The Strait of Messina Bridge () is a proposed suspension bridge across the Strait of Messina, connecting Torre Faro on the Italian island of Sicily with Villa San Giovanni in Calabria on the Italian mainland. If built, it would be the longest suspension bridge in the world and part of the Berlin–Palermo railway axis of the Trans-European Transport Networks.
While a bridge across the Strait of Messina had been proposed since ancient times, the first detailed plan was made in the 1990s, for a suspension bridge. The project was cancelled in 2006 under Prime Minister Romano Prodi, revived in 2009 under Silvio Berlusconi, and cancelled again in 2013 under Mario Monti. It was resurrected again in 2023 under Giorgia Meloni and received final government approval in August 2025. However, in October 2025, Italy's Court of Audit rejected the proposal.
The proposal has drawn concerns connected with earthquakes, strong currents in the strait, disruption of bird migration routes, and a possibility of infiltration into the bridge's construction by the mafia groups Cosa Nostra and 'Ndrangheta.
Geography
The Strait of Messina is a funnel-shaped arm of sea that connects the Ionian Sea in the south to the Tyrrhenian Sea to the north. The width of the strait varies from a maximum of approximately , between Capo d'Alì in Sicily and Punta Pellaro in Calabria, to a minimum of approximately between Capo Peloro in Sicily and Torre Cavallo in Calabria. A similar distance separates Pezzo and Ganzirri. At that point, the strait is only deep, while in other places, it can reach deep. In addition to strong tidal currents, the region's significant seismic activity will pose a challenge to the bridge's construction.
History The idea of a bridge crossing the strait is an old one. The Romans considered building a bridge joining Calabria and Sicily, which was to be constructed from boats and barrels. Pliny the Elder, a philosopher and Roman military leader born in AD 23, wrote of a plan to bridge the strait with a series of connecting boats. The idea was abandoned, as it was clear that more traffic plied the strait in a north-south rather than east-west direction, so any structure on water could not be permanent.
Charlemagne considered joining the two sides with a series of bridges. This idea was revived by the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard in the 11th century and by Roger II of Sicily in the 12th. In 1876, the politician Giuseppe Zanardelli was convinced that the strait could be linked by either a bridge or a tunnel. In 1866, the public works minister, Stefano Jacini, turned to Alfredo Cottrau, an internationally renowned engineer, to design a planned bridge between Calabria and Sicily.
In 1870, Navone proposed building a tunnel, based on Napoleon's failed 1802 proposal of a Channel Tunnel running below the English Channel. It was to start at Contesse and pass below Messina and Ganzirri at a depth of , crossing the strait to Punta Pezzo and resurfacing at Torre Cavallo.
In 1909, a geological study of the strait was published (historical Arch. Sicilian year XXXIV f.1,2). In 1921, a study of an undersea tunnel was released to the Geographic Conference of Florence. A group of railway civil engineers studied the possibility of a suspension bridge, but nothing came of it.
In 1953, the idea was revived by the American civil engineer David B. Steinman, with a plan to build a bridge that crossed the strait using two towers sunk into the seafloor. The proposed span would have represented a world record, eclipsing the then-longest centre span of the Golden Gate Bridge and longer than the Mackinac Bridge, then in planning, with a total length of . The proposed structure was to clear the sea by for navigation and have two decks—a lower deck carrying two rail lines, and above, a road deck wide. The main cables were designed with a diameter of . Construction of the bridge would have required 12,000 workers and cost hundreds of billions of lire.
Modern attempts to build the bridge Early planning stages Oudry's bridge proposal (1852)
One of the earliest documented proposals for a permanent crossing of the Strait of Messina was developed in 1852 by the French engineer Alphonse Oudry, a member of the Corps impérial des ponts et chaussées of France. His concept envisioned a four-span bridge linking Sicily to mainland Italy, representing one of the first international engineering studies dedicated to a fixed connection across the strait.
The proposal was described in French technical documentation as Projet d'un pont à quatre travées, proposé pour franchir le détroit de Messine and reflected the growing 19th-century interest in large-scale transport infrastructure and railway expansion. Oudry's design aimed to provide both road and rail connectivity between the island and the Italian mainland.
In 1862, Oudry expanded the concept with a revised study entitled Projet d'un pont indéformable et sans oscillations pour circulation ordinaire et trains de chemin de fer passant à toute vitesse à établir sur le détroit de Messine. The project emphasized structural rigidity and reduced oscillation, proposing a bridge capable of supporting conventional traffic as well as railway trains operating at high speed.
Oudry's studies are considered among the earliest modern engineering attempts to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a stable crossing over the Strait of Messina, anticipating later proposals developed throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Others In the 1960s, a wide variety of proposals were advanced, including everything from submerged tubes to floating struts, pontoons, and a revolving central section of the bridge. None turned out to be realistic. In 1968, an international design competition was arranged. In the 1970s, feasibility studies were undertaken by the state railways, leading to the creation of a private company with responsibility for planning the strait's crossing. In the 1980s, the Messina Strait Company was set up with support from the state railways, the regions, and the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale. It concluded that it would be feasible to build a suspension bridge. Detailed plans followed in the 1990s, with final approval from the High Council of Public Works (Consiglio Superiore dei Lavori Pubblici) on 10 October 1997.
