From toll booths and service stations – designed by some of the most brilliant minds in Italian architecture and engineering – to the latest-generation acoustic barriers and safety systems.
Along the outer margins of the motorway, signature buildings line up to be admired – or to showcase the brands they represent – much like along the main street of Las Vegas. Once again, these works involve outstanding talents from multiple generations. Expressionist churches and ultra-modern factories mark the frontier of a fast-moving urbanisation process that treats the motorway as a kind of commercial artery, with toll booths functioning as mobile centres of gravity. This creates a new form of competition between urban centres and their peripheries.