Will that controversial bridge to Sicily be built after all? Local residents and nature conservationists are concerned

caterina Voltano (65) and Andrea De Gregorio (67) wake up every morning with the Strait of Messina and go to bed with it every night. Their house is located on a hill in Villa San Giovanni, a town on the toe nail of the Italian boot, where the south wind always howls past the windows.

The couple’s enormous living room window offers sweeping views of the strait that separates Sicily from Calabria on the Italian mainland. Voltano leads the way through the garden, where she has planted every plant in the ground herself. “This is our world, which we have built in 25 years,” says the Italian teacher sadly. “And now we risk losing it for a completely useless plan.”

Voltano and De Gregorio are among hundreds of homeowners – on both sides of the Strait of Messina – to be bought out for bridge construction. Their life project is on the list for demolition, because one of the two pillars of Italy’s largest infrastructure project is to be built here.

The bridge over the Strait of Messina was one of the hobbyhorses of then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, but the plan was stopped in 2012 by his successor, technocrat Mario Monti. The idea had been haunting Italian politics for decades and seemed to have been definitively buried by Monti, but Matteo Salvini immediately made it one of his spearheads again shortly after taking office as Minister of Infrastructure in the autumn of 2022.

So, to the sadness of Voltano and De Gregorio, the mega plan is back with a vengeance. The couple, like many residents of the Street, are convinced that the bridge is a waste of money and effort, and will probably never be completed.

In any case, this will not be due to a lack of ambitious plans. With four lanes and two train tracks, the bridge should be the longest in the world (3,300 meters) on two pillars, so that ship traffic can continue to pass through the Strait. Far too risky, critics say, in a region known for its major earthquakes.

Although the first concrete plans date back to the 1970s, no stone has ever been laid for the bridge until now. The planning and preparation of the mega-project already cost the Italian treasury tens of millions of euros. That was the main reason why Monti pulled the plug on the project in 2012, when he had to make major cuts after the financial crisis.

At least 14 billion

It is really not selfishness, the couple Voltano and De Gregorio say, but the teacher and the retired bank employee sincerely do not see which of their problems the bridge of at least 14 billion euros will solve.

Because no one doubts that there are problems around the Strait, both in Calabria and Sicily. Young people leaving, high unemployment and inadequate public facilities: the well-known problems that exist everywhere in southern Italy. But is Salvini, who for years spouted crude insults about southern Italians as leader of Lega Nord (now Lega), now suddenly their savior? De Gregorio is skeptical, and he is not alone.

On the pedestrian ferry between Villa San Giovanni and Messina a ticket costs 2.50 euros, the crossing takes twenty minutes. The crew also does not see the great need for the bridge. “We have different priorities in Sicily,” says ticket inspector Fabio Cambria during the sailing. His colleagues nod in agreement. “They should first improve the trains and the roads,” says colleague Pietro Buonanno.

It is often heard criticism: the expensive bridge becomes a connection from nothing to nothing. But, Buonanno says hopefully, the promise is that in the wake of the bridge, the rest of the Sicilian and Calabrese infrastructure will also be upgraded.

The crew members have a simpler and cheaper suggestion, not entirely without self-interest, to improve the connection: more and faster boats, especially in the summer, when it can get busy around the Strait of Messina.

During the rest of the year, no one actually has to wait to cross, but crossing by car is mainly too expensive for daily commuting. A single trip costs 38 euros, a day return 41 euros. This will not change with the bridge, as has already been announced: the toll will be approximately the same as a boat ticket.

Block of concrete in the pasture

But will the bridge actually be built this time? Minister Salvini seems determined and has announced several times that construction will start this summer. The men on the ferry are sceptical. They fear that construction will start, with all the damage that entails, but that it will never be completed. This fear also exists among homeowners who are to be bought out, such as the Calabrese couple Voltano and De Gregorio.

That fear is not completely incomprehensible. Because although no stone of the bridge was ever laid, there is an unused section of tunnel in Calabria that is part of the surrounding infrastructure. The construction cost 26 million euros.

The otherwise unconnected block of concrete has been sitting idle in a meadow since 2011. Local residents mockingly call it the ‘tomb of the bridge’. They had not taken into account that the bridge, which had haunted them for a long time but seemed to be a thing of the past ten years ago, would once again rise from the dead.

