The Strait of Messina: a bridge too far?

It has been a dream some 50 years in the making – but finally that dream is becoming reality, said Francesco Sisci in Formiche (Rome). Last week, Giorgia Meloni's government defied the naysayers to announce it had approved a 3,300m bridge from the mainland to Sicily, with work to start in a matter of weeks.

The world's longest suspension bridge, the €13.5 billion structure would transport six lanes of traffic and a double track of trains over the Strait of Messina – a stretch of water that has challenged mankind since "Odysseus and his companions were side by side at the oars" attempting to navigate the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis. Now those two "rocks" will be "united" and the Strait – and Sicily – forever changed.

Attempts to bridge the Messina Strait go back to 251BC, said Amy Kazmin in the FT, when, according to Pliny the Elder, a consul moved 100 war elephants from Sicily to the Italian peninsula on rafts made of "rows of barrels tied together". From 1970, linking the mainland to Sicily was deemed a national priority, critical to the development of the economically poor south. Silvio Berlusconi issued the first €3.9 billion contract for the bridge in 2005, but the project was then beset by numerous political and economic crises and construction costs have since "ballooned".

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Meloni's government, however, has found a cheeky way to finance the contentious project: she claims it is key for "national security", as it will counter Russian influence in the Mediterranean and thus is part of Italy's pledge to increase defence spending by 5%.

Only if the blockers don't have their way, said Christian Rocca in Linkiesta (Milan). They're lining up with reasons why this bridge shouldn't be built, from claims that the Mafia will profit, to environmental objections (perhaps they should study the current impact of ferry crossings on the Strait). It's the usual old defeatism. Yet if we want to avoid Italy's long-term decline, "we must act like an adult country, not abandon infrastructure" as if we were a developing world country "incapable of building it".

Don't be fooled by the hype, said Domenico Gattuso in Il Manifesto (Rome). There are countless reasons why work on the Messina Bridge "should not begin". There is no other "cable-stayed bridge this long on the planet": the current longest is 2km, in Turkey. Attempting to tension a bridge's cables between two end piers some 3.3km apart without the structure then failing to support its own weight is, to put it mildly, a "challenge". Positioned at "the worst point of the Strait", it would be exposed to strong winds that "could cause the deck to oscillate dangerously"; and on the Calabrian side, its foundations would be built on a perilous seismic fault.

But Meloni's government is ploughing ahead regardless – pursuing, in the name of populism, a "shoddy, risky and extremely expensive project that would cause far more harm than good".