On Monday, Matteo Salvini – Italy’s new infrastructure minister and leader of the right-wing populist party “La Lega”– announced his intentions to build a sprawling, multi-billion-euro bridge between Sicily and mainland Italy. The area he intends to build in has one the highest seismic risks in Europe.
The proposed bridge would link the Sicilian city of Messina to Reggio Calabria, a project that has been rejected by previous governments due the high costs, engineering difficulties and environmental impacts. Salvini stated that the bridge’s construction would create close to 100,000 permanent jobs for Italians.
“Starting work on the bridge over the Strait within five years is one of my goals,” said Salvini to Porta a Porta, an Italian late night television talk show. “Now it costs more not to do it than to do it.”
In fact, the efforts to connect the island to the mainland stretches back to the times of the Ancient Romans, who, according to historical evidence, were supposedly the only ones who managed to do so, as stated by The Guardian. According to Ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, in the third century BC, the Romans built a bridge of boats and barrels to transport from Sicliy to Rome over 100 elephants that were captured from the Carthaginians during the First Punic War.
A 2021 study published in ScienceDirect, an online bibliographic database, evidenced a fault in the Messina Strait’s seabed. The area was the location of a devastating earthquake in 1908. According to the study, the earthquake was “the largest seismic event ever recorded in southern Europe in the instrumental epoch.” The bridge’s proposed area of construction therefore sits on one of the highest seismic risks of the continent. This fact does not seem to faze Salvini, who, in an interview with Italian television channel RaiNews, declared that the bridge would be a triumph for the country.
"We've been talking about it for 50 years and if we can get the construction site started it would be an exceptional promotion of Italian engineering.”
Asia London Palomba
Asia London Palomba is a trilingual freelance journalist from Rome, Italy, currently pursuing her master's in journalism at New York University (NYU). In the past, her work on culture, travel, and history has been published in The Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, and The Christian Science Monitor. In her free time, Asia enjoys traveling home to Italy to spend time with family and friends, drinking Hugo Spritzes, and making her nonna's homemade cavatelli.