Motorways' Chronology in Italy — Section Openings Listed by Date

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The material on this page is held in 12 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. A crossing whose two carriageways differ in length is recorded once per direction rather than once per crossing.

A tunnel list for Italy reads differently from a neighbouring country's, because the same journey time can be bought with one long bore in one country and a dozen short ones in another. An intermediate shaft turns one long heading into two shorter ones, at the price of a permanent structure on the surface above.

Read down the lenght (in km) column, the 193 values run from 0.7 km to 442.9 km with a midpoint at 20.9 km; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is. Italian motorway inventories list tunnels and viaducts together in running order along the auto-it-cr.

The table on this page runs to 209 rows and records Motorway Section, Opening Year, Opening Date (mm/dd), Lenght (in km) and Motorway / Road Connection for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here. A referendum has stopped more alpine schemes than geology has.

The captions name 14 distinct places and structures — Voltri, Gravellona and Toce among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure. A tunnel is funded on a traffic forecast and judged on a construction cost, and the two are rarely revisited together.

Reading the figures

This page records the structures catalogued for Italy in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. The kilometre point is recorded for each structure in Italy, which is how the operator identifies it. Rock cover above a subsea bore is the governing design constraint, not the depth of the water itself.

Tunnel building in Italy is shaped by geology and settlement pattern as much as by transport policy. Reconstruction after a fire or a collapse is noted, since it usually changes both the profile and the ventilation. Length is a proxy for terrain rather than for difficulty, and the correlation is weaker than a ranking implies.

Adding a metre to the longest tunnel in the world costs what adding a kilometre to an average one does. A structure renamed after an opening keeps both names in circulation, and the older one persists in the literature for years. Two administrations measuring the same crossing will agree on the rock and differ on the approaches.

Approach viaducts are frequently longer than the crossing they lead to, and whether they count is the reason two sources disagree. Local spelling and official spelling diverge often enough that a list has to choose, and this one follows the operator. Gradient limits are the main reason rail tunnels run longer than road tunnels on the same crossing.

Escape and rescue provision has driven most of the change in tunnel design over the past three decades. A base tunnel trades a much greater length for a far lower summit altitude and a gentler ruling gradient. The note column is often the most useful part of a row, recording tube counts, gradients, closures and reconstruction dates. A ranking of this kind moves whenever a single large scheme opens, and nothing on a stale page announces that a longer structure now exists elsewhere.