A Reconstruction of the Italian Road Network, 1861-1910

This paper offers a new georeferenced database of Italian roads available by the Italian Unification and constructed from 1863 to 1910. The Italian government (Ministero dei Lavori Pubblici) published three statistics about the road network in 1864, 1904 and 1912. Relying on these sources, this paper reconstructs the provincial and state road network in three benchmark years: 1863, 1904, and 1910. The georeferenced road lines are then integrated with other information available in the sources. The road network appears already quite widespread by the Unification, despite a significant North and Centre vs. South divide. Following the Unification, the road network further expands in a complementary way to the concurrent railroad expansion and mitigates, to some extent, the regional divides in the access to road infrastructure.