Tunnels and Viaducts on the R03 Motorway in Italy, by Kilometre Point

• 56entries listed
• 1.3 kmlongest bore
• 13.49 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Also recorded here are La Rossa at 0.68 km and Platano at 0.63 km. Read down the length (m) direction potenza column, the 55 values run from 12 m to 2 815 m with a midpoint at 127 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 0.88 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 56 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.

Lengths for Italy are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 12 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 107.9 times the shortest and 10.4 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Italy would have to beat 1.3 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The eighth longest is Marmo at 0.5 km, which is about where this record stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

This page records the structures catalogued along the R03 in Italy, in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 13.49 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Reading the figures

The ten longest average 0.75 km against 0.13 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. The tunnel / viaduct column names 56 distinct entries on this page, Fosse and Serrone among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

The table on this page runs to 57 rows and records Tunnel / Viaduct, Length (m) Direction Potenza, Length (m) Direction Sicignano and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here. Italian motorway inventories list tunnels and viaducts together in running order along the R03.

Read down the length (m) direction sicignano column, the 55 values run from 12 m to 2 558 m with a midpoint at 123 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 longest entry is Chialandreia, at 1.3 km. The 57 entries are grouped on the page under 9 headings — slipway buccino (25), slipway balvano (9), slipway picerno (8), slipway tito (7) and slipway sicignano (4) — a classification the table carries as section breaks rather than as a column of its own.

The next two longest are Fiumara di Tito at 1.11 km and Pietrastretta at 0.97 km. A tunnel list for Italy reads differently from a neighbouring country's: 0 of these 56 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.