From pipe dream to NATO pitch: Meloni tries to rescue long-awaited bridge to Sicily 

ROME – Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is rebranding the long-promised €13 billion Strait of Messina bridge as a strategic NATO corridor to finally get the European Commission on board – and unlock both political and financial support.

The dream of a three-kilometre bridge connecting mainland Italy to Sicily is as old as the Roman Empire.

Formal plans first emerged in the 1970s, but over the decades, the Ponte sullo Stretto has become Italy’s most iconic unfinished mega-project: a political mirage revived by prime ministers chasing a legacy, only to be shelved under the weight of financial, environmental, and seismic concerns.

Now, Meloni’s government is pushing harder than ever to move from near myth to reality by adding the word defence to the blueprint to clear those obstacles. 

It wants to list the bridge in the EU’s Military Mobility Action Plan, which funds transport corridors enabling rapid military deployment across the bloc.

In an April letter to the Commission, Meloni’s government argued that the bridge would strengthen Europe’s defence posture by facilitating troop movements from Northern Europe to Sicily’s four military bases.

This designation would unlock additional EU cash and allow Italy to count the project toward its defence spending – a timely move as NATO allies are close to setting a new defence spending target. 

But whether this bold repositioning is enough to break the project’s long-running deadlock depends on whether Brussels buys the pitch – or sees through it.

Environmental impact

Meloni’s defence card sidesteps a well-known obstacle: the bridge’s environmental impact. The infrastructure would cut through three Natura 2000 protected sites, habitats critical for marine ecosystems, and migratory birds.

EU law imposes strict safeguards on projects that affect such areas, requiring prior approval from the European Commission.

Seeking to bypass those restrictions, Rome has sent a letter to the Commission declaring its intention to classify the bridge as a project of “overriding public interest” – a move that would allow it to seek an exemption from the rules.

A Commission spokesperson, however, made clear that this designation must still meet high thresholds: the project must be essential, lack viable alternatives, and include compensatory environmental measures.

Still, Italy’s state-owned Stretto di Messina company managing the project told Euractiv that it is confident that all environmental impacts have been thoroughly assessed as part of the Environmental Impact Assessment and subsequent reviews required by Italy’s environmental regulator. The company plans to submit the final documentation by May.

If Brussels signs off, Italy’s interministerial committee could remove the final bureaucratic hurdle and clear the way for construction to begin. 

Shaky foundations

But another obstacle can’t be engineered away: geology. The Strait of Messina sits in one of Europe‘s most seismically active zones – the site of one of Europe’s deadliest earthquakes that killed about 80,000 people in 1908.  

The state-owned comapny insists the project would withstand stronger earthquakes: “The bridge’s contact points with the ground have been carefully positioned to avoid active fault lines.” 

But independent experts remain wary. Geologists warn that the strait’s complex and still poorly understood geology makes it impossible to guarantee long-term safety.

Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) has called for more extensive studies and tighter safety margins, noting over 6,000 earthquakes have been recorded in the region since 1908.

Antonino Risitano, a structural engineer and former dean at the University of Catania, argues that the paremetres used so far are “too conservative for a structure that should meet the highest safety standards.”

Even minor damage – “down to a single bolt,” he warned – could have serious implications over the bridge’s lifetime.

Military logic?

Aside from environmental and seismic concerns, the bridge’s strategic military importance is also “highly questionable,” particularly in the context of deterrence and defence against Russia, said Alessandro Marrone, head of the defence, security, and space programme at the Istituto Affari Internazionali.

To protect NATO’s eastern flank, Marrone argued, it makes far more sense to first move troops and equipment from Italian ports on the Adriatic Sea to Albania, Montenegro, or Greece and then reach Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary through southeastern Europe.

That’s not to say Sicily isn’t militarily significant. But its relevance, Marrone noted, does not relate to land-based troop deployments. Its bases, he said, are crucial for air surveillance and for the aerial and electromagnetic assets that provide intelligence for NATO.

“Moving a large quantity of military assets overland from Sicily is not really reasonable,” Marrone argued, “which is why it makes sense that the rapid deployment corps are based in Lombardy: closer to the Alpine passes, both toward the north and the east.”

(mm, de)