The "Great Public Works" Lack Funding

In Italy they are known as the "Grandi Opere" -- the Great Public Works, but a recently released report by Il Comitato Interministeriale per la Programmazione Economica (Cipe) -- The Interministerial Commitee for Economic Planning, speaks little of greatness.

Cipe's report has revealed that Italy's public infrastructure projects lack significant "financial coverage" -- a staggering 115 billion euro.

One of the most famous public works project effected is il Mose, Venice's dam project being built by Il Consorzio Nuova Venezia. Il Mose has four moving barriers and 79 hollow steel gates, engineered to raise during high tide to stop flooding. Il Mose (pictured below) has an estimated cost of 4.3 billion euro, but Cipe reports that funding is 2.8 billion euro short.

Il Mose project is controversial because of its huge drain on Italian taxpayer dollars, as well as environmental concerns. The city of Venice's problem is caused by two main factors: its waters are naturally rising (pictured above, Venice's Piazza San Marco), and its foundation is slowly sinking due to settling of sediments and the overpumping of its freshwater acquifer deep under the city. The high-tide flooding usually lasts six hours, but if the current situation continues uncorrected, several scientists contend that by mid-century many of Venice's main piazze and strade will be forever submerged. At the time of Venice's 421 A.D. founding, the Adriatic Sea was 16 feet lower than its current level.


Another Italian public works project that risks never being started, or started and then never completed -- and subsequently turning into a massive Ecomostro (see Aprile 25 for a full report on Ecomostri) -- is the bridge linking Sicily (Messina) to the mainland (Reggio Calabria). If completed, the bridge traversing the Strait of Messina will be the world's largest, single-span suspension bridge at 2.3 miles long.

Recently, however, Prodi's government has called into question the sagacity and feasibility of the project. Shortly after the 2006 election, on a stop in Sicily, Prodi said: "My son will one day see the bridge: I don't see the bridge as some sort of demon, but our priorities are elsewhere, and they must be compatible with the resources that we have... ...When I see that there isn't a highway that leads to the bridge, and in Palermo (Sicily's capital) water is rationed, and the railways, being in the state that they're in, I ask myself what are our priorities."


N.d.R. - pictured above, the Strait of Messina and a mock-up of the completed bridge