Good morning. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is positioning a €13-billion mega-bridge as a matter of national defence – more on that below, along with Shopify’s return to the top of the stocks and Gen Z’s embrace of Y2K fashion. But first:

• Trump and Putin could meet in person as soon as next week, the White House says
• Ford expects Trump to target USMCA and says Ottawa should prepare for early negotiations
• Victoria Mboko advances to the women’s singles final at the National Bank Open, continuing her remarkable streak

For centuries – well, actually, for millennia – Italians have dreamed of building a bridge connecting Sicily to the southern mainland. Charlemagne, King of the Franks, floated the idea in the 800s. Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, raised it a thousand years after that. Benito Mussolini vowed he’d get the bridge done once the Second World War ended. Silvio Berlusconi promised it during all three of his stints as prime minister.

Each leader soon discovered that the project was a financial and logistical nightmare, though Berlusconi, perhaps unsurprisingly, wasn’t as easily deterred. The closest anyone came – if you trust the word of Pliny the Elder – was Roman consul Lucius Metellus, who lashed together a bunch of wooden planks and barrels in 250 BC. The bridge held long enough to move 100 anxious elephants onto the mainland before it disappeared into the sea.

Now Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will try her hand at building something more permanent. Yesterday, the Italian government approved the construction of a single-span bridge across the Strait of Messina. Nearly 3.7 kilometres in length, this would be the longest suspension bridge in the world, and believe me when I tell you that it isn’t even close. This bridge would be longer than China’s two longest suspension bridges put together. This bridge would dwarf the current record-holder in Turkey, which links Europe to Asia in a measly two kilometres.

Under the plan, the Messina bridge will be held up by two colossal steel towers, each 60 feet taller than the Empire State Building. That eliminates the need for a central tower in the middle of the strait – good news, given that the proposed bridge runs directly over a fault line between two tectonic plates. (A 7.1-magnitude earthquake in 1908 killed half of Messina’s population and flattened 90 per cent of its buildings.) Because suspension bridges are naturally flexible, they can better withstand gale-force winds and giant quakes. The longer the bridge, engineers swear, the more flexible its deck, allowing it to bend slowly and register less seismic activity. The Messina bridge also has a nifty deck design that disperses wind while leaving room for six lanes of traffic and two rail lines.

Of course, all that engineering comes with an eye-popping price tag: €13.5-billion to finish the project by 2033. And Rome hasn’t been entirely clear about how it plans to fund the bridge. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, brushed aside financial concerns by noting that Michelangelo and Raphael never submitted their work for a cost-benefit analysis. But Meloni is now trying out a different pitch. She’s started promoting the project as a military expenditure – one that should count toward NATO’s new commitment for its members to hike defence spending to 5 per cent of their GDP.

That wasn’t the original sell: The bridge was first designed to boost economic development in Sicily and Calabria, two of Italy’s poorest regions. In April, though, the government released a report insisting that the bridge “will play a key role in defence and security, facilitating the movement of Italian armed forces and NATO allies.” By June, Meloni was reminding reporters at the NATO summit about Moscow’s growing ties to Libya, warning that “we see Russia increasingly projecting itself into the Mediterranean.”

Will it work? Might Italy manage to use the bridge as a defence-spending write-off? More than 600 Italian academics have their doubts, and they sent a letter to Meloni last month calling the project’s “frenzied restyling” into a military corridor “an instrumental lie.” But Rome, a habitual NATO underspender, has a lot of motivation to prove them wrong. It only hit the old, 2-per-cent commitment with some creative accounting this year, such as factoring in the pensions paid out to retired soldiers. In the spring, Italy’s Defence Minister called the 5-per-cent target “unthinkable.” The government appears to have thought again.

A few weeks ago, the European Commission told Reuters it was up to Italy to decide whether an infrastructure project’s main purpose was military or civilian. So far, NATO hasn’t opted to weigh in. Meloni has to hope the alliance proves every bit as flexible as the Messina bridge.

It seems like the land that fentanyl forgot: In the past few years, the European Union has seen just a fraction of the overdose deaths affecting Canada and the U.S. Read more about the drug discrepancy here.

At home: Federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel says Ottawa is committed to speeding up Canada’s drug-approval timelines, among the longest in developed countries.

Abroad: In Ukraine, which now has one of the world’s lowest birth rates, bomb shelters are transforming into labour wards.