Tunnels and Viaducts on the A20 Motorway in Italy, by Kilometre Point

• 219entries listed
• 3.35 kmlongest bore
• 97.31 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The 227 entries are grouped on the page under 18 headings — exit caronia furiano (tunnel on ramp) (61), exit messina boccetta. viaduct boccetta ( 166 m ) on ramp (30), exit rometta (27), exit patti (21) and exit brolo (15) — a classification the table carries as section breaks rather than as a column of its own.

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 1.39 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 219 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.

198 entries fall below a kilometre, short enough that portals and approaches usually decided their cost more than the bore itself. Read down the direction palermo column, the 208 values run from 19 to 3 345 with a midpoint at 252; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

The route table lists 219 structures with a recorded length, giving both carriageways where the two bores differ. The material on this page is held in 9 captions rather than in running text, 88 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 A20 in Italy, in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The captions name 21 distinct places and structures — Messina, Boccetta and Palermo among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Reading the figures

Lengths for Italy are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 25 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 133.8 times the shortest and 13.4 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Italy would have to beat 3.35 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The eighth longest is Tindari at 2.14 km, which is about where this record stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

On 98 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 22 exits, 2 motorway connections, 4 toll barriers and 3 service areas along the route, in running order rather than by size.

Read down the direction messina column, the 209 values run from 19 to 59 407 with a midpoint at 263; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is. A tunnel is funded on a traffic forecast and judged on a construction cost, and the two are rarely revisited together.

Also recorded here are Piana at 2.59 km and Cozzo Minneria at 2.51 km. A tunnel list for Italy reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 2 of these 219 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.