MESSINA, Sicily  –  Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government is reviving the long dreamed of bridge project to connect Sicily to the mainland starting in 2024, according to government officials, despite the opposition accusing her of “delusions of grandeur.”

 A government decree law passed by the cabinet this week envisages that in addition to the current shareholders - Rfi, Anas and the regions of Sicily and Calabria - the società Stretto di Messina, which in the past has burned hundreds of millions of euro in salaries and projects that never saw the light of day, will be owned “in an amount not less than 51 per cent by the Ministry of Economy and Finance.”

 The Ministry “will exercise the rights of the shareholder in agreement with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, which is responsible for policy, control, technical and operational supervision of the company.”

 The idea of connecting Calabria and Sicily is older than Italy itself. The first attempts to unite the two shores date back to the time of the Punic Wars when even Charlemagne considered it. Later in 1840, King Ferdinand II of Bourbon had a feasibility study carried out for the construction of the bridge, but given the excessively high costs of the work, he gave up like many others after him.

 After the Unification of Italy, the bridge project came back into the limelight, but then the devastating 1908 Messina earthquake highlighted the high seismic risk of the area and shelved the bridge project for a long time.

 The aim is to start work by the summer of 2024 and inaugurate the project on the threshold of the new decade. Matteo Salvini, the Vice President of the Council of Ministers and the Minister for Infrastructure, defines as “historic” the day when the project for the Sicily bridge is revived, declaring that “Sicily will be united to Italy and to the rest of Europe” and that there will be “huge savings in time and money for those who will use the greenest and most innovative bridge in the world.”On its completion it would be the longest cable bridge in the world spanning 3.2 kilometres.

 The management of the project, therefore, is entrusted in its entirety to Salvini, who may propose (Article 6) “the appointment of an extraordinary commissioner” to whom “are attributed all the tasks relating to the procedures for awarding and carrying out the work.”

 The board of directors, Article 1 goes on to state, will be “composed of five members, two of whom are designated by the Ministries of Economy and Infrastructure, one member designated by the Region of Calabria, one member designated by the Region of Sicily and one member designated by Rfi and Anas.”

 Criticism, on the other hand, came from Green Party leader Angelo Bonelli, who addressed the prime minister during question time at the Chamber of Deputies: "Tomorrow the bridge over the Strait will go to the Cdm: is it ideology or pragmatism, in a south that has no railways or aqueducts? You are planning to squander public money in the name of Salvini ideology.”

 He added in a note: “I ask Giorgia Meloni to stop Salvini's delusions of grandeur … The project would be a real drain on public accounts to the detriment of Italians, while in the South we still have old trains and old diesel-powered railways.”

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