Dromoscape. (Brenner) Motorway as a Symbolic Form

The Brenner Motorway is one of the most important parts of the European road network: 314 kilometres long, it climbs more than 1,300 metres between the Brenner Pass, where it connects with the Austrian Autobahn of the same name, and Campogalliano, where it meets the Autostrada del Sole. The E45, the European route to which it formally belongs, reaches the Strait of Messina on Italian territory and the Kattegat Strait beyond the Alps, connecting two crucial Mediterranean and North Sea links. The subject of much research before and after its final completion in 1974, the Brenner Motorway deserves to be studied as architecture, researching the quality of its plan, section and elevation. From this perspective, the bridges, viaducts, tunnels, junctions, tollgates, rest and service stations, which follow one another along the original road, appear as the parts of a unified work, designed to measure itself against the scales of territory and landscape. In order to understand this infrastructure and to handle these scales, the first volume of the research conducted on the Brenner Motorway by scholars of the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at Politecnico di Milano holds a selection of photographs taken between 2021 and 2022 by Giovanni Hänninen. Hovering by the motorway, the photographer’s lens selected parts of the Po Valley, the Adige and Isarco valleys, and the Alps, making the lists, indexes and contents of the maps to be represented to lead the Brenner Motorway along the complex path of ecological transition.