The Bridge That Divides Italy

Zoom into a map of Italy and you will notice a gap where the tip of the toe of the boot-shaped peninsula seems to touch Sicily—the stretch of sea that makes Sicily an island. The Strait of Messina is just a couple of miles wide at its narrowest point, and between two coasts that never quite meet, the Mediterranean produces a distinct hallucination. Every so often, sailors see it: the fata morgana, a trick of light that makes the shoreline seem closer. The sorceress Morgan le Fay, in a Sicilian telling of the Arthurian legend, lured a barbarian king to his death in these waters, smiling as he drowned.

In the south of Italy, distances deceive. The train between Palermo and Bari travels roughly the same space as between Turin and Rome in triple the time. A Ministry of Infrastructure study concluded that Sicily might as well be a hundred times farther from the mainland than it actually is, for all the time required to cross the strait by car on a rusty ferry. Of all the islands without a bridge or tunnel connecting them to Europe, Sicily is the biggest and—in geographical terms only—the nearest.

Build a bridge, then, and have it over with! The ranks of men who pursued this idea include the emperor Charlemagne, the Bourbon king of what was once called “the Two Sicilies,” the later king who unified Italy, the infrastructure-loving fascist Benito Mussolini, and the long-serving Silvio Berlusconi. All failed.

[From the December 1863 issue: Something about bridges]

The bridge along the Messina Strait is “Italy’s Apollo project,” Francesco Costa, a Sicilian podcaster, told me. The state has spent more than 1 billion euros on studies, models, stipends, torts—everything but construction.

Matteo Salvini, Giorgia Meloni’s infrastructure minister, says he will build it. His predecessor Paola De Micheli told me that his odds might be the best ever: All layers of government support the project, the funds are in reach, and Salvini has inherited Berlusconi’s plan and vision. The plastic model looks great. The bridge will, in Salvini’s words, serve as “a model for the Italy that believes in itself.”

This summer, I spent three weeks in the country, asking politicians, academics, and friends if they thought that Italy would at last link Sicily to the mainland. “Non lo faranno mai,” most people said—“they will never do it.” Only a few paused and considered. “Who knows?” a fruit seller in Sardinia said as he weighed some figs. “Maybe this will be the time they do it.”

The absent bridge tells a story about the beguilement of great infrastructure—and about power as an optical illusion. So many times, the bridge has seemed a certainty, only to vanish like a mirage, taking down powerful men.

The first Italian to try to bridge the Messina Strait may have been Consul Lucius Metellus, circa 250 B.C.E. After winning the battle of Palermo in the Punic wars, his army was flush with bounty, including, according to Pliny the Elder, some 140 elephants. Metellus’s ships weren’t big enough to carry them, so the Romans tied rafts together, then led the animals across them to the mainland. The structure might have stood for a few days, allowing toga-clad people to cross back and forth, before it was destroyed by the sea.

A couple of millennia later, in the 1860s, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel set out to build a bridge less for practical reasons than as a celebration of unity. Many little states had just come together to form one country, and a bridge to Sicily would make the integration complete. The fascist dictator Benito Mussolini thought a bridge would send a message to those who questioned that unity: In response to a brewing secessionist movement in 1942, he declared, “It’s time to put an end to this story that Sicily is an island. After the war, I will order a bridge built.” The furthest both leaders got was to commission studies.

Strongmen have a notorious attraction to pharaonic public works, but democratic leaders are said to have the edge in summoning the innovation required to complete them. In Italy, both systems have pledged, but neither has delivered, a bridge to Sicily.

After World War II, to prevent the return of fascism, the architects of Italy’s democratic constitution empowered Parliament to remove the country’s leaders. And remove them it did: Since 1946, the average Italian prime minister has lasted less than half of the allotted five-year term. This instability has put the bridge’s proponents in the position of having to plead their case over and over again.

Such was the fate of Oscar Andò, the senator behind a 1971 law authorizing the creation of Messina Strait Inc., a public company that would be tasked with building the bridge. In 1986, the company selected a design from several outlined in a feasibility study. Antonio Andò, Oscar’s son and a former senator himself, told me that the company decided against a tunnel for both technical and aesthetic reasons. It also rejected a bridge design with pillars in the water, because the strait’s currents are particularly treacherous. The winner was thus a suspension bridge anchored to pillars on the two banks, rooted in dry land. No suspension bridge had ever had its supports so far apart: At two miles, the bridge over the Messina Strait would have the world’s longest span.