That news also came as an unpleasant surprise for bird conservationist Anna Giordano (59). Every spring, she stares at the Strait for hours through her binoculars, from the top of the Peloritani Mountains that rise next to Messina.

Giordano has been coming here for more than four decades, not because of the dazzling view of the strait between Calabria and Sicily, but because she observes migratory birds. Today her face is troubled as she greets her fellow bird watchers, who have come from all over Europe to Messina for the migratory season with camping chairs, lunch boxes and binoculars.

The bridge will certainly cause casualties among the millions of birds that pass through here every spring and autumn, Giordano explains. They fly through the strait on their way from Africa to Northern Europe and back. Some birds will fly into the bridge, others will become disoriented by the light and sound, get lost and drown in the sea. “This is a protected nature reserve,” the environmental activist grumbles. “They shouldn’t even think about building a bridge.”

Swordfishing

This is also what the sisters Giusy and Antonella Mancuso think, about a thousand meters lower, on the beach north of Messina. The thirty-somethings took over the fishing license from their grandfather, who fished in the Strait of Messina almost every day of his life from the age of 4. ‘He knew exactly how deep it was everywhere. He had a radar of the seabed in his head,’ says Giusy proudly.

Now the Mancusos have their own felucaa boat for catching swordfish in the traditional way, as only happens in the Strait of Messina: with a jetty at the front of the boat on which the fisherman sits and a tower at the position of the mast, where another person spots the swordfish ‘.

Today their boat is still on dry land, because the season doesn’t start until summer due to the weather. Eldest sister Antonella leads the (otherwise entirely male) crew, who are busy at the shipyard preparing the boat for ship.

Yes, they fear for their livelihood with the construction of the bridge, which does not only consist of fishing, but especially of sightseeing tourists, who can take part in sword fishing themselves. “The bridge will get a huge shadow, we don’t know how the swordfish will react to that,” Giusy explains. ‘And we are losing space, because we are certainly not allowed to fish under the bridge.’

Enthusiasm in Rome

Is there no enthusiasm for the bridge anywhere in Italy? Yes, but you have to be further north for that. Nearly 700 kilometers away, in a vast office above the platforms of Rome Termini train station, the bridge is not a nightmare, but a dream.

Eighty people work here for the company Stretto di Messina, which was founded in 1981. In 2013, the Monti government ordered the company to be closed down, but Salvini reversed that decision last year. So the company was resuscitated, with Pietro Ciucci at the helm again, the director who left ten years earlier with a golden handshake of 1.8 million euros. The person primarily responsible for the bridge is also a suspect in a lawsuit over a viaduct that collapsed near Palermo in 2014. The court is investigating his responsibility as a director of Anas, the organization that maintains highways.

In his spacious office, technical director Valerio Mele decisively waves away the heavy criticism of the project and the company. ‘Yes, such a long bridge with two pillars has never been built before, but the fact that they were the first of their kind was true for all major bridge constructions throughout history.’

A recent critical report from the ministry’s technical expert committee does not worry him either. ‘Those are details. It is normal to have questions about a project of this size. If it weren’t the case, I would be concerned.

According to Mele, the bridge will boost the train network in Sicily, which will finally have a high-speed line. There are now trains from the mainland to Sicily, but they have to be put on a special boat across the Strait, a time-consuming process. That advantage will be greater for the hinterland of Sicily than for the residents of Messina itself, who immediately board the boat.

Mele hopes to receive the final green light from the ministry in September. It is possible that some preparatory excavation work can already be done, which would allow Salvini to just fulfill his promise of the first open construction site in the summer on paper. It is inconceivable that the buyout process has already been completed, so the start of real construction will follow later.

Connectedness

In the meantime, the residents of the Street do not intend to passively wait for that moment. Sicilians and Calabrians are united in protest committees. That is not surprising, says fisherman Giusy Mancuso resolutely. ‘There are also Calabrese boats here at our shipyard. We work well together.’

Only outsiders see the strait as an isolating obstacle between two pieces of land, her sister says. “But there is a continuous exchange between the two sides,” she explains. Or as Caterina Voltano puts it on the Calabrian side: ‘We are better connected here with Sicily than with the rest of our own region.’