Tunnels and Viaducts on the SS38 Motorway in Italy, by Kilometre Point

• 57entries listed
• 7.93 kmlongest bore
• 60.42 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

2 of the 57 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 60.42 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

The table below lists 57 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 56 distinct entries on this page, Rotatoria 1 and Rotatoria 2 among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.

This page records the structures catalogued along the SS38 in Italy, in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The captions name 20 distinct places and structures — Adige, Fuentes and Rotatoria 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 17.08 km of the 60.42 km on this page, which is 28 per cent of the total from 3 of 57 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 6.33 km against 54.09 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 5.55 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens. Where one of these 57 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

Lengths for Italy are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 60 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 132.1 times the shortest and 15.0 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Italy would have to beat 7.93 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The eighth longest is Poggiridenti at 2.41 km, which is about where this record stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

The note column places the route in Lombardy, Trentino, and the administrative area is recorded because a section is identified by it. The table on this page runs to 62 rows and records Tunnel / Viaduct, Length and Notes for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

The material on this page is held in 10 captions rather than in running text, 123 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 SS38, which is how the operator identifies it.

They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 22 words and the briefest to 6, and on a page of this kind the long ones are where the explanation lives — the caption carries what the picture cannot. A crossing whose two carriageways differ in length is recorded once per direction rather than once per crossing.