And as no uomo is an island, our Italiani amici are following the modern fashion of linking land, with a bridge over Sicilian waters.
All of which €13.5bn public project money will connect Sicily to Italy 2 miles across the Messina Strait.
The ambition to join Italy and Sicily has been a long-held target.
With the government first proposing the scheme in 1971.
And revising it in 2022 following multiple cancellations on the grounds of hard lira/euro.
With the project to erect the world’s longest single-span bridge starting next May and slated for completion in 2032.
No Ponte
Whatever has changed, and cynics might say it’s a politicians’ protection racket, it looks like this time it will go ahead.
And proponents will point to better access for Sicilians to Il Bel Paese, the Beautiful Country, and increased trade with them spitting out 120,000 jobs in the pipeline.
While the romantics will plead that the watery divide is what gives Sicily its very island identity and the bridge will remove that and alter the environment irrevocably.
Only the Sicilians aren’t as easily persuaded with 10,000 out protesting at the weekend waving their ‘No Ponte’ or ‘No Bridge’ placards.
With Mamma Mariolina De Francesco, a 75-year-old resident of Messina whose house lies near the site of one of the bridge’s 399m-tall land towers particularly animated.
Saying: ‘They could offer me three times the value of my house, but that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is the landscape. They must not touch the Strait of Messina.’
The Sea and the Skye
Now all this is familiar territory for those of us who live on a rock.
With Scotland engineering out Jacobean romance bridging Skye and the mainland.
Because had Bonnie Prince Charlie been fleeing Hanoverian forces in 1746 it would have been a very different escape.
In the boot of a car crossing the bridge rather than dressed up as Flora MacDonald’s maidservant.
On a bonnie boat like a bird on a wing over the sea to Skye.
Jutting out
Now don’t quiz us on this but Copenhagen sticks out for many reasons but specifically because its biggest city and the country’s capital is on an island, Zealand, off the mainland, Jutland.
So that its citizens, such as Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid had to swim to get anywhere.
All before the 5-mile Oresund Bridge between Zealand and Sweden came along in the year 2000… and blame the Millennium for many of these projects.
Channel your frustrations
And for those of us of a certain age, and the rest who followed the news reel, one of the great engineering vanities, celebrated at the end of the century, was the Channel Tunnel.
All when the English and French, for a brief time, got on with each other in 1994.
And there was great hoopla made of an English workman and a French counterpart meeting at the point where the 31 mile tunnel joined.
Of course modernists will tell you that this has made travel to the continent and for Europeans wanting to get to this island all the easier.
Which may be tree but it is a soulless journey and not without its delays… and you will of course miss that glorious sight of the White Cliffs of Dover.
There’s a black hole over the tunnel entrance to France.. Vera Lynn would turn in her grave.
Naw, give us our ferries, or even better party cruises going around in circles in the Med, a bit like Brexit really.
And if there’s a lesson in there somewhere, you’re welcome.
And a salutary piece of advice for the Italians and Sicilians (and if you’ve ever met any then you’ll know they are very different) about building a bridge over Sicilian waters.
