The Bridge will be built. That idea, that vision, that need to unite two lands, Calabria and Sicily, that began with the ancient Romans will see the first stone this year and the last in 2032- 2033.
It is Giorgia Meloni’s center-right government that goes down in history, but this is an achievement that specifically bears the name of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Infrastructure Matteo Salvini. To Matteo what is Matteo’s, even on the level of a battle that has been personal and political.
I say with clarity and simplicity these things about a newspaper that is a bridge between Italy and the United States and that is printed, circulated, and read mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world. So much so that we publish in both Italian and English. With Anglo-Saxon transparency, always a guarantee of democracy, we have told the names, roles and protagonists of this affair with simplicity and clarity.
By the way, yesterday the major American and British newspapers devoted space and this story, provided with the same clarity as above numbers and data of this public work that is also an economic and engineering challenge. It will be the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world (3.6km), will cost in euros 13.5 billion (substantially public, hence government) will have three lanes in both directions and a railway line, will have majestic pylons high and deep to ensure stability against possible seismic shocks and even very strong gusts of wind. It will create about 100,000 jobs.
While the Sun rattles off these numbers, an ‘authoritative Italian newspaper, La Stampa in its social version, focuses, by way of numbers, on the costs of future tolls that would be the highest on the Italian highway network. Rather than going into the details, and pointing out that it is premature now to talk about tolls and that it is not as if now putting your car on a ferry between Sicily and Calabria means getting a free pat on the back and a vacation bonus, what is of interest here is the vision.
Always controversial and always Italian, always divided between majorana and opposition and media fans in tow. On a hot August day, on the 6th to be precise, CIPESS, an acronym that stands for Interministerial Committee for Economic Planning and Sustainable Development, gave the final go-ahead to the project, after years of controversy and bitter challenges to the project itself. It is there in democracy, but it is also there in democracy that we then recognize, in transparency, the overriding national interest.
Our American friends teach us, right or wrong this is our country. They were already saying that in the late eighteenth century, we in the twenty-first century are still here advocating what is right only if we identify with the political side that says it.
Instead, I, in the American way, have the main protagonist, Salvini, conclude this installment of The Strait Bridge series : this work will bring jobs, wealth, beauty and save tons of co2 in the air. Until the next installments.
The article The Bridge will be done comes from TheNewyorker.
