Massimo Moraglio

Knights of Death: Introducing Bicycles and Motor Vehicles to Turin, 1890–1907

The aim of this article is to investigate, through a case study from the city of Turin, the reaction to the arrival of bicycles and automobiles in Italy. It focuses on the early years of bicycle and automobile use, using municipal council minutes, local newspapers, and satirical magazines as sources. The introduction of velocipedes and cars disrupted the traditional use of roads as public spaces, generating protests against the new transport devices, especially with regard to safety concerns resulting from the transgression of traditional uses of urban streets, the speed of vehicles, and the anonymity of riders and drivers.

Real Ambition or Just Coincidence?: The Italian Fascist Motorway Projects in Inter-War Europe

T fi rst Italian motorways were constructed at the beginning of the 1920s, an important innovation in the debate and practice of road building and the development of motorisation. They became, for various reasons, an icon and model for the development of car culture, creating an image of success that went beyond the reality of their effective realisation. This article will analyse the projects and construction of the very fi rst Italian motorways. From the events described, it reveals the way in which the realisation of the motorway (‘conceived’ and desired by industrialist and engineer Piero Puricelli) lacked a coherent programme of development, or any solid economic justifi cation (or traffi c); the construction oscillated confusedly between the desire to support industrial development and that of attracting tourist traffi c. The role of the state in the sector was also ambiguous. Mussolini, close to both Puricelli and the Banca Commerciale Italiana, supported the fi rst project with enthusiasm. No sooner had he assumed power in October 1922 than he championed the construction of the Milan– Lombardy Lakes motorway, seeing the initiative as a feather in his cap (and perhaps as a form of secret fi nance for his party). But after the fi rst enthusiasm other motorway projects were largely ignored, receiving government approval thanks solely to pressure from some local fascist leaders. At the same time a sizeable proportion of the automobile lobby seemed lukewarm regarding the initiatives.

Seeking a (new) ontology for transport history

For the past 64 years, the Journal of Transport History (JTH) has been disseminating research results and new ideas. It has been a long, bumpy and rich adventure. And we have, fortunately, a detailed and critical history of the JTH in its first 50 years, which to this day offers many hints about this Journal and, more importantly, about the whole field of transport history. JTH was for decades a British voice, ‘firmly positioned within the framework of economic and social history’, and largely devoted to big companies. This involved – more or less consciously – investigations of (British) railway companies, or shipping firms (the ones offering rich archive sources). The outcomes were the results of transport history cosily considered as a sub-field of economic history, from which it derived methods and questions. Today, what a change of landscape! First, in the 1970s, interest in the role of automobility increased, and soon the focus switched to car infrastructures and later on transport networks as a whole. ‘At the same time women’s history, urban history and, especially in the United States, the history of racial and ethnic minorities were discovered by the ‘‘new social history’’, a trajectory JTH did not follow’. We can argue over the extent to which JTH was unable to keep pace with novelty, but there is no doubt that the tumultuous and engaging shifts in the past two decades have shaken concepts of the Journal’s quest to the very core, and put its semiotics, targets and tools under pressure. While JTH repositioned itself in this new landscape, the need to break the predominance of a North-Atlantic model is still on the agenda, as is the necessity of gendered perspectives. Let’s face it openly: the concept of ‘transport’ has been deeply investigated, defined and criticised as insufficient to understand the movement of people, things and ideas. The rise of the term ‘mobility’ has redefined the horizons, often taking over from ‘transport’, giving room for a ‘mobility turn’. Therefore,

Il governo del territorio. Istituzioni, comunità e pratiche sociali a Torino (1861–1926)

Cristina Accornero studied the role and influence of municipal action in Turin, Italy, between 1861 (Italy’s political unification) and 1926 (the ascent to power of the fascist dictatorship). As declared by the author, the investigation focuses first on the political institutions (most notably the municipal council and its boards), second on the local communities, and third on the social networks that influenced and shaped the planning and governance of the city. The time frame has strong political connotations, but such a choice is also made with consideration to the case of Turin. The city was the capital of the small Kingdom of Sardinia, which was the engine of Italian unification. In 1864, 3 years after unification was reached, Turin lost its role of capital and local elites tried to invent a new future for the city. From then on, according to Accornero, local authorities and their municipal bureaucracy with their technical and administrative expertise played a central role in the policies for urban change, albeit with contradictory results. Moving from the French studies of Marcel Roncayolo and Bernard Lepetit – the latter was the initial supervisor of Accornero’s PhD thesis – the author investigates the gap between modernization and industrialization in this ‘marginal’ region of Europe. Somewhat challenging the self-congratulating histories of the city that infested the historical debate during the recent celebrations of 150 years of Italian unity, the book shows how Turin’s elites drew contradictory scenarios for the city’s future. The councillors insisted on planning as a form of modernization to avoid urban decline. Although Paris, London, and later Vienna were often claimed as European models, and industrialization was presented as a desirable goal, some decisions appeared to follow a different strategy. For example, supporting real estate speculations, the city council approved in the early 1870s the parcelling out of the former army parade ground to build small and ostentatious villas for the local wealthy community. Breaking with a long tradition of socially mixed residential neighbourhoods, the villa districts became a manifesto of a modernization without industrialization, and its pattern of city development seemed to evoke a recreational and ephemeral idea of the city. Eventually, history moved to other directions, turning Turin into an industrial city that came to be strongly associated with the name of FIAT. In this respect, Accornero’s book is especially useful, as it leads us to wonder how relevant the city council and the public bodies actually were in promoting and supporting industrialization. Even in the first years of the twentieth century, when industrialization was already well underway, the city actively encouraged urban speculation, and municipal projects for infrastructural betterment seemed to be successful only in the short interval between 1903 and 1909. For most of the period covered by the book, local elites seemed to be more interested in their personal business than in the development of the city as a whole. At times, Accornero’s book sounds rather erratic. Focusing on the periods 1861–1873 and 1903–1912, it leaves the reader with little information about the intermediate time. The book provides an interesting and innovative interpretation of the 1917 riots, which are presented as partly connected to the lack of infrastructural resources for the suburbs. But the analysis of this period is less developed than it could have been. In fact, although the title suggests 1926

Between Industry and Tourism: The Turin-Savona Motorway, 1956-2001

This paper focuses on a northern portion of the Italian highway network, from Turin to Savona, constructed from 1956 onward by Fiat. The route was built during the era of European mass motorization, in a context of car and road diffusion. It was intended solely to carry freight traffic for industry. But Fiat also backed the oil pipeline from Liguria to the north, while the former means of transport (railroad and cableway) continued successfully. The venture failed in its original purpose of stimulating automobile manufacturing, but the growth of private-car ownership soon filled it to capacity in the summer as a holiday route to vacation under the sun, much to the surprise of Fiat management.