelers. Which of course is why building this bridge is so important.