Italy Plans World’s Longest Suspension Bridge to Connect Mainland With Sicily

The bridge, expected to cost more than $15 billion, would stretch more than two miles across the Messina Strait

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

August 15, 2025

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Travelers wishing to reach the island of Sicily from mainland Italy have only one option: to cross the Strait of Messina by boat. Today, the shortest route—a ferry ride from Villa San Giovanni to Messina—takes about 20 minutes.

But in roughly seven years’ time, travelers may have new options. The Italian government has approved a plan to build the world’s longest single-span suspension bridge, an engineering marvel that would connect Sicily with the rest of Italy’s boot.

The proposed bridge, called the Strait of Messina Bridge, would span more than two miles across. With six lanes of car traffic and two rail lines, the bridge would reach nearly 200 feet wide. For comparison, the Golden Gate Bridge extends 1.7 miles across.

Estimated to cost $15.5 billion, the bridge has been touted as “the biggest infrastructure project in the West” by Matteo Salvini, Italy’s transport minister, and as “an engineering symbol of global significance” by Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, the Associated Press’ Colleen Barry reports.

Webuild, one of the companies leading the project, estimates the bridge will support 6,000 vehicles every hour and 200 train rides each day. Its construction, which is planned to begin next May and end sometime between 2032 and 2033, will generate roughly 120,000 jobs annually.

The project “marks the start of a new season of vision, courage and confidence in the capabilities of Italian industry and the entire infrastructure sector,” Webuild CEO Pietro Salini says in a statement.

But not everyone welcomes the bridge. Its construction would displace roughly 500 families, and environmental groups have filed complaints with the European Union citing the construction’s impact on migratory birds, Al Jazeera reports.

“We will continue to defend our land in any way possible,” Aurora Notarianni, an environmental lawyer, tells the New York Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo. “They are going to destroy an area that has existed for thousands of years, creating a unique ecosystem.”

The area is also prone to seismic activity, and the effects of erosion are worsened by saltwater and high winds. Webuild says the bridge is expected to last up to 200 years.

“The risk doesn’t go away, but it can be managed,” Lamya Amleh, a structural engineering researcher at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada, tells NPR’s Ayana Archie. “It just needs to be taken seriously throughout the design and construction process, throughout the bridge’s life cycle.”

On August 9, roughly 10,000 demonstrators marched through the Sicilian city of Messina and held banners that said “No Ponte” (“No Bridge”) to voice their opposition to the project. Local lawmakers have said that the bridge would divert resources that should otherwise be invested in local communities.

The debate about a potential Sicily-mainland connection has raged for centuries. Pliny the Elder, a first-century Roman author, described a temporary bridge that would connect the two landmasses. But the idea was abandoned, “as it was clear that more traffic ploughed the Strait in a north-south than east-west direction, so any structure on water could not be permanent,” wrote Italics magazine’s Frances Fahy in 2021.

In more recent history, the Italian government began soliciting proposals for a potential bridge beginning in 1969. A construction plan was first approved in 1971, but the project has been plagued by a series of cancellations due to funding and logistics. Officials quashed another version of the project in 2011 for its expensive price tag, which was $5.5 billion at the time. This latest effort was revived in 2022.

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Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.