Speaker
Description
This research aims to analyse the complex relationship between two means of transport in part of the Po Valley region of northern Italy in the mid-19th century, observing how the new mode of transport, railways, interacted with the centuries-old river and canal navigation. The question it seeks to answer is to identify the role played by railways in the decline of inland waterway transport in Italy. Railways are often attributed to having replaced canals as the means of transporting goods and people.
For Italy, there are several particularities that complicate this answer. Firstly, the canal system already appeared to be in decline before the emergence of rail transport, then the restricted geographic space in which river navigation was able to manifest itself as a large-scale phenomenon, the same region was also the first to create a capillary railway network connecting the numerous medium-sized towns. At the same time the complex political situation of the Peninsula had a significant relevance in the missed investments in a large system of inland waterways transport, in which the many rivers, and above all the Po, were not only a mean of transport but also a frontier between different state entities. While in the first half of the 19th century the creation of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia seemed to give dynamism to river navigation. In the second half of the century there were projects pushing toward the direct substitution of the canals with railways or their covering such as the proposed Martesana-Metro line.
The sources used, in addition to the existing bibliography produced, among others by Bigatti, Ogliari and Della Peruta, will be the contemporary analyses of Cattaneo, the reports of the different transport companies and the statistical documentation produced by the various governments of the northern states of the Peninsula.
Biography
Federico Meneghini Sassoli, born in Bologna, is a PhD student in History at the University of Pavia. Member of Rails et Histoire and International Railway History Association (AIHC-IRHA-AIHF).
Author of: Un trasporto passeggeri reticente: La petite ceinture de chemin de fer de Paris, in S. Maggi (ed.) La rotaia e il treno. In 2023 he participated as a speaker at the IX congreso de Historia ferroviaria, Mataró, at the congress Les inaugurations des lignes ferroviaires transfrontalières européennes et leur commémoration (XIXe-XXe siècles), Paris and was part of the organising committee of the IV Student Conference at the University of Pavia.