But before this design could become a reality in the early 1990s, a corruption scandal took down every Italian political party and the first republic itself. Silvio Berlusconi emerged from this wreckage: A construction and media magnate, he was corrupt, too, but at least he wasn’t a politician. Campaigning for a nonconsecutive second term in 2001, Berlusconi signed a symbolic contract with the Italian populace on live television, promising to quit if he didn’t achieve four of five pledges. One of these was to build great public works—most notably, the bridge to Sicily.

[Read: Berlusconi was Trump before Trump]

Parliament green-lighted the bridge in 2002, and Pietro Lunardi, Berlusconi’s infrastructure minister, told Corriere Della Sera that the “first stone” would be laid by late 2004 or early 2005. But construction never began. By 2006, opposition had gathered against the project. Prominent jurists warned of the danger of Mafia involvement. Some citizens of Messina didn’t want to see their nicest beach destroyed. Plenty of Italians simply disliked Berlusconi. Environmental activists were particularly vocal: Many vital migration routes for fish and birds pass through or above the strait, and the World Wildlife Fund warned that the bridge’s cables would confuse birds flying from Africa to Europe, that coasts would be degraded, and that trees would be cut down.  

“I don’t do bird-watching,” Antonio Andò told me when I asked about these objections. “But between the development of the south and the movement of some birds, one should be preferred over the other.”

Romano Prodi, Berlusconi’s opponent in the 2006 election, promised to paralyze all bridge plans if he won—which he did. But postwar Italian politics being what they are, Berlusconi was back in power two years later, and the bridge was back on the agenda.

Pietro Ciucci, the CEO of Messina Strait Inc. from 2002 to 2013, announced that the first stone would be laid by 2010. Why wasn’t it?

“Some declarations, especially at the political level, are not set in stone,” Ciucci told me.

Then, in 2010, Berlusconi pledged that a final plan would be before Parliament by the end of the year. What happened there?

“Absolutely nothing happened,” Ciucci told me.

His public-relations chief interjected to explain that these deadlines weren’t so literal; their purpose was psychological: “If you give soft timelines, people get too calm,” he said.

By the time Berlusconi resigned in 2011—he was indicted for allegedly having sex with minors and later  found not guilty on appeal—the bridge might have seemed the least of his unfulfilled promises. He hadn’t lowered income taxes or halved unemployment, either. He left behind a debt crisis that required austerity measures. The bridge now seemed a luxury that Italy couldn’t afford. In 2013, Berlusconi’s successor, the economist Mario Monti, liquidated Messina Strait Inc. and agreed to pay its contractors more than 300 million euros in damages.

A word perhaps unique to the Italian language is umarell, for a retired man who hangs around construction sites to watch and offer unsolicited advice. Perhaps the umarelli are the reason the idea of building this bridge never dies, their enthusiasm the force that sustains it no matter the political vehicle.

The unlikeliest of all the politicians to have resuscitated this project is surely Matteo Salvini, the current minister of infrastructure. The bridge entails a 12-billion-euro investment in southern Italy, a part of the country whose inhabitants Salvini called “parasites” as he campaigned for northern secession. As late as 2016, he mocked the prospect of a bridge to Sicily: “Engineers say it cannot stand,” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t want to spend several billion euros on some bridge in the middle of the sea.” Now Salvini is in charge of that very project.

[Read: The new populist playbook]

Lunardi, Berlusconi’s minister, told me that Salvini called him for guidance shortly after Meloni’s victory but before he officially assumed his post overseeing infrastructure. Salvini had been disappointed with this portfolio, as he’d hoped that Meloni, an ideological ally, would appoint him minister of the interior instead. Lunardi advised Salvini to build underground nuclear plants and a bridge to Sicily, saying that the infrastructure minister who accomplished these things would “go down in history.” Lunardi was delighted to offer counsel, because he thought that only a right-wing politician could get the job done. On the left, “there are no men, there’s no strength, no energy to do it,” Lunardi told me. “Maybe they’re good at directing films or things like that, but they can’t build this bridge.”

