Bridge over the Strait, between opportunity and monster to fight
Il Bridge over the Strait it is an exceptional infrastructural work, it will be the longest bridge in the world and will connect Sicily to Calabria and therefore to Europe. It has been talked about since the times of the ancient Romans. In an operational way he has already thought about it Ferdinand II king of the Two Sicilies to build a bridge in 1840 but the costs of the work dissuaded him. As we said, the first idea starts from ancient Romans but it was only after the unification of Italy that it began to get serious. The ball then passed to the Savoy of united Italy whose engineers also studied the projects of Napoleon for a Channel Tunnel. Fascism was also interested in the project in 1934 but the imminent conflict made it necessary to postpone it. After the war, starting from 1952, the projects resumed and experienced a period of operation during the so-called economic boom. In 1971 the Colombo government approved the establishment of a private company with public capital, concessionaire for the project. In 1985 the then Prime Minister Bettino Craxi declared: “The Bridge will be built soon”.
In the 2005during the Berlusconi III, it seemed to have been made with Impregilo SpA which officially signed the contract together with other companies subordinated to it. However, shortly afterwards, the Prodi II government took office and blocked the project again on purely ideological grounds. In 2007 the Prodi government was about to withdraw the contract, exposing itself to a penalty of 500 million euros, but the then Infrastructure Minister Antonio Di Pietro opposed it, together with the centre-right. The writer was then the Political Advisor for Major Infrastructure Works of minister Di Pietro and I can tell how the climate of the councils of ministers of the time incandescent as two opposing visions were contrasted of the development of our country.
On the one hand there was Pietro’s which was to develop strategic infrastructures as much as possible, on the other there was Pecoraro Scanio, bearer of that ideology of “happy degrowth” which produced – and still produces – enormous damage to our country. The basic idea was to be “no everything” to gain votes in that unproductive area of Italy which, under the excuse of ecology, blocked – and still blocks – the development of our country. It even went so far as to explain – again in the Council of Ministers – that the construction of the Bridge would have disturbed migration of birds and the reflections would have confused the fish. Pecoraro Scanio wanted to definitively close the Ponte sull’Sretto Society but we opposed it and proceeded to merge the Company with Anas, limiting ourselves only to reducing the number of employees and thus we avoided paying the penaltiesbut most of all we kept the project alive.
I remember that Pietro’sIn this regard, one day at the ministry he told me that this would allow “those who come after us” and he meant Berlusconi and the centre-right, to continue the meritorious bridge project. And so indeed it was. Well, after many years, now the minister Salvini is going to carry out this onerous commitment which, however, will also change the geopolitical perception of Italy in the world. He frequently reiterated: “The Bridge is one hundred percent built”. There have always been opponents to the project. These are “professionals of doubt” and determined Luddites to bring humanity back to the stone age. But the Bridge is not a coal or thermonuclear power plant, it does not pollute and does not emit dangerous exhaust gases. It is a project that provides work in areas with endemic shortages. Yet the Bridge, in the collective imagination, is the Monster that must be fought by the darkest ideology.
At the time of Pietro’s minister was the same litany and there was always Angelo Bonelli together with Pecoraro Scanio to contest the work itself, just to maintain the little garden of electoral consensus that blocked Italy’s infrastructural development for decades. And in the Democratic Party itself there were those who were in favor of the Bridge, the most enlightened and non-ideologized ecologists of the EcoDems. The same Pier Luigi Bersanias Minister of Transport first and then of Economic Development, he was in favor of the Great Works. The Democratic Party then had a modern and developmental vision which has now completely disappeared due to Elly’s demagogic infantilism Schleinwho is more than a secretary of the main opposition party She appears to be a high school student which goes to occupy the schools.
The responsible Democratic Party has been incorporated and conquered by red populism and rabble-rousers. Antonello Cracolicileading exponent of the Sicilian Democratic Party and president of the Ars Anti-Mafia Commission declared: “If it happens, the Strait Bridge is an opportunity, we are talking, in the end, about a road and a road is neither right nor left, there can be no ideology”, thus breaking the front of the ideological no. Instead, when leading opposition politicians are reduced to following the path of the Exposed, it means that they abdicated their profession for lack of arguments.