Deputy Prime Minister Salvini: Bridge to Sicily will fulfill "dream of millions of Italians"

According to Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, Italy is planning to build a bridge from Calabria to the island of Sicily "the largest public construction on the European continent this century". The infrastructure minister said on Tuesday in front of foreign correspondents in Rome, to whom he described details of the project. Salvini claimed the bridge was "the dream of millions of Italians for centuries."

Recently, the government in Rome had decided, after years of back and forth, to start a new attempt to build a bridge to Sicily. So far, the Strait of Messina – at the very tip of the Italian boot – can only be crossed by ferry.

The bridge will be 3666 meters long and 60 meters wide. The two bridge piers, on which the lanes for cars and trains hang over cables, will be 399 meters high, as the plan provides.

After completion, which according to Salvini is scheduled for the early 2030s, around 6000,200 cars per hour and 11 trains a day could cross the bridge. The planners assume that around 100 million people use the bridge every year. Rome hopes that the mega-project will create a total of 000,10 jobs. The cost of the bridge and access roads is estimated at <> billion euros.

Critical voices already in the past

The Ministry of Infrastructure announced that the bridge will be resistant to earthquakes up to a magnitude of 7.1 and wind speeds of up to 270 kilometers per hour. Experts had recently warned of the dangers of the forces of nature in this seismically active region.

Several Italian governments have discussed the project in the past. At the beginning of the 2000s, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi campaigned for its construction. However, nothing came of the plans – critical voices considered them superfluous at the time and risky because of the earthquake danger in the region.

Critics of the new plans accuse the government of "wasting resources," according to the Ansa news agency. Environmentalists reject the plans, therefore, because of "extremely high ecological and financial costs".

President Sergio Mattarella had recently countersigned a government decree, now the parliament has to convert it into a law. In the two chambers, the right-wing coalition of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has a majority. Salvini said that the first construction sites should be opened as early as summer 2024.