The long line from East to West, which seems to mark the course of the Sun on the Earth, the Via Emilia, traveled from 187 BC by the legionaries of the consul Marco Emilio Lepidus, by merchants traveling from the Mediterranean or the rest of Europe, by settlers settled with their tools and crops, by wayfarers in search of fortune and knights covered in glory, still today – stainless at the time – it is a place of identity, work and life for those who travel along it and for those who live there, it is a physical hinge and symbolic between the two worlds that Italy unites and to which Italy belongs: the Mere Nostrum and the Old Continent, with their peoples, their cultures, their exchanges.
The Via Emilia is so important and works so well that it has been joined, almost "cloned", in a series of other national communications landmarks: the historic railway, the motorway, the high-speed railway.
And today, ringing the cities that were born with it 2.200 years ago and even earlier, the Consular Way hosts a river of vehicles, public, private, commercial, motorized, electric, with "human propulsion" such as the bicycle.
The Anas surveys, to give a precise idea of the transport importance of the Via Emilia, show impressive numbers: 136 cars and 9.200 trucks, on average, every day of the year. Traffic comparable to that of Rome's Grande Raccordo Anulare.
A road, also well known by the acronym SS9, on which the life and development of a regional system, Emilia-Romagna, and of a system of national and international scope, such as northern Italy, move.
That intuition of Marco Emilio Lepido, in other words, is today a strategic axis of Italian mobility and logistics.
There is no contemporaneity and there is no future, without a past and without a full awareness of that past. On the other hand, there is no past that has not nurtured hopes and ideas for the future, which are now our present.
So it is right that the great archaeological exhibition On the road. Via Emilia 187 BC dedicated to the Consular Road and its Founder – curated by Luigi Malnati, Roberto Macellari and Italo Rota, on show at the Palazzo dei Musei in Reggio Emilia until next July 90st – is enriched with new suggestions proposed today in the Roadshow #Congiunzioni promoted on the occasion of the 27th anniversary of Anas and created by the company itself, which stops in Reggio Emilia on 28 and XNUMX April, proposing the photographic exhibition I remember the road - curated by Emilia Giorgi and Antonio Ottomanelli - with a section dedicated to Via Emilia of the Italy of the post-war economic boom. Anas's proposal is therefore associated with On the road, of which the Company has also made possible the Guide to the visit, as an enrichment through a dimension that can be defined - in a not so much paradoxical way - of "archaeology of the contemporary".
The On the road exhibition. Via Emilia 187 BC, divided into 400 finds, several of which are of absolute historical-archaeological importance, offers the public a story on two levels: the "below", i.e. the ancient history of this colossal road work, and the "above", that is, the topicality of the Via Emilia. The "historical" images that Anas proposes in support of the great exhibition complete that cultural and exhibition project, contributing significantly to its declination in the Contemporary.
In reality, the photographic images that Anas offers also belong to the register of memory, but to a memory that still remains in the memory of many.
They offer an intense amarcord on the Via Emilia after World War II, between the 50s and 60s. They take us back to a Via Emilia trodden by bicycles and horses, sparse cars and motorcycles to arrive up to the Fiat 600 of the economic boom that furrows an Emilia flanked by billboards that photograph consumption and well-being. In the story it is the whole territory that is reflected in a busy road that itself becomes a landscape and background, a place of passage and construction, which portrays workers at work, men in suits leaning out of doorways, churches that stand along the roadside , roadmen's houses as benevolent lookouts of an Italy in perpetual rush and transformation. That Italy that comes down to us, with the variants to the state road designed to lighten the traffic from inhabited centers and the new bridge over the river Po. Black and white images of another yesterday that created today.
"A precious opportunity to celebrate - say Ennio Cascetta and Gianni Vittorio Armani, president and CEO of Anas - the fundamental role that Anas has had in the modernization of the country, influencing its economic and cultural development, from the date of foundation of the AASS in May 1928 until joining the FS Italiane Group in January 2018, just the latest of the steps taken in the process of continuous transformation of a company that has never stopped".
“With this important new “section”, On the rod. Via Emilia 187 BC further investigates - underlines Elisabetta Farioli, director of the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia - the history but also the actuality of the consular road wanted by Marco Emilio Lepido and which takes its name from him. At the time it represented the road used by the army to defend and expand the borders of the Empire but also one of the first urban planning experiments of antiquity. The urban nucleuses that were found on the itinerary were built at an average distance from each other of about 25 kilometres, corresponding to a day's march by the army”.
The Via Emilia is part of that dense and rational network of consular roads of the Roman Empire of which the current Anas network is the direct and natural heir, with routes that sometimes take up the itineraries of antiquity.
The Emilia road cuts the region in two like a sword. From Rimini to Piacenza it divides and unites Emilia-Romagna to reach San Donato Milanese in Lombardy, connecting a territory characterized by wide landscapes and a thousand towns that appear as one continuous city.
Throughout the 1859th and 1864th centuries, until today, the territory has been profoundly influenced by this artery which crosses and flanks, almost accompanying them, the main capitals of the region, with the exception of Ravenna and Ferrara, maintaining the role of director between the north and the center of the Italian peninsula. The railway that arrived in Bologna in XNUMX via Milan-Piacenza and, in XNUMX, the first crossing of the Apennines towards Florence, also thought of broadening the horizons and connections with the rest of Italy. In an Italy that was beginning to unite, it was the infrastructures that acted as glue between the territories.
Because for 22 centuries the Via Emilia has been more a dimension than a pure road itinerary.
Image: State road 726 'Variante di Cesena' – 2008
