Italy in Motion. Motorways and the Future: The Touring Club’s Historical Photos Exhibition

The exhibition Italy on the Move. Highways and the Future, dedicated to the centenary of the first Italian motorway, was hosted at the MAXXI in Rome and also presented at the 46th edition of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, offering the public a broad reflection on how major infrastructure has shaped the landscape, mobility, and travel culture in Italy.

Within the exhibition layout, the Touring Club Italiano Archive participated with a significant documentary contribution, providing photographs and cartographic materials that bear witness, through images and texts, to the development of Italian motorways throughout the 20th century.

Among the selected historical materials on display in the exhibition are:

• Autostrada dei Laghi: the first entrances to Milan in 1920 and 1924, and cars racing on the first Italian motorway;

• Milan-Bergamo in the 1930s, with a view of the bridge over the Adda river;

• Firenze-Mare and Naples-Pompeii in the 1930s, featuring Mount Vesuvius framed from the highway;

• A1 Milan-Naples Motorway (1957), a symbol of the new national road network in the post-war period;

• Vintage editorial materials from the 1950s and 1960s, such as brochures and publications on L’Autostrada del Sole and the Autostrade d’Italia (1961).

These images and documents, preserved by the Touring Archive, recount not only the infrastructure itself but also the perspective through which Italy envisioned its own future, combining landscape, technology, and the culture of travel.

The participation of the Touring Club Italiano underscores the importance of its documentary heritage as a center for the visual narration of the country’s history: a living archive that connects photographs, maps, and documents to bring to light untold stories and connections between travel, territory, and collective memory.

• The history of highways in the photographs of the TCI Archive