Tunnels and Viaducts on the A18 Motorway in Italy, by Kilometre Point

• 115entries listed
• 2.95 kmlongest bore
• 38.39 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The table below lists 115 entries with a recorded length, each giving a name, a length in metres and, where documented, the year of opening. The tunnel / viaduct column names 136 distinct entries on this page, Guidari and S.S. 114 among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The next two longest are Cozzo Battaglia at 1.6 km and Scardina at 1.53 km. The table on this page runs to 145 rows and records Tunnel / Viaduct, Length Direction Catania, Length Direction Messina and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

This page records the structures catalogued along the A18 in Italy, in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The captions name 14 distinct places and structures — Messina, Palermo and Areas among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The three longest entries alone account for 6.16 km of the 38.39 km on this page, which is 16 per cent of the total from 3 of 115 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 6.3 km against 32.1 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 2.17 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 115 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Italy, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two.

Reading the figures

Also recorded here are Filippella at 1.33 km and Serena at 1.18 km. A tunnel list for Italy reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 0 of these 115 structures pass three kilometres, and the same journey time is bought with one long bore in one country and a dozen short ones in another.

Lengths for Italy are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 50 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 59.0 times the shortest and 15.8 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

The eighth longest is Piano Cutiri at 1.07 km, which is about where this record stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 1.41 km against 0.23 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.

Read down the length direction catania column, the 139 values run from 10 m to 2 845 m with a midpoint at 146 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is. Tunnel building in Italy is shaped by geology and settlement pattern as much as by transport policy.

The material on this page is held in 6 captions rather than in running text, 48 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together. The kilometre point is recorded for each structure on the A18, which is how the operator identifies it.