The world’s longest bridge (in Venice?)

Yes, the world’s longest bridge exists, in of all places, Venice! “Venice”?, you might very well say? “But wait a minute, I’ve been to Venice and I haven’t seen the world’s longest bridge”!, you may rightly add. Ahh, but you haven’t looked closely.

Yes, there are only 400 bridges that connect the small islands of what I personally consider to be THE world’s most beautiful city (at least the most unique one, that’s for sure) and there are three that span the Grand Canal. The world’s longest bridge will be the fourth one that will cross the same canal, but it’s not necessarily the length that one must look at. It’s the time. The time? Yes, because that bridge was only begun 11 years ago and it now risks falling down even before being put in place!

The bridge was commissioned by the City of Venice. The architect is Santiago Calatrava, the very same architect that designed the Olympic stadium in Athens (with materials from an engineering company located not too far away from Udine). Engineering experts have come to the conclusion that if the 94 metre bridge will be laid down from bank-to-bank, the pressure exerted from the central point of the bridge (some 52 tons) will be the equivalent on both banks to approximately 75 semi trucks, each one that exerts a pressure of 40 tons!

The “catastrophic” result might be that the banks will cave in, therefore sending the uncompleted bridge into the waters of the Grand Canal (including tourists too). Few know that Venice itself is built on approximately 1 million stilts, and through the centuries with constant flooding, many of these stilts have worn away. Adding a 94 ton bridge on the fragile borders of the Grand Canal certainly won’t help matters much either.

Cost-wise, in 11 years’ time the project has not doubled in cost but tripled: it has now ballooned to a whopping 10 million Euros (an astronomical figure in dollars too)! One solution many years ago was also that of building a tunnel under the Grand Canal, but I personally don’t know if that’s crazier than Calatrava’s project.

Venice is certainly NOT new to these far-fetched architectural follies. For the last 20 years or so Venice has been fiddling around with the “Mose” project, a portable-like dike set-off in Venice’s lagoon in order to combat the constant high tides that damage the former Venetian republic. But as we all know (or at least for those who know Italy well enough), the call of the day is the usual political blah-blah-blah. One can only imagine that other “folly”: Berlusconi’s less-than brilliant idea a while ago of constructing a bridge to connect Messina and Reggio Calabria in the Strait of Messina! That project would have played DIRECTLY into the hands of the local mafias.

I wonder if there’s some way of importing some Scandinavian DNA into the bloodstream of Italians: my memory may fail me, but I believe that some years ago the Swedes and Norwegians built a rather long bridge to connect the two nations. The bridge still stands and was completed in record time. Sort of like Calatrava’s “utopic” bridge!