The Brenner route - The journey from Mitteleuropa to the Mediterranean

On Thursday 11 April 2024, in the spaces of Le Gallerie in Trento, the exhibition "La via del Brennero. The journey from Mitteleuropa to the Mediterranean", proposed by Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino and Autostrada del Brennero Spa, in collaboration with Fondazione Ing. Lino Gentilini. An exhibition that promotes a reflection on the meaning of the construction of roads as an engine of development for the territory, in the broader cultural context that sees the Brenner pass at the center of a millenary history.
Colleagues in the media are cordially invited.

On 11 April 1974, with the opening of the motorway section between Chiusa and Bolzano Sud, for the first time a car could travel seamlessly all 314 kilometres of the A22. Trentino Alto Adige/Südtirol, but more generally Italy, were connected to Europe and consequently to the world by a fast and direct corridor through the Brenner, a passage already the protagonist of a millenary history. What and how this has impacted the territories, their social and economic development and their relations with the surrounding realities is the central object of the reflection proposed by the Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino and Autostrada del Brennero Spa, in collaboration with the Fondazione Ing. Lino Gentilini, in the exhibition "La Via del Brennero", which will be inaugurated on 11 April at 5.30 pm in the spaces of Le Gallerie in Trento.

Roads have always built relationships between peoples. A road means connection, exchange of goods, ideas, cultures. The most important roads are those that bear the furrows of history, those that despite the change of times, borders, empires and states, always remain traced. One of these is certainly the Brenner route, still traveled by the Etruscans, chosen by the Romans as a privileged route to cross the Alps, which became a place of osmotic exchange in the Middle Ages. Because it connects northern Europe with the Mediterranean, completing one of the world's main corridors, the Scandinavian Mediterranean. With the construction of a motorway, the A22, started in 1964, the threads of the history of an area have been reinstalled and projected into the future.

“The Brenner Way. The journey from Mitteleuropa to the Mediterranean", this is the complete title of the exhibition that can be visited until February 2025, is a journey that unfolds in a highly symbolic place: the White Gallery is a disused road tunnel built by Autobrennero, also inaugurated in 1974 and transformed into an exhibition space in 2008. The project, proposed both in Italian and in German and English, is divided into four macro sections – "Infrastructure", "Viability", "Company" and "Green Corridor". Thanks to a selection of images, videos, texts, interviews and objects, the route allows you to discover the meaning and even some secrets of yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's mobility: we thus move on from the themes posed by construction, such as the bold and innovative solutions adopted with the viaducts to overcome the narrow alpine valleys, to the challenges of tomorrow. Ecological transition, digitalisation and intermodality are the pillars around which the transformation of the Brenner axis into Europe's first Green Corridor revolves. Visiting the installation, you can see first-hand how hydrogen, electric, photovoltaic, connected guide or rail reinforcement are not simple potentials but key design words already in place. The entire concept of the exhibition and the graphics were curated by the Doc a communication group studio in Bolzano.