Road Tunnels in Italy — Complete List by Length, Part 750

• 228entries listed
• 1 kmlongest bore
• 1841–2015openings span
• 171.68 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

Where one of these 197 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. The 197 rows for Italy are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2015 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Lengths for Italy are recorded in metres which is how the operators publish them and why the shortest entry here reads as 750 m and not a rounded figure. The longest entry is 1.3 times the shortest and 1.2 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

A new scheme in Italy would have to beat 1 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. Eighth on the list is Montà at 0.99 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure.

Dated entries run from 1841 to 2015, and the busiest decade is the 1970s with 43 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 228 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Region and Prov. for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

Further down the table, Fopel III is recorded at 0.99 km and San Benedetto at 0.99 km. Read down the length (m) column, the 228 values run from 750 m to 999 m with a midpoint at 868 m; the spread rather than the maximum is what says how uneven this set is.

Reading the figures

Second and third place go to Castelfeder at 1 km and Pagliarotto at 1 km. 161 of the 228 rows carry an entry in the notes column — 71 per cent of the table — and that column is where the qualifications live: tube counts, closures, boundaries and the reason a figure reads the way it does.

Roughly 45 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 32 distinct places and structures — Gallo, Lombarda and Strada among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The longest stands 0 km clear of the next longest, which is the margin to watch when a new scheme is announced. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 171.68 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

The dated entries carry 39 distinct opening years across 174 years, and the median opening year is 1988. The material on this page is held in 31 captions rather than in running text, 255 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

The dated entries fall across 39 different years, which is a rough measure of whether this was a sustained programme or a handful of separate schemes. The ten longest average 0.99 km against 0.87 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.