Fifty-five years of debate, six decades if one goes back to Italy’s first framework law on the subject, and still not a single pillar planted in the waters of the Strait. The bridge intended to connect Sicily to Calabria remains, in the summer of 2026, a jumble of studies, terminated contracts and legal disputes. In the meantime, the bill has climbed to several hundreds of millions of euros, without a single cubic meter of concrete ever touching the seabed.
Key takeaways
- Since 1981, the Messina Bridge project has swallowed hundreds of millions without a single pillar being installed
- Extreme technical challenges: the strait imposes a record span of 3,330 meters, violent winds and major seismic activity
- Five decades of political relaunches, abrupt cancellations and legal disputes that resemble an absurd scenario
A Sea Serpent Born in the Heat of the Cold War
Everything begins with a 1971 Italian law that opened the way to a fixed link between the peninsula and Sicily. Ten years later, in June 1981, the State created the company Stretto di Messina S.p.A., tasked with designing, constructing and then operating the project. The company Stretto di Messina S.p.A. was established in 1981 under an Italian government law to design, construct and manage the bridge of the Strait of Messina. What followed were decades of twists: feasibility studies in the 1980s and 1990s, a political revival under Silvio Berlusconi in the early 2000s, and the victory of the Eurolink consortium (led by Salini Impregilo, which has since become WeBuild) in a bid.
The scenario collapsed in 2012. The Monti government, faced with severe instability in international financial markets, decided to cancel the project and the contract, liquidating Stretto di Messina and terminating the agreements with Eurolink and Parsons. The company formally entered liquidation in 2013. It would take until the arrival of a right-wing coalition led by Giorgia Meloni to see the file resurface: Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini announced the relaunch of the Stretto di Messina company, created four decades earlier and halted in 2013. Since then, the timetable has continuously slipped. The CIPESS, the interministerial committee that approves major public investments, adopted in August 2025 a resolution approving the final project, but the Italian Court of Auditors did not stamp this resolution on October 29, 2025, preventing its entry into force. The result: the start of works, originally hoped for November 2025, has again been postponed.
Hundreds of Millions Spent, No Pillar Built
That is where the dossier becomes frankly vertigo-inducing. According to calculations by the Italian Court of Auditors, published during the liquidation procedure, Stretto di Messina spent a little over €958 million from its creation in 1981 up to the 2013 liquidation decision, with an additional €6 million spent between 2013 and 2016 as the structure continued to exist and operate. A large portion of this sum had nothing to do with construction: it comprises indemnities paid after the project’s abrupt cancellation. The 2013 balance sheet shows €342 million payable to Stretto di Messina in penalties and compensations, plus more than €130 million spent on studies and management costs during the 1980s and 1990s.
The company itself disputes the most alarmist figures advanced by some unions, which spoke of more than €1 billion spent “for nothing.” Its official version remains nonetheless telling: from June 1981, the year of its creation, to 2013, investments devoted to research, development, feasibility studies, designs and four international bids totaled roughly €300 million. Three hundred million euros for study dossiers and contests that never led to a real construction site. And the ledger does not end there: the evicted Eurolink consortium still seeks compensation. Eurolink, led by Salini Impregilo (now WeBuild), has a pending claim for €657 million for unlawful contract termination. A half-century of hesitations that mechanically ends up costing almost as much as a real project would have.
Why Is This Bridge So Difficult to Build?
It is not merely a matter of bureaucracy or political calculations. The Strait of Messina imposes technical constraints that few engineers worldwide have faced simultaneously. First, the span: the bridge must cross 3,330 meters from one tower to the other without any intermediate offshore support, i.e., 1,300 meters longer than the current world record holder, the Çanakkale Bridge over the Dardanelles. A single, ultra-long span fundamentally alters the physics of the structure: the longer a span, the more sensitive it is to swaying and resonance effects.
Then the wind. The strait acts as a natural funnel between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Ionian Sea. The site is subjected to fierce winds regularly exceeding 100 km/h, with record gusts of 144 km/h recorded in the past two decades. WeBuild’s engineers say they tested a triple-caisson configuration in wind tunnels to withstand stronger gusts, but the safety margin remains a topic of ongoing discussion among the consulted seismologists and hydrologists.
The real conundrum, however, remains seismic activity. The Strait of Messina sits in a highly active tectonic zone, exposed to earthquakes of magnitudes comparable to the 1908 event, which reached 7.1 on the Richter scale and killed around 80,000 people. That earthquake remains one of the deadliest in recent European history. The Strait owes its existence to two major sets of normal faults facing each other, forming a graben that has been flooded by the sea, so that Sicily and mainland Italy rest on two blocks that move relative to one another and frequently generate powerful earthquakes. Building a multi-kilometer suspended structure directly above an active fault is not a technical detail solved by simply adding dampers.
Where Do We Stand Now, Fifty-Five Years On?
The current project, priced at €13.5 billion, received the Meloni government’s approval in August 2025, only to be blocked by the Court of Auditors’ veto two months later. Pietro Ciucci, head of Stretto di Messina, sought to reassure in spring 2026: he believes the approval process could be completed by the end of summer 2026, which would allow the construction phase to begin in the last quarter of the year, with a commissioning date announced for 2034. That is precisely the sort of promise this file has heard many times since 1981. What has changed this time is the amount already spent before laying a first pile: enough to fund several tram lines or renovate hundreds of kilometers of Calabria’s roads, which are sometimes in poor condition, an argument that opponents of the project do not hesitate to invoke at each relaunch.
Sources: lemoniteur.fr | wedemain.fr
