"Is Mount Etna bringing Fontanarossa to a standstill? Sicily should rediscover the bridge." The Azzurri players Calderone and Siracusano have their say

Società Aeroporti Catania (Sac) has described it as “the most difficult emergency of the last twenty years” and it is hard to disagree: as of 13 August, nearly 800 flights had been cancelled – 36 per cent of scheduled flights – leaving thousands of passengers stranded at “Fontanarossa-Bellini” airport.

“Etna has been a problem for many years; politicians must provide answers. That is why, as soon as parliamentary proceedings resume, I will convene the relevant bodies – starting with the airport’s senior management – to understand what has happened,” Tommaso Calderone, a Forza Italia MP and chair of the parliamentary committee on the difficulties associated with insularity, told Il Foglio.

The airports at Palermo, Trapani and Comiso – the latter partly affected by ash from Mount Etna – coped well with the pressure from incoming flights, but the disruption for holidaymakers and residents proved problematic. There was a partial reopening on the afternoon of 15 August, but volcanic activity resumed the following day, leading to a partial closure scheduled to last until 12 noon yesterday. The emergency has reignited the political debate over the Bridge over the Strait, the project for which is still bogged down in various bureaucratic procedures, whilst opponents are making their voices heard in Messina and Villa San Giovanni.

On 14 August, Transport Minister Matteo Salvini stated that “with the Strait Bridge, passengers would already be at their destination”. However, setting aside political slogans, the issue is more complicated than it is made out to be. “I am absolutely in favour of the bridge,” continues Calderone, “but I am a keen observer: first the Court of Auditors, then the Public Works Council… it is clear that something in the project is not working, so here too politics must step in to address all the cracks that are emerging.”

It is rather simplistic to focus solely on the presence of the Strait Bridge when analysing the efficiency of transport links in Sicily, despite the hundreds of construction sites that have been dividing the island in two for months and which aim to strengthen rail and road links along the A19 Palermo–Catania motorway and the railway line connecting the regional capital with Messina and Catania. “At the moment we cannot talk about high-speed rail,” adds Calderone, “but rather high capacity, because our trains will reach 200 kilometres per hour. It is a major step forward, but we are struggling to keep pace with central and northern Italy.” The bridge project is inevitably linked to the necessary modernisation of Sicily’s rail and road networks, but, Calderone continues, to claim that the bridge is therefore “a secondary piece of infrastructure is a cliché”. Quite simply, says the Forza Italia MP, “politicians should be thinking about both the internal network and the bridge project at the same time”, setting aside “political ideologies”.

“To say ‘we don’t have roads, so let’s focus on the bridge’ in a disparaging way,” Calderone emphasises, “is a provincial and backward-looking idea: we must consider the transport system as a whole. I think this is short-sighted reasoning, and there must be no ideological barriers. We must think of the good of the Sicilian people, not of party politics.”

Matilde Siracusano, a Forza Italia MP and Under-Secretary for Relations with Parliament, also operates on the very same dividing line between everyday needs and the development of major infrastructure. A native of Messina, just like Calderone himself, with a political career that has always been linked to the island’s infrastructural revival, she begins with a recollection to put the present into context: “In 2018, having just been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, I tabled a bill on the airport project on the Tyrrhenian coast of Messina, with most of my colleagues laughing in my face”. She is referring to the project – repeatedly brought to light by Sicilian centre-right politicians but which still languishes on the back burner – to open a fourth airport in the Mela Valley, between the municipalities of Messina and Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto.

For the MP, the Fontanarossa emergency demonstrated that the proposal in question should have been examined in greater depth. “In Catania, we’ve been battling Mount Etna for as long as anyone can remember; this time the emergency had a greater impact, but it’s clear that an alternative is needed.” On paper, the alternative should be Comiso, an airport just 75 kilometres away as the crow flies from Catania airport. However, the Ragusa airport is rarely used even in ‘normal’ times and is not equipped to handle a large volume of aircraft.

Siracusano’s main argument, however, is that the land transport network alone is not enough when the main hub fails. “When an international airport with such a high passenger throughput is shut down, even with improved road and rail transport, there would still have been major disruption. That is why it still makes sense to consider a further airport”.

Then there is the chapter on the Bridge, of which the Messina MP describes herself as a “fervent” supporter. “With the Bridge, all this hardship would certainly have been minimised.” An infrastructure project which, in her analysis, would act as an overall economic driver, much like the major construction projects of the 20th century: “A project of this kind, like all major infrastructure projects, attracts significant investment, creates jobs and generates economic wealth, much as the Autostrada del Sole did in its day.”

Then there is the attack on the public debate and its chronic delays, aimed at dismantling what the MP considers a rhetorical excuse. “We have always heard the ‘it’s someone else’s fault’ arguments from those who say that there were no trains or motorways, and that is why the bridge was of secondary importance or even unnecessary.” A fallacy which, for the Under-Secretary, reveals its full fragility in the figures: “This line of reasoning has a huge flaw: the bridge was not built, but there was never any real investment in Sicilian infrastructure either, unlike in the last parliamentary term, which spent 70 billion across Sicily and Calabria on modernising the railways and motorways.”

“Infrastructure has no political colour; I really don’t understand,” he concludes, “those who claim to be opposed to connecting Sicily with Europe, especially at times of emergency such as the one we have just experienced. At this point, it’s just ideology.”