Italy's plan to hang the world's longest suspension span across the Strait of Messina passed its most important engineering review in nearly thirty years this summer. The verdict was favourable. It was also, on close reading, a very long list of things the designers have not yet proved.
On 6 August 2026 the Consiglio Superiore dei Lavori Pubblici, the technical body of roughly eighty experts that advises Italy's infrastructure ministry on major public works, concluded its general assembly with a positive opinion on the crossing. The council had not formally ruled on the Messina project since October 1997. Its opinion, running to 353 pages, confirms that the design can proceed. It attaches more than one hundred prescriptions and recommendations, many of them binding conditions rather than suggestions.
The project would link Torre Faro, a headland a few kilometres from the city of Messina in Sicily, with Villa San Giovanni on the Calabrian mainland. The main span would measure 3,300 metres, far beyond the 2,023 metre record held by Turkey's 1915 Çanakkale Bridge. The total scheme is valued at about €13.5 billion, with roughly €10.5 billion sitting in the construction contract held by the Eurolink consortium, led by the Italian contractor Webuild. Two phases before anyone digs The council split the remaining work into a sequence. In what it calls Phase A, the concessionaire Stretto di Messina S.p.A. must complete the studies, surveys and physical tests that the council found missing or outdated. Only in Phase B can the project move to detailed executive design, which is the stage that includes preparing the land and the construction camps.
That ordering matters more than the headline approval. It means the favourable opinion does not by itself authorise a single excavator to move. The ground under the towers The council's most consequential objections concern geology. The Strait of Messina sits in one of the most seismically active corridors in Italy. In 1908 an earthquake and the tsunami that followed killed tens of thousands of people in Messina and along the Calabrian shore.
The council found that the geological investigations contained in the project do not conform to current standards and are therefore insufficient. New surveys must establish which faults in the area are active and which are capable of rupturing the surface. That is a different and harder question than measuring how strongly the ground will shake, because a fault that breaks the surface beneath a tower foundation is not a load case a suspension bridge can absorb.
The council also asked for an analysis of the two towers pushed all the way to collapse, so that the most vulnerable points can be identified under extreme scenarios. Wind, and the cables that may gallop A second cluster of prescriptions concerns wind, which for a deck suspended over 3,300 metres is the governing design problem. Aerodynamic testing on the deck was carried out in four separate laboratories. The council noted that in some cases the laboratories did not agree with one another, and that the designers did not consistently adopt the more conservative of the competing values.
The opinion also faults the project for failing to treat non synoptic wind phenomena systematically. These are the sudden, localised events that do not follow the behaviour of a broad weather system: downbursts, tornadoes and Mediterranean cyclones.
Then there are the cables. Suspension cables can enter an instability known as galloping, in which a cable oscillates with growing amplitude under a steady wind. The designers classify this as a contained risk. The council disagrees, calls the risk significant, and has ordered fresh wind tunnel testing.
The council further asked for scenarios that the original design simply never contemplated. Those include fires and explosions aboard ships passing beneath the deck, sabotage, drone attacks and cyber attacks. When the current contract was first drawn up in 2005, several of those threats did not meaningfully exist. Ships that are already too tall One finding is awkward in a way that has nothing to do with advanced physics. The designers state that the deck will sit at least 70 metres above sea level in most conditions, and never below 68 metres. Ships taller than that already use the strait.
According to documentation supplied by Stretto di Messina itself and reproduced in the council's opinion, there were 77 transits by vessels taller than 65 metres during 2023. Thirty seven of those exceeded 68 metres. Any of them, under the current design, would not fit. Two committees still stand in the way Stretto di Messina must now respond to the prescriptions. Beyond that lie two approvals that have already stopped the project once.
The first is a fresh resolution from CIPESS, the interministerial committee that signs off on spending for major public works. A CIPESS resolution approving the bridge was issued on 6 August 2025. The Corte dei Conti, Italy's national audit court, refused to register it in the autumn of that year, which stripped the approval of legal effect.
The second is a return trip to the Corte dei Conti with the revised package. The government and Stretto di Messina argue that most of the auditors' objections have since been addressed. If the court registers the new resolution, executive design can begin alongside preparatory works: site access roads, water and sewage networks, base camps, and the clearance of unexploded wartime ordnance. Government estimates place the start of that preparatory work by the end of 2026. Italian law then requires the executive design to be finished within one year of its start. The contract question nobody has settled A quieter risk sits underneath all of it. Italian procurement rules require a new competitive tender when modifications push a contract more than 50 percent above its original cost.
To build the bridge, the government reactivated a contract signed in 2005 with Eurolink. The value of the work assigned to Eurolink has risen from €3.8 billion in 2005 to roughly €10.5 billion today. Stretto di Messina maintains that no new tender is required, on the grounds that the increase reflects the rising price of raw materials rather than any expansion of the scope of works.
That reading has not been tested by a court. If it fails, the timetable does not slip by months. A political clock The political impetus behind the crossing is explicit. Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini has made the bridge a signature commitment and has pressed for final clearance before the end of 2026. The government wants construction sites open before the current legislature ends next year. Alessandro Morelli, the undersecretary to the prime minister who holds the CIPESS brief, has said the committee should adopt the new resolution by the end of September.
The evidence on the ground is less encouraging for that schedule. As of late August 2026 there was still no major bridge construction activity at Torre Faro. Analysts tracking the project now put the realistic start of earthworks in 2027, once the new seismic surveys, the additional wind tunnel campaigns and the prototype fabrication for critical components have been completed.
Opposition has not faded either. A demonstration against the project was held in Messina on 8 August 2026, two days after the council issued its opinion. Environmental groups continue to challenge the crossing on seismic resilience and on its effect on a sensitive marine corridor.
For a scheme first sketched in antiquity and formally studied for half a century, another year is not a dramatic development. What has changed is the nature of the remaining obstacles. They are no longer arguments about whether Italy wants the bridge. They are questions about whether the current drawings will survive contact with the strait.
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