Italy forges on with world’s largest bridge

Italy hopes to begin constructing the world’s largest suspension bridge, connecting Sicily to the Italian mainland, this summer amid widespread scepticism that it will ever be built.

- PIERA ROCCO DI TORREPADULA

The €13.5-billion ($15.3-billion) project would carry trains and six lanes of traffic, allowing cars to cross the Strait of Messina in 15 minutes.

Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right government hopes to boost the economy of the impoverished region, although critics say there are better ways to do this, and many believe that after decades of false starts, the bridge will never actually happen.

The choppy waters between the eastern tip of Sicily and the western edge of the region of Calabria are legendary as the place where monsters Scylla and Charybdis terrified sailors in Homer's epic poem The Odyssey.

These days the challenges are more prosaic, from winds of more than 100 kilometres an hour (62 mph) to the real risk of earthquakes in a region that lies across two tectonic plates.

The government says the bridge will be at the cutting edge of engineering, with the section suspended between its two pillars stretching 3.3 kilometres, the longest in the world.

But critics point to a long history of public works announced, financed and never completed in Italy, whether due to corruption or political instability, resulting in enormous losses for taxpayers.