A century of motorways

This month marks 100 years since the opening of the world’s first motorway, the Autostrada from Milan to the Lakes.

On 21 September 1924, if you were lucky enough to be living in Milan and wealthy enough to own a motor car, you might have driven your machine through the busy cobbled streets of the city to Viale Certosa, where the north western suburbs gave way to the countryside, baking in the late summer sun.

There before you would be something completely unique and utterly exhilarating. From the dusty street a broad piazza was formed, with an ornate toll house on the right. Advertising hoardings for tyre companies and pumps dispensing fuel lined the edges. A large sign reading “ALT” – demanding that you stop for the toll – was strung overhead on wires. And beyond it all, stretching away into the hazy distance, was a straight, flawlessly smooth highway, built from brilliant white concrete.

In a world of horse-drawn carts and steam trains, in a country where virtually nobody drove a car, in a city of nineteenth-century splendour, it was a giddying vision of the future. You would not have seen anything like it before – indeed, you couldn’t have, because there had literally never been anything like it. On 21 September 1924, Milan witnessed the opening of the world’s first motorway, the Autostrada Milano-Laghi.

First, second or third

A motorway is not a single concept that popped into existence at a single time. What we now expect when we hear that word is something that took a number of years to evolve. So there are, naturally, several claims for the crown of the first motorway.

The UK can boast one of the earliest ideas: in 1906, plans for a “motor road” from London to Brighton were laid before Parliament, the concept being for a dedicated track for motor vehicles that would charge a toll and offer freedom from the onerous requirements of the national 20mph speed limit. But it remained only a concept, and was never started. The UK did not open its first motorway until 1958.

The earliest candidate to be actually built was the Long Island Motor Parkway, sometimes also known as the Vanderbilt Parkway, just outside New York. Opened in sections between 1908 and 1911, it was the world’s first road purpose-built for motor traffic, and had some of the features we’d find familiar, including bridges to carry cross-traffic over or under, guard rails, and a limited number of access points. A toll of $2 was charged to those wanting to drive it.

However, it was by any standard a narrow and twisting route: with a single carriageway of variable width, often only just wide enough for two vehicles to pass, and an alignment that swerved wildly around obstacles, it was not really built for directness or capacity, and it was only fast by the standards of 1908. Its purpose was to give its extraordinarily wealthy owner somewhere to host motor racing events. Until then, they had been held – with disastrous results – on residential streets.

William Kissam Vanderbilt II built the Parkway privately to use as a racetrack, which is why it had banked corners, and it remained a private enterprise until 1938 when it was claimed by New York State in lieu of unpaid taxes. Its value as a through route was very limited, and large parts have now been turned into footpaths or even returned to nature.

The earliest European candidate, meanwhile, was the AVUS – or, to give it its full title, the Automobil-Verkehrs- und Übungsstraße (“Automobile Traffic and Training Road”). Used as a racetrack and proving ground, the AVUS shoots in a bolt-straight line south west from Berlin through the forest, and opened to thrill German speed seekers in 1921. When not in use for organised races, it too could be driven by anyone for a fee.

It looked much more like a motorway, being two extremely long straights, side by side, but they were linked at each end by a banked hairpin turn. As a result it appeared, superficially, rather like a dual carriageway. But it didn’t actually go anywhere, and like Vanderbilt’s Parkway, it was really a plaything for rich people with cars to race each other. It had a long heyday as a racetrack before eventually finding a more serious use: it is now part of Autobahn A115.

Both of those were roads built specifically and solely for motor cars, both were segregated from the ordinary road network, and both arrived earlier than the Milano-Laghi. Both are sometimes claimed to be the first motorway. But the Autostrada was different. The Autostrada was not for racing: like a modern motorway, it was a means of transportation, built for people who wanted to go somewhere.

A man, a plan, a road: Puricelli

Italian engineer and businessman Piero Puricelli was just 31 years old when he founded Società Puricelli Strade e Cave (the Puricelli Road and Quarry Company), and during the First World War he did rather well, supplying the Italian army with road construction machinery. His business was built on government contracts for road maintenance and the supply of aggregates and other materials, and he did everything he could to push his way to the forefront of his profession, becoming a leading light of the motoring lobby.

