We’ve all heard of the great American road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking a great Italian road trip, you’ve surely come across this inevitable hitch in the plan: you can’t drive to Sicily. You can, of course, put your car on a ferry; you can even take a train that gets put on a ferry, the last of its kind in Europe. But a stretch of road spanning the volatile Strait of Messina, which separates Sicily from the mainland, has been a dream deferred since antiquity, when Pliny the Elder wrote of Roman notions of building a floating bridge — which, with its potential to disrupt the waterway’s considerable north-south trade, was eventually scrapped.
It seems that Italians have been joking about the impossibility of a bridge to Sicily ever since. These two videos from Get to the Point and The B1M explain the history of this continually frustrated infrastructural project, and the political maneuvers that have recently begun to make it seem very nearly semi-possible.
Though the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis of which Homer sung may not be a threat, the challenges are still many and varied, from the depth of the strait and the regional seismic activity that would necessitate building the largest single-span bridge in the world to the interference of local mafia groups who make their living by driving up the costs of construction works while also making sure that they’re never completed.
Two years ago, the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni approved a decree to proceed with construction, but whether it will realize its projected completion by 2032 is anybody’s guess. The very idea of such a structure has such cultural resonance that its existence — as well as its collapse — was envisioned to great effect in the recent Italian crime drama The Bad Guy. Though critically acclaimed, that series was also condemned in some political quarters for perpetuating negative stereotypes of the country: stereotypes that could potentially be refuted by getting some ambitious new infrastructure finished. If Italy can get the Strait of Messina Bridge built, after all, what couldn’t it do?
Related content:
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Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks
Why Europe Has So Few Skyscrapers
Rome’s Colosseum Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
