The Strait of Otranto separates Italy’s southeastern peninsula from Albania and connects the Adriatic Sea with the Ionian Sea. It is the gateway through which vessels pass from the Adriatic into the wider Mediterranean.
At its narrowest point, between Punta Palascìa in Italy’s Salento region and Albania’s Karaburun Peninsula, the strait is less than 72 kilometres wide. It takes its name from Otranto, the Italian port city on the strait’s western side.
The passage has been strategically important since antiquity. Roman armies and supplies moved from Brundisium, modern Brindisi, across the water toward the eastern Adriatic and the Via Egnatia. In World War I, Allied forces established the Otranto Barrage to restrict Austro-Hungarian naval movement out of the Adriatic.
The Strait of Messina is the likely confusion: it separates Sicily from mainland Italy and links the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas. The Bosporus and Dardanelles are in Turkey, forming a different route between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.