Salvini got to work. In May 2023, Parliament passed a law authorizing the bridge’s construction. Then, in June, Berlusconi died. Politicians paid tribute. The foreign minister said that the bridge should be completed soon so that the dead man could see it “from above.” Salvini said that Berlusconi’s last words to him were: “All the works I started, you will finish.” He even hired Pietro Ciucci to lead the construction.

The city of Messina extends along the horizontal line where Mount Etna’s volcanic hills end and the sea begins. How fortunate one would be, I thought, to live at this beautiful threshold. Then the ferry drew closer, and I noticed that the waterfront buildings were cracked, their windows boarded. Messina holds the European record for population decline from 2015 to 2020. Its desolate streets are pleasantly shaded by trees and low-rises; empty bars serve such wonders as crema di caffè and granita. Elsewhere in Sicily, the curse of architectural decay and economic paralysis comes with the consolation of tourism, but not in Messina. Here buses await cruise ships in the port to deliver visitors to the Instagrammable Taormina, 45 minutes away.

Visiting in early September, I found the city divided over whether it wanted this gift it never asked for. I had tried and failed to find opinion surveys: None had been done, I realized, because Messina’s wishes don’t matter much in Rome. Months after Salvini started talking about building the bridge, the mayor of Messina complained to the press that he hadn’t been contacted.

His name is Federico Basile. A slender former accountant, he’s proud of having improved water networks and increased the number of city buses from 20 to 152, 16 of them electric. His job, he told me, is not to weigh in on the central government’s initiative—although he does favor it—so much as to figure out what to do about a cemetery that stands in the construction zone, or whether he might create a “technology hub” in the renovated riviera.

The wall outside Basile’s office is lined with portraits of Messina’s past mayors. The only one not wearing a tailored suit is Renato Accorinti, an anti-bridge activist, elected in 2013, who wore only T-shirts with slogans. Among the highlights of his administration were the opening of a homeless shelter, a visit from the Dalai Lama, and the day he recognized the hard work of a street sweeper to the applause of all present. To Accorinti, the strait is a “sacred” place, a natural reserve he fought for UNESCO to recognize as a World Heritage Site, and the bridge is a distraction from Messina’s problems.

[From the July 1953 issue: Sicilian idyll]

“In the south, there are no streets, no schools, no money, no jobs, no railways,” Accorinti told me. “And you want to spend a colossal figure of money we don’t have on those three kilometers. What will you solve with those three kilometers? Just to say you did the biggest thing in the world?”  To build a bridge in a place with no decent roads or railways, he said, is to build a “cathedral in the desert.”

Citizens of Messina, like the two mayors, have split into camps. The nonpontisti (literally, “non-bridgers”) fear the not-unrealistic prospect of never-ending construction. Supporters, such as Davide Passaniti, who runs a pro-bridge social-media campaign, argue that the risk is worth taking, and the funds, if not spent on the bridge, will not be spent on Sicily at all.

One day in Messina, I ducked into a church during a rain shower and asked the cleric there, Monsignor Santi Musicò, what he thought about the bridge.

“Well, if it can bring some good, welcome,” he told me, “but if things remain the same, it’s better  they don’t do anything.”

He had lost hope for Messina, he told me, and now presided over fewer weddings than funerals. I asked whether he thought the bridge would ever be built.

“If he wants it,” he replied, pointing upward—I assumed toward God. But then he made clear that he was referring to another unpredictable higher power: Salvini.

By the summer, the bridge had begun to draw criticism. Salvini dislikes the media but cares about his image—enough that his head of public relations once texted me, “Please treat us well or else they will hang me.” Hence, his party posted a website to debunk “le fake news” about the bridge, using the Trumpian phrase in English.

The single-span design has remained essentially the same since the 1980s, even though every government that has promised to build it has improved the models. The result is a formidable feat of engineering that promises to withstand higher-magnitude earthquakes better than any bridge in the world. Bridges elsewhere have copied the “Messina Deck type,” with a railway in the middle and car lanes on the sides, an innovation meant to slow down fast winds.

