Before asphalt, Italy was a country held together with difficulty. Distances weighed more than kilometers, because crossing them meant dealing with incomplete railway lines, long times, and territories connected in pieces. In 1861, as soon as Unification was born, the railways measured a total of 2,500 kilometers and a true national network had yet to take shape: the cities of the Po Valley were connected to each other, while a North-South backbone capable of giving continuity to the country was missing.
The European comparison made that delay even more harsh. In the same period, Germany, yet to be unified, already had 11 thousand kilometers of railway, the United Kingdom 14 thousand, France 4 thousand. Italy recovered quickly: in 1881 the railway network had almost quadrupled, in 1901 it exceeded 16 thousand kilometres, in 1942 it reached the maximum of 23,227 kilometres. Then came another idea of modernity, noisier, more private, more suited to the imagination of the full refrigerator, of holidays, of the seventeenth century under the house. The car arrived.
When the car became well-being
In the long story of Italian transport, the most profound turning point comes from a familiar object: the car. With the economic boom, between 1961 and 1971, the number of cars registered in the Public Automobile Registry went from less than 50 to over 200 per 1,000 inhabitants. In ten years the daily posture of an entire country changed. Mobility stopped being just a service to take, a train to wait for, a coincidence to guess. It became a key stuck in the ignition.
The Autostrada del Sole entered into this hunger for movement as a concrete promise. Between 1956 and 1964, the years of the beginning and end of its construction, the Italian motorway network tripled, reaching over 1,600 kilometres. In the same period, state and provincial roads were also expanding, doubling in size in just over a decade at the end of the 1950s. The country that previously struggled in connections began to take on a different geography, made up of junctions, toll booths, lanes, service areas and green signs.
That asphalt had the tone of optimism. It carried goods, families, tourists, workers, vacationers, vendors, students. It made cities seem closer that for generations had remained distant in the head even before on the maps. The Autostrada del Sole thus became the most recognizable symbol of an Italy that ran, often with more enthusiasm than prudence, within mass motorisation.
The country sewn together by asphalt
The growth of the road network speaks of a much broader transformation than just the infrastructure. Motorways continued to increase strongly even in the 1970s, then at a slower pace, until today they exceed 7,500 kilometres. It is a weighty figure because it measures a choice that has lasted decades: putting the road at the center of the way in which people and territories speak to each other.
In the meantime, the railway was also changing its skin. In 1926, to go from Rome to Milan without changes, just three connections were available, with times between 13 and 14 hours. By 1989 the connections had tripled and the journey had dropped to around 5 hours and 15 minutes. In 2025 there will be around 130 connections and the direct ones, without intermediate stops, cover the route in less than 3 hours. High speed, which started in Italy and Europe in 1977 with the direct Rome-Florence line, doubled the extension of dedicated lines between 2008 and 2024, up to 1,097 kilometres.
Yet the car continued to occupy a special place in imagination and practice. Italy has long been the European country with the highest rate of motorization: the cars registered with the PRA were 500 for every 1,000 residents already in 1991 and have reached over 700 in 2024, compared to a European average of 578. France, Germany and Spain remain between 550 and 600. Even considering only the vehicles that are estimated to have actually been in circulation, the Italian figure drops to 564 every 1,000 inhabitants in 2021, returning close to the European average. However, cultural photography remains: Italy was thought of, built and often organized around the automobile.
The bill left to the landscape
The environmental price of this race, in the available data, appears above all as a physical transformation of the territory. The figures do not measure emissions, land use or habitat fragmentation in detail. However, they tell the story of the mass of the intervention: roads doubled, motorways tripled in just a few years, a network that has reached over 7,500 kilometres, a car fleet that has grown to become one of the densest in Europe. Just look at these numbers to understand that the Autostrada del Sole united Italy, of course, but left the country with a strong dependence on asphalt.
Every kilometer of road brings with it a promise and a renunciation. The promise was to arrive earlier, leave when you wanted, work further away, go to the seaside, deliver more goods, expand your life beyond the neighborhood and the station. The renunciation was less visible: pieces of countryside cut away, suburbs grown along the most convenient routes, cities adapted to traffic, habits modeled on the ownership of a private vehicle. For years this exchange seemed natural, almost inevitable. The economic boom was in a hurry, and asphalt was its simplest language.
The history of the Autostrada del Sole lies within this ambivalence. It has shortened real distances, given shape to a more connected Italy, accompanied industrial growth and the desire for mobility. It has also shifted the balance towards a model in which moving often means taking the car, filling a street, adding traffic to traffic. Today, while high-speed railways have regained space on the main connections and the country discusses transition, that long strip of asphalt remains there: useful, historic, cumbersome. Boom Italy wanted to race and the Autostrada del Sole gave it the lane. Since then, the landscape still bears the marks of the tires.
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