Road Tunnels in Italy — Complete List by Length, Part 1000

• 191entries listed
• 1.39 kmlongest bore
• 1890–2016openings span
• 199.8 kmtotal length

The record table

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

How this table is compiled

The middle half of the table runs from 1.07 km to 1.27 km, and that band is where most of the engineering on this page actually sits. Between the longest and the tenth-longest the drop is 0.02 km, which is the part of the table that changes when a single scheme opens.

The three longest entries alone account for 4.16 km of the 199.8 km on this page, which is 2 per cent of the total from 3 of 170 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 91.63 km against 108.17 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Where one of these 170 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 170 rows for Italy are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2016 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

Dated entries run from 1890 to 2016, and the busiest decade is the 2000s with 37 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 191 rows and records Tunnel, Length (m), Date of opening, Region and Province for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

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 199.8 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Reading the figures

A new scheme in Italy would have to beat 1.39 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 1.4 times the shortest and 1.2 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Roughly 63 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 23 distinct places and structures — Marche, Umbria and Lombarda among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

The dated entries carry 48 distinct opening years across 126 years, and the median opening year is 1995. The material on this page is held in 34 captions rather than in running text, 288 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

They are not uniform: the fullest runs to 20 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. Ventilation and escape provision, not bore length, drive most of the cost on modern road tunnels in Italy.

Eighth on the list is Bagnara at 1.37 km, which is where the table stops being about record holders and starts being about ordinary infrastructure. The ten longest average 1.38 km against 1.16 km for everything below them, and that ratio is the clearest thing this table says about the distribution.