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Italian government aims to add decades-old project to increased Nato spending pledge

Giorgia Meloni’s government on Wednesday was set to approve the construction of a €13bn bridge linking Sicily to the Italian mainland, resurrecting a controversial project that Rome now says is key for national security. 

Originally designed to spur economic development in one of Italy’s poorest regions, the 3.3km-long suspension bridge over the Messina Strait has had several false starts in recent decades. But the Italian government has now recast the project as a way for the country to help meet its Nato commitment to boost military spending.

Like all Nato allies, Italy has pledged to increase annual defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP within a decade, of which 1.5 per cent of GDP is earmarked for strategic infrastructure.

Meloni’s government aims to include the cost of the bridge as part of this effort, and has begun touting the project’s strategic value in the Mediterranean, where it believes Moscow is striving to increase its influence.  

“The Messina Strait bridge constitutes a fundamental infrastructure with respect to military mobility, taking into account the presence of important Nato bases in southern Italy,” Italian authorities wrote in an April report declaring the project of “overriding public interest”.

The road and railway bridge would assume a “key role in the context of defence and security — facilitating the movement of Italian and Nato allies armed forces”, the report said, citing “the growing role of the Mediterranean as a geopolitically sensitive area”.

However, Alessandro Marrone, who leads the defence programme at Rome’s Institute for International Affairs, said Rome’s claims were “stretching the concept” of a military asset, since Nato’s main priority is to ensure that troops stationed in western Europe can be rapidly deployed east if Russia attacks Nato’s eastern flank.

Marrone said Italy needed to instead focus on upgrading ports, airports and roads in regions where its troops are stationed: “If you have to go east, it’s either via the Adriatic, via plane, or via the Alps.”

Attempts to bridge the Messina Strait — whose turbulent waters were immortalised in Homer’s Odyssey — go back to ancient times. 

In 252BC, according to Roman chronicler Pliny the Elder, a consul managed to move 100 captured war elephants from Sicily to the Italian peninsula on rafts made of “rows of barrels tied together”.

The dream of linking up Sicily to the mainland took root in the 19th century with the unification of Italy. By 1970, it was deemed a national priority — critical to the economic development of one of Italy’s poorest regions.

Yet contemporary efforts to build the bridge have repeatedly faltered, hampered by Italy’s fragile public finances and persistent doubts about the project’s economic viability and structural integrity.

Messina residents also fought for years — and are mobilising again — to try to stop the project, which will require huge changes to the city, including the relocation of the train station.

In 2005, then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi issued the first €3.9bn contract for the bridge, but it was shelved months later after his government fell. On his return to power two years later, he tried to revive the project, only for it to be scrapped again in 2011 as Italy reeled from a sovereign debt crisis.

The cost of construction has ballooned from an expected €4.4bn when bidding first took place two decades ago to €13bn now. Still, Meloni’s government is committed to reviving the plan, and is talking up its strategic importance.

“We see Russia increasingly projecting itself into the Mediterranean,” Meloni told reporters on the sidelines of the Nato summit in June, as Italian strategists raised growing concerns about Moscow’s growing ties to Libya.

“There are many hybrid threats, many hostile actors operating on the southern flank of the [Nato] alliance,” she added.

But the bridge itself could turn into a vulnerability and add to Rome’s military costs if it had to defend it. 

“The infrastructure is destined to attract the attention of any potential aggressor, even a minor one,” wrote General Gualtiero Corsini all the way back in 1987. He said that of all the ways of connecting the island to the mainland “the suspension bridge has the highest vulnerability” and would require anti-aircraft and anti-missile protection.

Decades on, Marrone agrees that the bridge, if it were to be classified as military or strategic infrastructure, would need air and sea defences. But he is not convinced it would be considered a high-priority target for sabotage.

“It’s an easy target from a symbolic or political point of view — it will hit the headlines,” Marrone said. “But Russian military planners also know that Italian troops and reinforcements for the Baltic states or Poland will not transit that bridge.”