From his terrace in the town of Villa San Giovanni in Calabria, Ciccio Marino admired the blue-tinted currents of the Strait of Messina stretching toward Cape Peloro, the tip of Sicily. He has always cherished the horizon, which is often dotted with slow-moving cargo ships and the occasional swordfish hunter raising a harpoon from a colorful feluca, vessels with an old Arabic name destined to be relegated to mere folklore.
“The strait is an old friend,” the 49-year-old firefighter confided. An old friend haunted once again by an old ghost. Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister, has revived a proposal to build a bridge to Sicily. The leader of far-right party Lega, a coalition partner of the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has been seeking to fulfill an old dream. One that stretches back to the third century BC, when, according to Pliny the Elder, the Romans built a floating bridge to transport a bounty of 142 elephants.
Charlemagne, the Normans, the Bourbons and the Kingdom of Italy all nurtured the same desire to conquer the landscape. So has the Italian Republic. In 1983, an episode of the weekly Mickey Mouse magazine’s Italian edition imagined the billionaire Scrooge McDuck embarking on the venture.
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