Sicily's giant bridge a step closer

ROME - A giant bridge linking the Italian mainlandwith Sicily, discussed for decades, came a step closer to realisation yesterday when the Italian government announced the winner of the contract to build it.

The 4.4 billion euro contract, the biggest in Italian history for a single project, was awarded to Italian construction giant Impregilo, bidding in tandem with firms from Japan and Spain and some smaller Italian companies.

"Now everybody will understand that we were not joking," said Infrastructure minister Pietro Lunardi.

"The bridge is a great work which will unite Sicily and its six million inhabitants with the continent and for this reason it has enormous value socially, and for the urban and transport development."

Pietro Ciucci, managing director of the Ponte di Messina company, said work on the bridge would begin next year and be completed in 2012.

Soaring across the Straits of Messina, the vast suspension bridge will stretch for nearly 4 kms.

It will be 60 metres wide and carry 12 lanes of car and rail traffic and the anchor posts will be higher than the Eiffel Tower.

It will create 40,000 jobs for the 6-year construction period, and bring 6 billion euros to the region during the same period.

The government hopes it will transform the prospects of one of the poorest and most backward corners of the country.

But Ermete Reallacci of the centrist Margherita party, a prominent environmentalist, said: "It will be a black hole for the public finances, an abyss that draws near while under our eyes a budget is taking shape made of nothing but cuts, sacrifices and missing funds.

"It is another proof of the schizophrenia of this government and their absolute deafness to the real needs of the country."

Environmental and financing concerns aside, the main worry about the bridge is the bonanza it will offer to organised crime.

The Sicilian Mafia and their equivalent across the straits in Calabria, the 'Ndrangheta, are already immensely rich and powerful.

Back in 1998 the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, the state body dedicated to fighting the Mafia, declared that it was "worried by the great interest of the 'Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra" in the bridge project.

In 2000 they voiced a warning that the criminal organisations on both sides of the strait - both rich and feared in their own domains - might "overcome their traditional rivalry in order to take the greatest advantage from the enormous spending power of the Calabrian administration in the coming years."

The gangs have made huge sums from public works contracts in the south over the years, in the form of protection money and control of the labour force.

In an indication of how much the bridge means to the Mob, Calabrian politicians opposed to the project have received a variety of Mafia-style threats, with bullets arriving through the post, their homes set on fire and animal heads dumped on their doorsteps.

- INDEPENDENT