A dozen or so times each day, as Italy’s southbound Intercity rail service arrives in the Calabrian town of Villa San Giovanni, the journey comes to a dramatic halt. The train is decoupled from its tracks, carefully loaded on to the deck of a ferry, and secured in place. The entire cargo then eases out into the Strait of Messina en route to Sicily. Invariably, this 25-minute crossing becomes an impromptu community moment. Passengers abandon their carriages, flocking to the ship’s top-deck snack bar to share freshly fried arancini, trade anecdotes, and admire the vista over Mount Etna’s distant peak, before returning to continue their journey by rail.

For tourists and itinerant visitors like myself, the ferry crossing is a charming novelty. For local people, however, it has long been a defining part of their identity. In his 1941 novel, Conversations in Sicily, the writer Elio Vittorini describes a group of fruit pickers congregating on the boat’s deck, feasting on large chunks of local cheese and enjoying the view. As the narrator joins them, he is transported to “being a boy; feeling the wind devouring the sea”, while gazing out at “the ruins along the two coasts”, separated, poetically, across the water.

Soon, though, this sentimental voyage may become a relic of the past. For the past few months, Italian officials have been in advanced talks to sign off on a new bridge connecting Sicily to the mainland. In August, the Italian government confirmed it will invest €13.5bn and commission the Webuild Group to begin construction. If it is ever built, it will be the longest single-span bridge in the world.

The Sicilians I know are sceptical. After all, this is not the first time the Messina Bridge has been mooted, only to be shelved. While plans for the crossing date back to Roman times, the modern saga truly began in the late 1960s, when successive Italian governments championed the project as crucial for tackling regional inequalities. For the original architects, the bridge offered an obvious solution to the glaring infrastructure gap between the industrial north and the agricultural south. By closing that space, they reasoned, Sicily could finally attract the kind of international investment that other parts of Italy had long enjoyed.

But the bridge has never materialised. Over the decades, hurdles such as seismic viability, environmental concerns, and the pervasive risk of mafia fraud have repeatedly halted the plans, making it seem impossible. Even a few months ago, when the government announced its “final” approval, my Sicilian friends told me they’d believe it when they saw it. They were right. Last month, Italy’s court of auditors blocked the project due to concerns about the legality of the financing, and at the time of writing, the project is frozen once again.

In the meantime, an old public debate is re-emerging, which reveals a lot about Italian politics today. On one side are the pro-bridge advocates, who see the project as key to the future, pointing out that it would provide as many as 120,000 new local jobs per year and improve prospects for growth. On the other side are the protesters, from across the political spectrum, who dismiss pro-bridge advocates as nefarious opportunists concerned only with profit. For them, the bridge is synonymous with the shortsighted exploitation of the island.

If you’ve ever been to Messina, you’ll know these vague ideological stances quickly rub up against reality. While the city’s life and culture are as exciting as anywhere on the island, Messina is unfortunately afflicted by some of the worst social problems in Italy. The local municipality is infamous for its financial mismanagement, characterised by mysterious losses of public funds and active criminal and civil court cases ongoing against various politicians, including two former mayors. Organised crime is prevalent, and cases of infrastructure-related fraud are already common among businesses, including those with interests in the Strait. Poverty is a huge problem. The health service is on its knees, and the school system is on the verge of collapse, suffering from some of the worst drop-out rates in the country.

This reality makes the rhetoric of political proponents hard to swallow. Recently, Italy’s transport minister, Matteo Salvini, called the bridge “the most important public work in the world”, but he didn’t always feel this way. A decade ago, in fact, he was arguing the exact opposite. In a 2016 TV interview, which is now being widely reshared online in Italy, he judged the bridge unfeasible from an engineering standpoint and argued that regular closures due to the notoriously strong winds would render it useless. Given the state of public services in Sicily, he argued, spending billions on such a project would be a waste of money, and it would be better to dedicate such limited funds to bolstering local services.

Ironically, the very arguments Salvini made in 2016 have only gained greater relevance as the effects of the climate crisis intensify. Over my years of taking the ferry, I’ve witnessed first-hand how the annual wildfires are getting worse. I’ve made small talk with local farmers on the ferry’s top-deck bar, watching flames lick the sky, illuminating the charred hillsides. I’ve heard accounts of the fatal spring and summer of 2024, when the province of Messina experienced its worst drought in decades. Crops failed, livestock died. Reservoirs ran empty and aqueducts began to fail. In some areas, tap water failed to arrive for days on end.

Webuild presents the Messina Bridge as a historic opportunity. Residents, though, don’t seem to see it that way, and a recent survey indicates 70% are against the project. And you can see why: if you were living in a drought zone, would the prospect of having an estimated 15-20% of your local water supply diverted towards the project really seem like an opportunity? If you lived near the seafront, would you want years of noise, wildlife destruction and pollution, all for the eventual aim of a giant public work that is not guaranteed to benefit you? If you were one of the 4,000 people on either side of the Strait who would be forced to abandon their homes to demolition, would you be ready to pack your bags?

Salvini has promised to respond to the court’s concerns and claims the government can still get construction started by February 2026. I, for one, hope he backs down. At a moment when the climate crisis is creating new emergencies and worsening an already dire economic situation, the bridge is simply not a priority. Sicilians are desperately in need of political investment in public services, of leaders who can inspire collective action to ensure government funds are properly spent. Until then, Sicilians remain defiant and continue to enjoy one of the world’s most spectacular ferry crossings: preferring conviviality and arancini to a costly steel panacea.