I carefully read the intervention of Professor Giovanni Randazzo who reflects on my contribution dedicated to the bridge that appeared on the pages of the Gazzetta on 27 August. I thank him because my desire was precisely to open a calm and reflective interlocution. His contribution offers me the opportunity to clarify some points and, above all, to report the discussion on what, in my opinion, really matters. We let alone the fact that the project – not yet executive – remains an unknown to the engineering level (and in fact we will proceed for “design phases”). Let’s ask ourselves about what it means culturally. This is the perspective – not at all vague – from which I want to tackle the theme of the bridge because it seems, at least in the public debate, guilty deserted.
I immediately want to clarify one thing: talking about colapesce or Scilla and Cariddi does not equate to refuse science, as Randazzo seems to be afraid. Nobody doubts the importance of calculations, geological investigations, engineering models. It would be absurd. The point is another: the problem is to believe that science can run out the sense of a place. A territory is also the way those who live it perceives it, tell it, it transmits it. In this sense, myth is a form of knowledge, a cultural code that allows you to orient itself in what would otherwise remain silent.
The Strait of Messina has never been just a stretch of sea. It is a place that asks to be told, interpreted. It is an intertwining of geography and myth: not a neutral container, but a landscape modeled for centuries of stories, images and legends. For this reason, every time we talk about the bridge, we inevitably end up discussing also identity, memory and collective imagination. Colapesce is not a fable for children, but the personification of a sacrifice that keeps an island in balance. Scilla and Cariddi are not only two homeric monsters, but figures who continue to express the idea of danger and vertigo that the strait still inspires today. Talking about these myths means recognizing that the community that inhabits these banks has internalized them as tools of interpretation of reality. And our great writers showed it to us. Randazzo says that the bridge “passes over myths and legends”: it is true, but it would do it as a compressor roller.
The great geographer Carl Sauer teaches us: the landscape is never only nature, but nature transformed by culture. Myth is also a cultural device, which does not describe the world but makes it intelligible. For this reason, the idea that the calculations “save” while the “deception” myths is very reductive.
I am not at all blind when I look at my Messina: if I contemplate the wonder of the Strait I know well what has become, today, the outline built around it. The Messina and Calabrian territory brings the scars of decades of urban planning speculations, building abuses, administrative curies. More than “disharmonies” I frankly talk about abuses, outrages to the territory, yes of a depth urban geography. However, it is allowed to me: to think that a great work can “compensate” all this is an act of faith, not a scientific forecast. I fear that the logic that produced the disorder is similar to that which today proposes the bridge as a miraculous remedy. In reality, in my opinion, an infrastructure of this reach is likely to consolidate, not to heal, still open wounds.
The territories are not saved from above. They regenerate with care policies, with participatory processes, with the enhancement of the existing assets. The technocratic gaze tends to see in the bridge a “concealer” of the distortions, but in reality it could become a curtain that covers them, leaving the development model that generated them intact.
Randazzo states that the bridge could represent “the last hope of relaunch” for the city and the region. It is a statement that I understand in its emotional figure: in a context marked by the economic and social decline, the idea of a grandiose work seems to light the imagination and return trust. But the recent history of our country teaches more. The great infrastructures, alone, did not reverse the impoverishment processes, nor detained young people. They have not remedied structural inequalities.
Entrusting the Panacea function to the bridge risks transforming itself into an alibi in order not to face the deepest issues: governance, essential services, local mobility, strengthening of the social fabric. Indeed, so a new myth is created: the “Salvatore” bridge, the Redeemer of a beautiful but unfortunate place. Even the rhetoric of the “flame of local entrepreneurship” that the bridge would have rekindled deserves a lot of caution …
Professor Randazzo cites Golden Gate as a model to be taken for example, for the “iconicity” that the future bridge would give our stretch of sea. I know the Bridge and the Californian land well from experience. And I can say to the reason that the city of Messina will not be saved by selling off the only thing still integrated and unchanged, that is, beauty. We do not feel the need for an icon of modernity to be exhibited: to be “iconic” the strait does not need – like other lands – of a fetish at all. The strait has been iconic for centuries. If it is not believed to the myths of Homer, it is believed at least to the National Geographic who in 2022 elected him among the most beautiful in the world on the sea. Without bridges.
Discussing the bridge then does not only mean evaluating costs and benefits, engineering calculations or urban plans. It means deciding which relationship we want to have with our territory. Development cannot be conceived at the expense of memory, of beauty – as if it were an overwhelming value, of Serie B – and of the concrete life of the communities.
The question is not to be “pro” or “against” the bridge. It is to understand what we are willing to lose and what we intend to keep. Because the strait is not and will never be simply a problem to be solved.