The final approval of the long-conceived Messina Bridge Project by the Italian government on Aug. 6, has produced a wave of happiness and enthusiasm among Italian patriots, and conniption fits among Transatlantic elites. The Messina Bridge is a major component of the North-South “Corridor 5” of the Trans-European network, aimed at getting Europe closer to the African continent for the purpose of mutual development.
The Bridge over the Strait of Messina will connect the Sicilian capital, Palermo, and Sicilian ports to the Italian North-South high-speed railway system (over 250 kmh for passengers, 120 kmh for freight). Once Palermo is reached from Berlin in 8 hours, Tunisia is only another 40-minute flight. Its importance was stressed in the Special Report “There Is Life After the Euro! Program for an Economic Miracle in Southern Europe, the Mediterranean Region, and Africa” published by EIR in 2012. That publication also described other ideas for connecting Tunisia to Sicily, via a bridge or a tunnel.
The Messina Bridge will be a 3.3-km-long, single-span suspension bridge, the longest in the world (the longest suspension bridge is currently Türkiye’s Çanakkale Bridge over the Dardanelles, at 2.02 km.) Its towers will be 400 meters high, as tall as the Empire State Building. It will be able to withstand winds up to 200 kmh strong and 7.1 Richter earthquakes. To build this, it has had to face and resolve several engineering challenges. Giuseppe Gelardi, President of the Lega Salvini Calabria Group, compared it with Brunelleschi’s cupola in Florence. “Many said it couldn’t be done,” he told StrettoWeb news agency, “just as in the 15th century they claimed it was impossible to build the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. Yet Filippo Brunelleschi built it, changing the history of architecture forever. In the same way, today, the bridge over the Strait, long derided and opposed, is finally entering the implementation phase.”
On the engineering challenges of the world’s longest suspension bridge, see the video posted on Aug. 7 by Webuild, the Italian company member of the Interlink consortium that will build the bridge. Given its function in the Europe-Africa integration perspective, the Bridge has been hated and opposed by the Transatlantic elites and their Green shock troops, which have succeeded in sabotaging and delaying its construction for decades. Now they do not bother to hide their frustration, even if it goes beyond the realm of the ridiculous.
“Italy’s bridge to Sicily is a gift to Putin,” wrote Brookings Institution senior fellow Robin Brooks on X, “because it does nothing to really make Europe safer from Russian aggression, while diverting scarce fiscal space—which Italy has little of—away from what would truly protect Europe.” Robin Brooks is a senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution; prior to Brookings, he was managing director and chief economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF), prior to that he was the chief FX strategist at Goldman Sachs based in New York.
