They still haven’t started and they’re already on holidays. But has the work for the Strait of Messina bridge really started? Today was to be the day of the first stone, the official inauguration with the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, with the Infrastructures Minister, Altero Matteoli and the managing director of the company Strait of Messina, Pietro Ciucci.

But nothing happened. There were only Paolo Brogani, a Eurolink executive, seven workers, a bulldozer, for just 30 hours of work. The appointment with the authorities has been postponed to January. Today an area of around one hundred squared metres has been cleaned up. Yesterday an extraordinary assembly of the shareholders of the company Strait of Messina passed the increase of the capital reaching 900 million Euros. “The work has officially begun” said Anas. “Today a part of the area interested was acquired – said Paolo Brogani – for clearance”. This phase will last sixty days while the railway line in Cannitello will be completed in eighteen months. The cost will be of around 26 million Euros. This work is necessary to solve the interference with the future tower of the bridge, in Calabria. The tower will be 382.6 metres high.

The same tower on the Sicilian side will be built between Ganzirri and Torre Faro, but work still has to be defined and expropriations still have to start. Today near the construction sites, where last Saturday some five thousand people manifested against the bridge, there is just silence, as if nothing is happening. Maybe because the authorities were not present and the site was closed at 11 in the morning because of the Christmas holidays.

Translated by Chiara Nunnari from John Milton Institute