Bridges and Viaducts in Italy — 239 Listed by Length

• 239entries listed
• 9.62 kmlongest bore
• 1892–2019openings span
• 404.1 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The three longest entries alone account for 22.5 km of the 404.1 km on this page, which is 6 per cent of the total from 3 of 231 rows. After the 1970s the next busiest decade here is the 1980s with 24 openings, so the building effort came in more than one wave.

Where one of these 231 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 231 rows for Italy are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2019 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

A new scheme in Italy would have to beat 9.62 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 9.6 times the shortest and 6.8 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

This page records the bridges and viaducts catalogued for Italy in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 404.1 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Second and third place go to Fichera at 7.35 km and Sciarapotamo I at 5.53 km. The table on this page runs to 239 rows and records Viaduct, 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.

Reading the figures

4 of the 231 measured entries exceed five kilometres, and those are the ones that carry a full ventilation and escape regime. Only 129 of the 239 rows carry anything in the date of opening column, so that field describes a minority of this table and the rest of the rows are recorded without it.

Dated entries run from 1892 to 2019, and the busiest decade is the 1970s with 47 recorded openings. The material on this page is held in 20 captions rather than in running text, 181 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

Roughly 22 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 21 distinct places and structures — Adda, Collesalvetti and Genova among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 37 distinct opening years across 127 years, and the median opening year is 1981. They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 31 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.

The ten longest average 5.4 km against 1.58 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution. The viaduct column names 223 distinct entries on this page, Coltano and Fichera among them, each traceable to the operator or administration record it was taken from.