Tunnels and Viaducts on the A22 Motorway in Italy, by Kilometre Point

• 109entries listed
• 2.64 kmlongest bore
• 40.92 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

The 121 entries are grouped on the page under 21 headings — exit bressanone z.i. (brixen) (45), exit vipiteno (sterzing) (19), exit ponticolo-colle isarco-brennero (direction brenner) (10), exit ala - avio (8) and exit rovereto sud – lago di garda nord (5) — a classification the table carries as section breaks rather than as a column of its own.

Lengths for Italy are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 20 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 132.0 times the shortest and 13.8 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

103 entries fall below a kilometre, short enough that portals and approaches usually decided their cost more than the bore itself. Read down the direction modena column, the 92 values run from 16 to 2 640 with a midpoint at 175; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

The route table lists 109 structures with a recorded length, giving both carriageways where the two bores differ. The material on this page is held in 11 captions rather than in running text, 74 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

This page records the structures catalogued along the A22 in Italy, in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The captions name 26 distinct places and structures — Area, Alto and Adige among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Reading the figures

A new scheme in Italy would have to beat 2.64 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The eighth longest is Villandro at 0.94 km, which is about where this record stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

On 34 of the structures here the two carriageways are not the same length, which is why the archive records each direction separately rather than one figure per crossing. The note column records 34 exits, 6 motorway connections, 1 toll barriers and 6 service areas along the route, in running order rather than by size.

Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 40.92 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued. An intermediate shaft turns one long heading into two shorter ones, at the price of a permanent structure on the surface above.

The three longest entries alone account for 7.63 km of the 40.92 km on this page, which is 19 per cent of the total from 3 of 109 rows. Spoil disposal is a civil work in its own right, and on the longest crossings it has reshaped the valley floor outside the portal.

Bolzano (Bozen) at 2.58 km and Campodazzo (Atzwanger) at 2.41 km follow it, and lengths are given per carriageway because the two bores of a dual route are rarely cut to the same length. Length is a proxy for terrain rather than for difficulty, and the correlation is weaker than a ranking implies.