But some of Italy’s best engineers fear that this bridge defies the possible. Humanity took more than a century to lengthen the span of suspension bridges by 0.9 miles, going from the 0.3 mile Brooklyn Bridge in 1869 to the 1.2 mile Çanakkale Bridge in 2016. Records were broken little by little. The span of the Messina Strait bridge would extend two miles. That’s a big jump. Moreover, ships have gotten taller over the past four decades. The head of Federlogistica, an Italian guild of transport firms, warned that those higher than 65 meters would not be able pass or reach the port of Gioia Tauro, one of the most important in Europe. Traffic in the port could shrink by as much as 17 percent. The bridge could become a wall.

If the object really is simply to link Sicily to mainland Italy, the world’s longest suspension bridge, with all these problems, might no longer even be needed. Enrico Giovannini, a former infrastructure minister, oversaw an independent study concluding that a bridge with pillars in the water—the idea discarded in ’86 because of strong currents—might be worth revisiting given new technologies. Oliviero Baccelli, a transport-economics professor at Bocconi University, told me that he’d endorse a tunnel, but he understood that it “would not be particularly seductive or make the country proud, because actually anyone can do it.” An engineer who presented the tunnel idea to the government a few years ago put it this way: “Mussolini wanted the bridge. Berlusconi wanted the bridge. The bridge is a symbol. A tunnel, nobody sees.”

[Read: Fascism returns to Italy]

In press tours across Italy, Salvini has brushed off reporters’ objections with one-line quips. Asked whether the cables might endanger birds, he said: “Birds are not stupid.” To a critic who pointed to the risks of undertaking such an untried feat of engineering, he said: “Just like the dome of Brunelleschi is unique in the world.” The quick replies could be Salvini’s way of playing politics—or a sign that he doesn’t have a plan.

I spoke with him on a brief video call in September. When I asked him about the ships, he said that those taller than 65 meters could be “counted on the fingers of one hand” and that “99 percent” would be able to go through. Berlusconi’s model, he told me, was the only way to link Sicily and Calabria. “This is the most studied project that has never been realized,” he said.

A little while before our meeting, a memo from Prime Minister Meloni had leaked to the press in which she cautioned that money was running scarce: “Matteo should contain himself.” But Salvini remained sure that Meloni’s support would come through, and he was right. Within a couple of weeks, he announced that the bridge was in the budget, and that construction would start in the spring of 2024. The first train will supposedly cross the Messina strait in 2032. The umarelli who cannot make it to the construction site will be able to watch the progress live online.

Torre Faro, a fishing town north of Messina where one pillar of the bridge will rise, has gotten used to the perennial possibility of its own demolishment. In the Berlusconi years, the manager of the Faro Motel postponed maintenance work as he waited for an expropriation letter that never came. The establishment is now in ruins. But even here, the bridge has supporters. “Before the Eiffel Tower was built, some people opposed it,” the owner of a local mussel farm next to would-be construction sites told me. “I am not like them.”

The bridge is a symbol of greatness. Who wouldn’t want it? But by becoming a symbol of greatness, this bridge has lost its claim to be what bridges normally are: symbols of unity. Pundits and politicians, supporters as well as critics, have encapsulated this problem with a clever aphorism: This is the bridge that divides.

The bridge is likely Italy’s oldest, unfulfilled ambition. When the kingdom was born, when Mussolini promised an empire, when postwar prosperity peaked, when Berlusconi made his campaign pledges, when the Italian right prevailed, the idea of this grand structure beckoned. The bridge to Sicily is not the spirit of a specific time. It’s a mirage that appears whenever the state feels powerful.

Then an economic crisis strikes, the government collapses, or something happens to make Italians reconsider whether some vague idea of greatness suffices to justify the enormous cost. The mirage fades.

Salvini often says he will name the bridge after Berlusconi, the man he credits with getting closest to building it. But he is wrong about that. The haphazard runway the ancient Romans rigged for the elephants to cross remains the best attempt so far. That floating, fleeting bridge through the strait of Messina, the first and maybe the only, holds a lesson. When the bridge was conceived to fulfill a practical purpose, it got built.