First Berlusconi government
The 2006 plan called for a single-span suspension bridge with a central span of . This would have made the span more than 60% longer than the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge in Turkey—currently the longest suspension bridge in the world, at .Sicily to get longest bridge from TimesOnline www.timesonline.co.uk . Accessed 8 March 2009.
Plans called for four traffic lanes (two driving lanes and one emergency lane in each direction), two railway tracks, and two pedestrian lanes. In order to provide a minimum vertical clearance for navigation of , the two towers were to be high. This would have been taller than the Millau Viaduct in France (then the world's tallest bridge, at ). The bridge's suspension system would have relied on two pairs of steel cables, each with a diameter of and a total length, between the anchor blocks, of .Italy revives Messina Straits bridge from Construction Europe. www.khl.com Accessed 9 March 2009.
The design included of road links and of railway links to the bridge. On the mainland, the bridge was to connect to the new stretch of the Salerno-Reggio Calabria motorway (A3) and to the planned Naples-Reggio Calabria high-speed rail line; on the Sicilian side, to the Messina-Catania (A18) and Messina-Palermo (A20) motorways as well as the new Messina railway station (to be built by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana).
The bridge was planned to connect Reggio Calabria to Messina, the two cities that face each other on either side of the strait, in order to form a single metropolitan area. This ambitious urban project was called Area Metropolitana integrata dello Stretto ("integrated metropolitan area of the strait") or simply Città dello Stretto ("city of the strait"). Among the controversies surrounding the bridge's construction was strong, relentless opposition from various Sicilian nationalist groups, which explicitly objected to the formation of such a metropolitan area.
Among the engineers who participated in the project was Giorgio Diana, who mainly dealt with the aeroelastic aspect.
Contracting parties A construction consortium, led by Impregilo, was selected in 2005, with work set to begin in the second half of 2006. The bridge was designed by Danish architects at Dissing+Weitling in close collaboration with the Danish engineering firm COWI. In March 2006, Impregilo and Stretto di Messina signed a contract assigning final project planning to a general contractor. Impregilo S.p.A., the lead partner, had a 45% share. Other participants were Spain's Sacyr (18.70%), the Italian companies Società Italiana per Condotte D'Acqua S.p.A. (15%) and Cooperativa Muratori & Cementisti-C.M.C. of Ravenna (13%), Japan's IHI Corporation (6.30%), and Consorzio Stabile A.C.I. S.c.p.a (2%).
The general contractor would also be assisted by the Danish and Canadian companies COWI A/S, Sund & Baelt A/S, and Buckland & Taylor Ltd., who would handle project engineering. Completion was planned to take six years, at an estimated cost of €3.9 billion.
+ Contract of the Messina BridgeFunction Companies RoleGeneral contractor Eurolink Webuild (Impregilo until 2012) Group leader (45%) IHI Infrastructure Systems Co., Ltd. Mandator COWI A/S Mandator Sacyr Mandator Società Italiana per Condotte d'Acqua Mandator Cooperativa Muratori & Cementisti Mandator Argo Costruzioni Infrastrutture Mandator Dissing+Weitling Mandator Sund & Bælt A/S Mandator Buckland & Taylor MandatorProject management Parsons Corporation Environmental monitoring Fenice Group leader Agriconsulting Mandator Eurisko NOP World Mandator Nautilus Società Cooperativa Mandator Theolab MandatorInsurance broker Marsh
On 12 October 2006, the Italian Parliament voted 272 to 232 in favour of abandoning the plan due to the bridge's "doubtful usefulness and viability" and the inability of the already burdened Italian treasury to bear its share of the cost. Transport minister Alessandro Bianchi stressed that the road and rail links leading to the location of the proposed bridge were not capable of supporting enough traffic to make its construction economically feasible. Other reasons for abandoning the plan were earthquake risk and fears that the bridge would enrich the networks of organized crime in Italy, such as Cosa Nostra and 'Ndrangheta.
Second Berlusconi government In April 2008, Silvio Berlusconi was re-elected Prime Minister of Italy and vowed to restart the project to build the bridge. The following month, Altero Matteoli, Italy's minister of infrastructure and transport, confirmed the government's intent to restart work on the bridge in a letter to Pietro Ciucci, the president of Società Stretto di Messina.
In March 2009, as part of a massive new public works programme, Berlusconi's government announced that plans to construct the Messina bridge had been revived, pledging €1.3 billion as a contribution to its estimated cost of €6.1 billion. Berlusconi claimed that work would be completed by 2016. Until 2006, when the project was halted, the work had been assigned to a consortium of Impregilo (now called Webuild), Condotte d'Acqua, Cooperativa Muratori & Cementisti, and Consorzio Stabile A.C.I., alongside Spain's Sacyr and Japan's IHI Corporation.
In December 2009, preparatory work began, with the diversion of the Tyrrhenian railway at Cannitello on the Italian mainland side of the strait.
In February 2013, the project was shut down by Prime Minister Mario Monti for lack of funds.
Renzi government In September 2016, the project was reconsidered by the government of Matteo Renzi.
Conte government