IWith the construction of a bridge from Calabria to the island of Sicily, Italy is planning, according to Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, “the largest public building on the European continent this century”. The infrastructure minister said on Tuesday to foreign correspondents in Rome, to whom he described the details of the project. Salvini claimed the bridge was “the dream of millions of Italians for centuries”.
The government in Rome recently decided, after years of back and forth, to try again to build a bridge to Sicily. Until now, the only way to cross the Strait of Messina – right at the toe of the Italian boot – was 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 via stay cables, will be 399 meters high, as the plan envisages.
After completion, which Salvini says is scheduled for the early 2030s, around 6,000 cars per hour and 200 trains per day could cross the bridge. The planners assume that around 11 million people will use the bridge every year. Rome is hoping for a total of 100,000 jobs from the mega-project. The cost of the bridge, including access roads, is estimated at 10 billion euros.
Critical voices already in the past
The Ministry of Infrastructure announced that the bridge will withstand earthquakes up to a magnitude of 7.1 and wind speeds up to 270 kilometers per hour. Experts had recently warned of the dangers of natural forces in that seismically active region.
Several Italian governments have discussed the project in the past. In the early 2000s, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi campaigned for the construction. However, nothing came of the plans – at the time, critical voices considered them superfluous and risky because of the risk of earthquakes in the region.
According to the Ansa news agency, critics of the new plans accuse the government of “wasting resources”. Environmentalists reject the plans because of “extremely high ecological and financial costs”.
President Sergio Mattarella recently countersigned a government decree, and now Parliament has yet to convert it into law. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing coalition has a majority in the two chambers. Salvini said that the first construction sites should be opened as early as summer 2024.
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