The tangenziale
highway of Naples
Some
cities have what is called a “ring road” (raccordo annullare in Italian). Rome,
for example, has one—a highway around the city. You
approach Rome from any direction, get on that ring
road and then drive clockwise or counterclockwise
entirely around the city to continue on your way, or
you can use one of the many exits from the ring to
drive into the city at the point most convenient for
you.The other kind of road that lets you by-pass a
city is called a tangenziale.
Naples has one, the A-56. (No one I know really
remembers that number. It’s just “the tangenziale”.
In the amusingly broken Italian of US military
stationed in Naples, it may be called the “tan-gee”
or worse, the “tange”, pronounced like the first
part of the fruit, tangerine. Don’t
ask what they do with tongue-twisters such as Domiziana, Gricignano
or Capodichino!)
 The
idea for a road to avoid downtown Naplesis not a new one. As early as
1850, when there was only horse and horse-drawn
traffic and when the downtown area was much smaller
and less congested, that idea, indeed, occurred to King Ferdinand II. At the
time, if you wanted to go from Pozzuoli, another town
entirely, almost at the western end of the Gulf of
Naples, into Naples, itself, you essentially
followed the old Roman road, the Domiziana,
through the towns of Bagnoli and Fuorigrotta, then
through the still functioning ancient tunnel, the "Neapolitan crypt",
that passed beneath the Posillipo hill to Mergellina. From there,you trotted along the Riviera
di Chiaia, went along the sea through Santa Lucia
and into and then simply through the city.
The king had a new
road—an early “tangenziale”—built and named for his
wife. It was Corso Maria Teresa, today Corso
Vittorio Emanuele II. You could start at Mergellina,
angle up away from the sea on the new road and to
the east above and past the populated sections of
Chiaia and the Spanish
Quarter and move along what was then a
sparsely populated (even bucolic) area below the San
Martino hill; then, you turned down a mile or so
later and were at the National Museum, effectively
having passed by the congested city. From there, it
was easy to turn north onto via Santa Teresa degli
Scalzi, itself a major elevated road built
some 50 years earlier, leading over the densely
populated section of Naples known as the Sanità and out
of town past the Capodimonte
palace. From the museum, you could also go straight
to the east just outside the old city walls of the
city along via Foria towards the other end of
Naples. In either case, you had circumvented most of
the city. Additional seaside roads in the early 20th
century—via Caracciolo and via Marina—also provided another kind of
tangenziale along the coast for the
up-and-coming motor-car traffic. You could start at
Mergellina and drive straight along the coast and
past the port to get out of town. In the days before
every family had two cars, that was actually not a
bad through-road.
By the time of post
WWII Naples, however, the tire-tracks were on the
wall. In the 1960s, the city decided to build an
entirely new road, the tangenziale, from Pozzuoli to the
airport. It would run in back of the city—that is,
on the north side; the bulk of the modern city of
Naples would then lie between the new road and the
sea. A number of exits would take you down into the
city; the corresponding on-ramps would also be a
quick way out
of the city.
 The first stretch of the new tangenziale
was opened in 1972. For only 100 lire you could
by-pass some of the city on the way in from
Pozzuoli. Today, the six-lane divided highway runs
all the way from Pozzuoli to the Naples airport.
Both ends hook up to other multi-lane roads; in the
east, the tangenziale connects to the major
north-south autostrada in Italy, the A-1,and
in the west to the road that runs up the coast to
Gaeta.
Road construction
behind Naples meant going through and between hills;
the 15-mile stretch includes three long tunnels and
a number of overpasses, one of which is almost a
mile long. It was all major engineering, but not
unusual in a city where people have been digging tunnels and quarries
for many centuries. Along the tangenziale
There are ample filling stations and rest stops, an
SOS call-box every kilometer, and 14
on-and-off-ramps. Modern city traffic in Naples is
unimaginable without the tangenziale.
Sometimes, it is unimaginable with
the tangenziale, but I have been
stuck in traffic in the ring-road around Rome, too. (At those times, you
just relax and beat on the horn like everyone else.)
The 14 on/off-ramps on the tangenziale are numbered
from the airport in the east to Pozzuoli in the
west. They are Capodichino, Secondigliano,
Doganella, Corso Malta, Capodimonte, Arenella, Zona
ospedaliera, Camaldoli, Vomero, Fuorigrotta, Agnano,
Pozzuoli /Via Campana, Cuma, and Pozzuoli /Arco
Felice.
People thought that
the original 1972 100-lire toll was going to disappear
once the road was paid for. That's what they city
said, and they wouldn't actually lie(!) about
something like that, would they? After all, it is
true that there are no tolls on roads in southern
Italy, but they apparently mean southern
southern Italy.
(That is, you can drive from Salerno, just south of
Naples, hundreds of miles down to the tip of the
bootfor
nothing.) The tangenziale
was finally paid for and, glory!, the lire did
disappear. They changed into euros. Today, the toll
is 70 €-cents. In purchasing power, the original
toll of 100 lire
was also the cost of a single bus ticket in 1972.
Today, such a ticket cost €1.10. Thus, the
tangenziale toll has not increased as much as
other things. But still...they
promised...
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