Puricelli, with a keen eye for marketing, decided to give his creation a snappy name. He called it the autostrada - literally the “motor road”.

His issue was that Italy had yet to start its love affair with the motor car. There were just 53,000 motor cars in the whole country in 1923 - hardly a critical mass crying out for dedicated infrastructure. But half of those vehicles were in prosperous Lombardy, the region surrounding Milan, and many of those would belong to the wealthy middle classes in Milan itself. Those people frequently travelled to the nearby Italian Lakes to spend time in their summer houses. A motorway might succeed there, connecting Milan to its industrial hinterland and giving the Milanese a thrillingly fast and smooth ride to their weekends away.

Financiers weren't immediately taken with Puricelli’s plan, and he struggled to raise capital, but he was in luck: after months spent trying to get his scheme off the ground, it reached the attention of another wildly ambitious man, and one who was a personal friend.

In October 1922, Benito Mussolini became Italian Prime Minister in what amounted to a coup, rapidly converting Italy into a fascist dictatorship. Keen to demonstrate his new regime’s effectiveness and willingness to modernise, he leapt on projects that would burnish his own image. A futuristic transport scheme, promoted by private industry, that appeared to solve the longstanding problem of Italy's roads? That was just what he was looking for, and its propaganda value would be exploited to the full.

Mussolini offered government backing to build the road, on the condition it was started as soon as possible. Puricelli’s company started work on 26 March 1923, Mussolini himself symbolically striking the ground with a pick axe, and the first length opened little more than a year later, running in a ruler-straight line from the edge of Milan to the village of Gallarate, bypassing most of the old road to Lake Maggiore.

Over the following year, further sections were opened, and while it was invariably referred to as “the Milan-Lakes Motorway”, it was really a small network – one route out of Milan that threw off two branches, so that its end points were in Sesto Calende, Varese and Como, all gateways to the magnificent Lakes.

A trip to the Lakes

If you were there in 1924, sitting in your early-model Fiat on the Viale Certosa, you could have witnessed King Victor Emmanuel III making his inaugural journey, accompanied in his official car by Piero Puricelli. And when the grand ceremony was finished, you could pull up in front of the toll house, pay the attendant, and try it out for yourself.

The Autostrada was the first road solely for motor traffic that was designed as a serious means of transportation, but it had yet to evolve some of the features we would expect today. Perhaps the first surprise is that it had opening hours. The motorway opened to traffic at 6am, and journeys had to be completed by 1am, at which time its gates were closed and locked.

The toll collector would live, with his family, in the toll house at the roadside, working all day every day – it was the fact that he needed to sleep that caused the motorway to close overnight. Emerging from the house at the sound of your engine, he would collect your toll and issue you with a ticket, just as if you were making a railway journey. An end-to-end trip would cost 17 lire, about £10 today, pricing that made this a luxury option. He would then push aside the red-and-white striped wooden barrier to let you pass.

The motorway you joined was a single broad carriageway, initially 10 metres (30ft) wide until the first branch forked off, after which it was just 8m (26ft) wide, little more than a modern rural single carriageway. Its verges would have white-painted stones at regular intervals to mark the edges in the dark. To one side, a line of telegraph poles followed the motorway throughout, another indication of the new and the modern. Other roads passed over or under the Autostrada, often by handsome arched bridges, so that your journey was uninterrupted.

The surface of the motorway was concrete, usually described in contemporary reports as gleaming white cement. A single white line was painted down the centre, but it was just there to mark the middle of the road, so you could overtake across it if you wished.

In any case there would be little trouble passing other vehicles because you were unlikely to see many. About a thousand vehicles a day used the Autostrada, but most went no more than half the total distance. The highway engineer Bruno Bolis, who used the motorways extensively in the 1920s, recalled how desolately empty they were.

Francesco Aimone Jelmoni, one of the designers of Italy’s iconic Autostrada del Sole in the 1960s, was a teenager when the Milan-Lakes route opened. He recalled the novelty of encountering another car.

One thing you might have seen was a bicycle, since the company’s inspectors used them to patrol the route.

