In a few days, the “Technical Commission” established by Italy’s second government under Giuseppe Conte to evaluate alternatives to the Messina Strait bridge to Sicily will present its conclusive report. According to insider sources, the Commission will issue a pilatesque report, to avoid endorsing either solution.
In view of this, the pro-Messina Bridge lobby has mobilized in an unprecedented way to put pressure on the Draghi government:
1. A bipartisan parliamentary group has been formed, composed by members of Lega, Forza Italia and Italia Viva (Renzi), to endorse the Bridge project.
2. Webuild, the largest construction firm in Italy and contractor for the Bridge project, has published a beautiful video on the Bridge as an engine of development and a technical jewel.
3. “Lettera 150,” an organization gathering hundreds of academicians, has drafted a Memo of Understanding under the direction of Schiller Institute friend Prof. Enzo Siviero, which will be signed by the presidents of the two regions that will be connected by the bridge, Sicily and Calabria, March 26.
A statement by the newly formed bipartisan group says: “A parliamentary intergroup, made up of several components of national politics: this will be ‘Bridge on the Strait—Italian Recovery and Development Starting from the South.’ An alliance aimed at Italian infrastructural development starting from the Mezzogiorno which, turning the paradigm upside down, is meant as an expression of social-economic potentiality.”
The six-minute Webuild video presents the Bridge as a large payroller: It will create 118,000 jobs and “will attract Mediterranean world trade toward Italy.” It will “turn Southern Italy into the logistic pole of the EU and will promote the know-how of Italian companies involved.” It will be the longest single-span bridge in the world with a total length of 3,660 meters and a 3,300 meter span. It will also be the highest, with towers 399 meters high, and the largest with a 65 meter driveway. It will require 1.5 million tons of concrete and 376,000 tons of steel. It will carry 60,000 trains and 6 million vehicles per year. Webuild is the largest Italian construction and engineering firm. They have built, among other things, the Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia and the second Panama Canal. Last year, they built the new Genoa highway bridge in less than 12 months. https://youtu.be/nFu_3zpPmSg
The long paper drafted by the Lettera 150 group says, among other things, that the Bridge is a strategic infrastructure because “through the connection between Sicily and Calabria, the ‘Berlin-Palermo’ European Corridor would be completed” and it would create “conditions to have the Sicilian port system (Augusta, Catania, Palermo and Messina) finally assume its natural role in the Mediterralean, as a fundamental logistic hub at the center of major world commercial routes". “Only an economic shock, through filling the infrastructural gap among the different regions of Italy, can allow a general growth that makes present and future government debt sustainable, including Recovery Fund loans.”
Construction of the Messina Bridge had already started in 2011 under the Berlusconi-Tremonti government. The Chinese government had shown interest in co-financing the bridge and helping in building a logistic platform in Sicily, both towards Northern Europe and Africa.
In December that year, the government was toppled and EU economic hitman Mario Monti blocked the work. Meanwhile, contractors went to court and the government was threatened with a huge fine, so that building the bridge would cost less than not building it..
Ironically, the same Mario Draghi who wrote the famous ECB letter that “killed” the Berlusconi-Tremonti government is now called on, to remedy the disaster he himself helped produce.
