At the northern tip of Sicily, near the lighthouse at Faro, two enormous lattice steel towers rise from either side of the Strait of Messina. The Torri Faro — also called the Pylons of Messina or, after their engineer, the Torri Morandi — were built in 1955 to carry high-voltage electricity cables across the strait on a single span of 3.6 kilometres, the longest in the world at the time. Each tower stands around 230 metres tall. They were decommissioned in 1981 when an undersea cable replaced them, and they've stood unused ever since: too large to demolish quietly, too structurally interesting to abandon entirely.
The pylons are best seen from the area around Faro lighthouse, where you can walk to the shoreline and look up at the scale of the things. On a clear day the matching tower on the Calabrian side is visible across the water. They've become an unlikely symbol of a grand engineering ambition that the strait itself eventually defeated — a proposed bridge between Sicily and the mainland has been debated, planned, and cancelled repeatedly for decades, and the rusting pylons carry some of that weight of unfulfilled connection. Getting there from central Messina requires a car or a local bus to the Faro area.