Plans to build the world's longest suspension bridge to link Sicily and the Italian mainland have been put in cold storage.
"All planning activities on the bridge have been frozen," Infrastructure Minister Antonio Di Pietro said Thursday.
The company set up to build the record-breaking bridge, Stretto di Messina, is talking to the general contractor, top Italian engineering group Impregilo, about possible alternatives to the scheme, Di Pietro said. However, the minister did not rule out the possibility of the bridge going up some time in the future.
Di Pietro, who caused a flap upon taking office three months ago by saying the project was still very much on the cards, said Thursday that the bridge "is not among our priorities".
Impregilo and Stretto di Messina are talking about "complementary works to be carried out whether or not the bridge is built".
These talks are at "an advanced stage," Di Pietro said. The bridge produced clashes between newly named ministers in May before Premier Romano Prodi settled the issue by saying that it would not go ahead in the foreeable future. Prodi spoke of other priorities like completing a motorway to Palermo, improving water services and boosting rail links.
The Messina bridge was the biggest public works project championed by former premier Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government.
But it has been opposed by environmentalists and dogged by concerns over its safety and fears of potential Mafia involvement ever since it was unveiled in 1996. Its future was immediately called into doubt at the Prodi government's swearing-in ceremony, when Transport Minister Alessandro Bianchi scotched the multi-billion-euro project - only to be contradicted by a more cautious Di Pietro.
Bianchi called the bridge "the most useless and damaging project in Italy in the last 100 years".
When and if completed, the bridge would replace slow ferry services between Sicily and the mainland.
The 3,690-metre-long bridge has been designed to be able to handle 4,500 cars an hour and 200 trains a day.
Work on the 6.5-billion-euro structure was scheduled to start later this year and end in 2012.