Occasionally you would come to an interchange providing access to a local road, taking the form of a simple T-junction to one side or the other; vehicles wishing to enter or leave would turn across the road to do so. The junction would be accompanied by another toll house that doubled as a family residence. Vehicles would pay their toll and then wait while the attendant walked out into the middle of the Autostrada, checked for oncoming vehicles and then signalled them to proceed.

At Lainate and Gallarate, the motorway split into two branches, heralded by large signs saying “BIFORCAZIONE”, and then boards beside each diverging route to say where each went. A white painted line down the centre of the road split into two to highlight the junction, but there were no priority rules and no controls.

At various points, advertising hoardings would appear at the roadside or on bridges, an additional way for the motorway company to generate some income: they were invariably for Italian motor companies like Pirelli, Oleoblitz or Fiat, and often the advertisers were also investors.

Your journey would end – if you made it to the end without overheating, a common problem when driving an early motor car at sustained speed in the Italian summer – at another barrier. The uniformed attendant would inspect your ticket, and then open the barrier and salute as you passed. You would emerge, perhaps onto the streets of Sesto Calende, having travelled 26 miles in less than an hour, a remarkable achievement that would have been scarcely believable, let alone possible, anywhere else in Italy.

A road ahead of its time

For all that it was a ground-breaking achievement, and set a template that countries around the world would follow in the years to come, Italy started building motorways much too soon. It invented futuristic roads but simply didn’t have the traffic to make use of them.

Initially, Puricelli’s innovation was popular, not just with Mussolini and Milan’s wealthy motoring class, but with forward-thinking members of the public too, who were happy to believe that this might be the answer to Italy’s crumbling and inadequate highways.

Numerous other companies were formed, many with Puricelli’s help, for other motorways: Milan to Turin, Milan to Bergamo, Naples to Pompeii, Padua to Venice, Florence to the Sea. All, though, struggled to raise enough capital, and all were given loans and guarantees by the Fascist government, effectively propping them up in return for positive propaganda. Before long, the hopelessness of the enterprise, and the growing feeling that these vanity projects were diverting attention and funds from the public network, caused even Mussolini to back away. By the mid-1930s the government was refusing to pay for any more empty roads.

Meanwhile, Italy’s legislators had finally found ways to properly fund highway maintenance and improvement, and public roads were gaining smooth surfaces. As they did so, the country’s incoherent scattering of Autostrade were on the way to bankruptcy, failing to cover their loan repayments, and suffering broken surfaces from a lack of maintenance. Puricelli, desperate to save his business, which was bound up with the motorway’s sinking finances, pleaded directly with Mussolini for his shares to be bought by the state.

In 1932, the Autostrada Milano-Laghi was taken into public ownership; the state highway authority, which inherited it, ended up having to divert funds from public road improvements to fix the maintenance backlog. In the years that followed most of the others went the same way.

By 1941, with the collapse of the Florence-Sea motorway into state ownership, just three were left in private hands: Padua-Venice, Naples-Pompeii and Milan-Turin. None of those turned a profit either; in fact all were operating at a loss, but they had the advantages of slightly more effective management, and repeated bailouts from their local authorities. They struggled on in this manner for a bit longer until they too became concessions of the state.

It was only after the Second World War, as motoring truly took off in Italy, that motorways became viable, and a construction boom in the 1960s and 70s set the Italians on the way to having one of the densest networks of motorways in Europe.

You can still drive the Autostrada Milano-Laghi, but if you first saw it in September 1924, you’d struggle to recognise it now. It turned out Piero Puricelli was right: this was the transport of the future, and motoring would become widespread. He was just a long way ahead of his time.

Today it forms the A8 striking north west from Milan, with its Como branch part of the A9 and its Sesto Calende trunk now timidly known as the A8/A26 Link. It has been dualled, widened and rebuilt to modern motorway standards. In time for its centenary, the length between Milan’s ring road and the Lainate fork was widened to provide five lanes each way, making it not just the first Autostrada but also, now, the widest.

Some things, though, remain the same. You will still pay a toll to use it, and you will still glimpse adverts for Fiat and Pirelli as you travel. You will still travel in a ruler-straight line almost all the way. And you will still get from the congested streets of Milan to the towns on the banks of the Italian Lakes in under an hour, just like Piero Puricelli and the Italian King did, when they became the first people to travel by motorway, a full century ago.