A dozen or so times each day, as Italy’s southbound Intercity rail service arrives in the Calabrian town of Villa San Giovanni, the journey comes to a dramatic halt. The train is lifted from its tracks, carefully loaded on to the deck of a ferry, and secured in place. The entire cargo then eases out into the Strait of Messina en route to Sicily. Invariably, this 25-minute crossing becomes an impromptu community moment. Passengers abandon their carriages, flocking to the ship’s top-deck snack bar to share freshly fried arancini, trade anecdotes, and admire the vista towards Mount Etna’s distant peak, before returning to continue their journey by rail.

For tourists and itinerant visitors like myself, the ferry crossing is a charming novelty. For local people, however, it has long been a defining part of their identity. In his 1941 novel, Conversations in Sicily, the writer Elio Vittorini describes a group of fruit pickers congregating on the boat’s deck, feasting on large chunks of local cheese and enjoying the view. As the narrator joins them, he is transported to “being a boy; feeling the wind devouring the sea”, while gazing out at “the ruins along the two coasts”, separated, poetically, across the water.

Soon, though, this sentimental voyage may become a relic of the past. For the past few months, Italian officials have been in advanced talks to sign off on a new bridge connecting Sicily to the mainland. In August, the Italian government confirmed it will invest €13.5bn and commission the Webuild Group to begin construction. If it is ever built, it will be the longest single-span bridge in the world.

The Sicilians I know are sceptical. After all, this is not the first time the Messina Bridge has been mooted, only to be shelved. While plans for the crossing date back to Roman times, the modern saga truly began in the late 1960s, when successive Italian governments championed the project as crucial for tackling........

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