We’ve all heard of the great American road trip. If you’ve ever dreamt of taking a great Italian road trip, you’ve surely come across this inevitable hitch in the plan: you can’t drive to Sicily. You can, of course, put your car on a ferry; you can even take a train that gets put on a ferry, the last of its kind in Europe.

But a stretch of road spanning the volatile Strait of Messina, which separates Sicily from the mainland, has been a dream deferred since antiquity, when Pliny the Elder wrote of Roman notions of building a floating bridge — which, with its potential to disrupt the waterway’s considerable north-south trade, was eventually scrapped.

It seems that Italians have been joking about the impossibility of a bridge to Sicily ever since. These two videos from Get to the Point and The B1M explain the history of this continually frustrated infrastructural project, and the political maneuvers that have recently begun to make it seem very nearly semi-possible.

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